ABSTRACT
As a result of market reforms, China's major urban centers are dependent on the low-wage labor of migrants from the nation's countryside. One hundred million rural people have flocked to China's urban centers to find work in new and restructured industries; 2 forty percent of these are women. 3 China's tremendous economic growth, combined with the diminished state provision of urban services, has heightened consumer demand for a range of services that are now performed by female migrant laborers. 4 Such massive migration can potentially weaken family structures as wage labor brings rural women a measure of independence. Yet the service work into which women are channeled draws them into a suffocating arena of urban toil and fosters their subordination to urban customers and employers. Even though the state advances an ideology of gender equality, a complex of state agencies structures the unregulated labor market niche into which migrant women are fun-neled and shores up rural patriarchal family structures.
