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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research with temporary workers in China’s state-owned railway sector, this paper examines how dreams of a stable life shape orientations to stay rather than move under increasing labour uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

This paper approaches precarity not simply as unstable labour conditions, but as a politically and economically structured differentiation of futures. While existing studies often link mobility to hope and the pursuit of a good life, it asks what happens when remaining in place becomes the primary way of sustaining future aspirations.

Drawing on ethnographic research with vocational school and junior college graduates from rural backgrounds employed on short-term labour agency contracts in China’s state-owned railway sector, I examine how dreams of a stable life orient practices of staying put under increasing labour uncertainty. Working alongside permanently employed state workers, these workers confront futures marked by unequal capacities to face risk, endure disruption, and await improvement. However, their own positions are widely regarded as offering better prospects than casual work elsewhere, drawing on a long-standing socialist imagination in which state employment has long been a key anchor for imagining a stable future, even as that promise has become fragile in late socialist China.

I argue that staying put in this context is not a form of demoralisation or political withdrawal, but an ethical and temporal practice through which life projects are held together. Conceptualised as the ethics of staying put, this form of suspended striving foregrounds how hope, insecurity, and immobility are actively composed in everyday labour lives.