The Production of Dual Marginality

1The difference between educational activities in developed areas like Shanghai and those in inland provinces constitutes an important mechanism for shaping the man of dual marginality. Here, dual marginality denotes the social fact that the migrant subject is facing an identity dilemma, one in which they are shocked by the fate of a double-stranger, not belonging to the urban world of which they strived to become a part, and at the same time being estranged from their home environment due to a changing mentality and socio-cultural dispositions. The welfare guarantee based on the household registration system with an inclination toward local protectionism (and corresponding welfare exclusion), as well as social and cultural exclusion based on lifestyle differences, have become the two major production mechanisms that support the dually marginal position. Specifically, the former involves the provision of admission or test-taking qualifications, while the latter is characterized by acculturation difficulties caused by discrepancies in English proficiency/accent/lifestyle. The discussion of this dual marginality in the sociological circle of China can be seen in the early description of the social situation of substitute farmers in the suburbs of metropolises (Huang and Xu 2010), and later it specifically refers to the unique structural position of the second and third generations of migrant workers in the social system space of urban and rural areas (Yang 2013; Li 2015). In particular, it refers to the structural distress that migrant middle-school students between rural and urban areas face when they fail to find proper cultural status in the education system in the places of departure and arrival.

Spatial Separation and Spatial Integration of Families: “Structural Sacrifice” in the Perspective of Institutionalism

2According to traditional practice, for better development and survival opportunities, the major labor force of the family would leave his or her hometown and either go to Southeast Asia1 or to the West2 to make a living, or move to a city on the main trade routes to become an itinerant trader or shopkeeper, but the main part of the family’s population reproduction remained in the hometown and was protected by the local clan and patriarchal system. Since the first wave of the migrants would always be the male components of the family, while women and children were always left behind, the concept of “population reproduction” here means the rearing of the minors in the household by remaining adults of the family, mainly women. The rural-urban migration that began in the mid-1980s was, above all, the largest human undertaking initiated by the rural surplus labor force, who intended to obtain a cash income. Here, as an inheritance of tradition, that is, the spatial separation of the family, we first faced the phenomenon of stay-at-home children. Since around the mid-1990s, for all sorts of reasons we have seen a larger number of migrant children, indicating that in reality the spatial separation of families has been partially compensated to some extent. However, living with city family reunions (in the sense of the nuclear family) that are not of high quality, are partial, or are complete is still an important detail in the full-scale cultural drama of migration in contemporary China. The institutional exclusion mentioned above has remained, for many years, one of the main factors hindering or ruining the completion of families’ spatial integration. To finally absorb the huge harms brought about by spatial separation migrant families must pay a large emotional and mental cost: children must not only adapt to re-separation emotionally, but also adapt to different educational practices in their schooling. Adaptation requires an enormous amount of mental energy, which must be borne by the family and the individuals themselves.

3In order to make it easier for readers to understand, here we will further explain “structural criticism” and “institutionalism” in a Chinese context. The “structural sacrifice” mentioned above is a concept I have recently adopted (Liu 2020). It was originally used to refer to the fact that in the process of China’s modernization, the primitive accumulation of capital was not manifested as foreign war or plunder, but through the unequal domestic exchange between urban and rural areas. The unequal exchange between urban and rural areas is mainly reflected in the unified purchase policy and price scissors of industrial and agricultural products. In addition, in order to ensure food security in urban areas, the free migration and mobility of rural residents are restricted. This is the origin of the hukou system (household registration system). Therefore, the so-called urban-rural dual society is not a natural social fact, but must be understood in the context of institutional choice embedded in China’s road to modernization. Professor Wen Tiejun of Renmin University of China is the first person to systematically expound the idea that China’s countryside is the place where the economic crisis of urban areas in China is transferred (Wen 2013). Therefore, I put forward the concept of “structural sacrifice” in the above two contexts.

4The meaning of institutionalism here is probably to say that all kinds of Chinese people, to a large extent, are related to the political system in some institutional fields. From the social facts with which this book is concerned, the hukou system (household registration system) is an important example of the unbalanced relationship between China’s state and rural society, and the phenomenon of rural-urban migration closely related to the hukou system is also an institutional fact. In this institutional fact, no matter where the migrants live after migration, no matter how they enter a specific labor market, and no matter how they fulfill the most basic needs for survival, they need to be understood not only as individual facts, but also as institutional facts. In the above three scenarios of social encounter, migrants have to deal with the temporary residence permit system, the employment system of the informal sector, and institutional space, such as food and shelter or a large-scale work shed. Among them, the police station (or the management station for the migrant population in the village), the factory as the employer, and the catering institutions and construction sites served by the migrants are relatively concrete institutional scenes. Here, the meaning of regime is also relatively different—in the first example, institutional space itself is part of the regime, while in the second and the third examples, institutional space is the object of regime regulation.

