ABSTRACT
This chapter provides some brief contextual information as to of post-Mao economic reforms and the commodification of labour. It aims to an exploration of the early representations of peasant workers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapter explains intense party-state sponsored cultural construction of peasant workers as it is mediated within the Shenzhen official press. It presents an exploration of the ways in which peasant workers narrate their experiences of labour and to the modalities of articulation of these narratives with larger cultural and social formations. One particularly interesting way in which the postsocialist imaginary field of economic reform has been invested is through variously mediated forms of narration that focus on people’s experiences of labour and on how they explain how they fare on the labour market and in raising within the social hierarchy. Rural migrant workers’ cultural politics has indeed become increasingly articulated within the larger politics of rights and of resentment in twenty-first-century China.
