Paper short abstract:

China's turn toward the global market has displaced hundreds of millions of rural migrants while keeping them administratively tied to rural localities. The gendered and generational dimensions of the transformation of grassroots rural society is examined with field data from 2003 to 2011.

Paper long abstract:

China's decisive turn toward the global marketplace has drawn enormous populations—as many as 200 million at present alone--to urban and coastal centres since Deng Xiaoping's Tour of the South in 1992. Despite working and living in urban centres, often for extended periods of time, these economic migrants remain defined as rural within China's bifurcate household registration system that separates all citizens into rural and urban categories and ties their permanent residence and entitlements to specified locations. The complex results of this administrative mechanism include the challenges of creating and sustaining translocal families, systemic economic disparity between rural and urban populations (as administratively defined), restricted channels of attractive exit from the countryside, substantive exclusion from urban entitlements for most rural migrants, and steep socioeconomic barriers between rural migrants and their urban neighbours. This study departs from a political economy of care and caregiving viewpoint to examine how rural residents--both those remaining in place in the countryside and those in motion to and from the metropoles--work to fashion lives and futures for themselves and their families. The focus is upon the rural end of the continuum and to the gendered and generational distinctions in play as China's rural and national societies are transformed at the grassroots. The research reported is derived from field research in two west China provinces and two metropoles (one interior and one coastal) from 2003 to 2011.