Paper short abstract:

Through exploring how China’s marginalized internal migrants live and provide care in circumstances of normalized and often extreme precarity, insight may be gained into what is required to move through limited measures for inclusion to a potential mutuality.

Paper long abstract:

China's global rise has been built with the labour of hundreds of millions of internal migrants moving from the countryside to coastal and urban locations where their work fuels the global economy. At the same time, most remain defined as rural migrants who are formally or effectively excluded from adequate access to the benefits of their labour. The precarity of their lives comes most immediately to the foreground when they face serious illness or injury for themselves or their family members. This paper draws on narrative ethnographies of 177 instances of migrant and translocal health care, exploring how people strive to care from locations of marginality in public programs for health care, very meagre resources in the market and mobile dispersal of family. Fragments of eroding rural communities and of past or renewed cooperative health care evoke and interrogate what familiar models of mutual aid can offer. Families strive to be filial in giving care and members in declining to accept care--both in a mutuality of being to the extent that family is able to persist. Through exploring how people live and provide care in circumstances of normalized and often extreme precarity, insight may be gained into what is required to move through limited measures for inclusion to a potential mutuality.