ABSTRACT
The chapter has three interconnected themes. First, it critically examines the concept and the genealogy of peasant worker as a term that does not have a long history in Chinese social and political narratives. It is a concept that was generated with the emergence of Chinese neoliberal modernization and the combination of two prestige classes from the Mao period – peasant and worker. The major public narratives of peasant workers are that of a group of socially and politically ‘marginalized’ people since the period of post-Mao economic reform. This chapter aims to examine the hegemonic ideology of modernization operating within contemporary China, and its role in the construction of the current representation of male peasant workers. Hall (1996a) understands ideology as
… the mental frame-works – the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation – which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works.
(Hall, 1996a: 26)