Family as a Decision-Making Unit: The Central Position of Family Support and Its Negative Effect

5Due to the household contract responsibility system, after the disintegration of the people’s commune, China’s rural society has rapidly stepped into an era that takes the nuclear family as an economic unit. Therefore, our investigation of rural-urban migration should also shift the range of decision-making space for rational choices from expanding or uniting families to the nuclear family, although the former is still the most important resort for migrant subjects in providing economic opportunities and social support. In the five Chinese cases examined here, families (parents) have always played a role in saving children from experiencing harsh living conditions or circumstances. On the one hand, it hinders the child’s degradation to the pit of “deviation” or “getting hurt,” and on the other hand, it actually leads to the temporariness of the child’s life and career planning. It seems that the migrant families in rural areas would seize every opportunity and utilize all information to make use of all kinds of social relations and social resources for the future of their children (whether to get an education or to find a better place in the labor market). The subjectivity of the weak, the ability of the weak to mobilize resources, can be regarded as another feature in the full-scale cultural drama of migration in China.

6Here, we regard the rural-urban migration in contemporary China as an active performance of human subjectivity under institutional constraints. The plot includes not only the institutional fate of being determined, hurt, restricted, discriminated against, and excluded in the sense of structural sacrifice, but also the shaping of the individual actor’s body (including appearance), sociality, and spirit (concept) influenced by contact and encounter with urban modernity. Similar to the “joys and sorrows” in our daily discourse, this social process is formed by a variety of emotions, choices, and fates, and unfolds slowly in a timeline. The attitude, position, concept, and cognitive resources expressed by the migrants in this cultural drama, or, in an abstract way, the strategic choice in the cultural toolbox they use is what we often call cultural repertoire (Taylor et al. 2009). In this sense, migration seems to be a special collective action. The motives, cultural attributes, and cultural characteristics of the migrants determine the cultural temperament of the collective action. The institutional constraints or facilitators that determine the direction of the cultural drama are the structural shells of the structural fate (structural sacrifice) mentioned above in the perspective of institutionalism.

Upward Social Mobility and Stability of Daily Life

7Consistent with my own research experience, the migration from the countryside to the city and the contact with urban modernity (rational educational system, industrial system, and organizational culture) will eventually bring great opportunities and transformational opportunities to the status of migrants and their families. At least two of the five cases have become members of the professional class in the city through higher education, another one has achieved short-term career success through merging his own business and his family business, and another one has made efforts in improving his human capital through a marginal education system (career and adult education). Of the five people, there are currently four who are starting a business or own their own businesses. It can be stated that the rising international economic status and the sustained economic prosperity of the developed coastal areas in China have laid a structural background for the upward social mobility of the second or third generation of rural migrants with the help of what Merton calls “institutionalized means” to achieve “cultural ideals” (Merton 1957), while the motivation, ambition, and proactivity of families and individuals to improve their own situation by utilizing all sorts of opportunities have become the micro-support in a more basic sense.

8Several of the five cases also illustrate, to some extent, another basic mechanism in Chinese culture, namely, “becoming independent at thirty,” demonstrating the role of stability in an individual’s circumstances and daily life. Generally speaking, China’s cultural ideal is to have children and grandchildren, with the premise that at a proper age every individual can get married and settle down; therefore, concentrating family resources for adult individuals to get married is a core cultural event in Chinese culture, and marriage has become an important opportunity for a migrant family to construct a stable life order. Some of the cases in this study have shown parents’ strong control over intimate relationship construction with their children, while others have shown that the family provides the basic resources for their children’s family-building.

Homecoming: A New Possibility

9Several master’s degree papers I read mentioned the topic of “homecoming,” which can be seen as proof of the trend of “reverse urbanization,” which has lately been one of the foci of my academic concern. By “reverse urbanization” I mean to describe such a generic phenomenon in which, after having experimented with urban lifestyle for a while, and with the opening of new economic opportunities, or facilitated by other motives, frustrated migrants or hopeful youth entrepreneurs return to their hometown for a long period of time, or permanently. In 2015, the state generally introduced the policy of providing support to college students to return to their hometowns and start businesses. The family-based cultural genes in certain cultural geographical areas (such as the Bai and Naxi nationalities in Yunnan), together with the overall atmosphere of higher-level competition and lower-level primary solidarity in the urban world labor market, formed the generating mechanism for young people to return to their hometowns and start businesses in Dali (M. Chen 2020). The two almost identical thesis themes (X. Chen 2020; Zhai 2020)—i.e. a female college student from Hebei returned home for a blind date, female migrant workers from a rural area of Anhui returned home for marriage—reveal the multiple structural constraints reflected in the rational decision-making of young women and their families: the stratification of the quality of the higher education system, and the corresponding negative responses of the labor market, with graduates from the universities and colleges at the bottom layers being severely despised and dismissed; the expectation of family reunions, and an integrated family future planning regarding where to live and to finally settle down for the whole family or each of the members, as well as the question of when to retire on the part of parents, in an unprecedentedly low birth rate society; and the degradation of the meaning of positive cultural goals (that is to say, people no longer regard explicit social goals such as becoming outstanding as the ultimate goal of life, but the sense of leisure and self-control in daily life instead), have to some extent explained and legitimized these kinds of homecoming actions. New types of livelihood in the context of the Internet (such as e-commerce in rural areas), and local investments in ecological landscapes as tourism resources have also partly supported people’s motivation to return home.