The digital Dasein of Chinese Rural Migrants

Abstract

start from there... we need to treat Internet media as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces, that they happen within mundane social structures and relations that they may transform but that they cannot escape into a self-enclosed cyberian apartness”. In the light of these reflections on digital anthropology, this paper aims to understand the use of social media among young Chinese migrant workers in both offline and online contexts. First of all, the significant “offline” context of this study is the massive domestic migration in China. In the process of ongoing urbanisation and industrialisation, the expansion of capitalism has had profoundly dislocating effects on Chinese society. By 2015, when the fieldwork was conducted, there were more than 250 million Chinese who had left their places of origin in rural China to seek employment in Chinese factory towns and cities (NBSC, 2016). These rural migrants are referred to as a “floating population,” which indicates the difficulty of settling down in urban China in the rigorous Chinese household registration (Hukou) system. This paper is based on 15 months of ethnographic research (2013-2015) in a small town called GoodPath1 in southeast China. GoodPath is a typical industrial town which serves as a transitional place connecting the village and city. The local process of industrialization has turned most of the farmland (76%) into more than 60 large scale factories within a decade. Migrant workers account for two-thirds of the