Table of Content

01 April 2022, Volume 8 Issue 2

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Neighborhood socioeconomic status, relative household income, and life satisfaction of Chinese mainland migrants in Hong Kong

Donglin Zeng and Zhuoni Zhang

2022, 8(2):  165-186.  doi:10.1177/2057150X221087030

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This paper examines the life satisfaction of Chinese mainland migrants compared to that of Hong Kong natives, using microdata from the 2011 Hong Kong Panel Study of Social Dynamics (HKPSSD) and aggregated neighborhood data from the 2011 Hong Kong Census. We find that Chinese mainland migrants have significantly lower life satisfaction than Hong Kong natives. As neighborhood socioeconomic status rises, life satisfaction increases, yet the positive effect is smaller for Chinese mainland migrants than for Hong Kong natives. Relative household income in the neighborhood is also positively related to life satisfaction, but the effect is larger for Chinese mainland migrants, suggesting that relative status affects life satisfaction much more for Chinese mainland migrants than for Hong Kong natives.

The game of popularity: The earnings system and labor control in the live streaming industry

Linfeng Xu and Hengyu Zhang

2022, 8(2):  187-209.  doi:10.1177/2057150X221090328

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The case study in this paper concerns a street performance band in Wuhan, each of whose members is under contract as a live streamer. Borrowing from Michael Burawoy's concept of “the game of making out”, this study describes the labor control mechanism in the live streaming industry as a “game of popularity”. Popularity is a pivotal indicator of labor price, determining the compensation of contracted live streamers. However, this seemingly objective popularity indicator can in fact be manipulated. Both live streamers and platform providers can benefit from purchasing “fake popularity”. In the game of popularity manipulation, the interests of capital and labor are conjoined, and consensus reached. In collaboration, live streamers become co-conspirators of capital and thus lose control over their own labor output, and the relation between labor input and compensation is distorted. By participating in this manipulation, live streamers help affirm the ideological dominance of the platform economy. The neoliberal work ethic that emphasizes individual responsibility conceals the power relationship behind unstable employment modes like live streaming. Despite being horrendously exploited, live streamers still think of themselves as someone with an “independent destiny”. The online platform economy has transformed the labor–capital relationship. The earnings distribution system, in combination with other social factors, often plays a vital role in labor control. Therefore, understanding this system and its influence on labor processes and ideology is the correct way to start for any exploration of concepts such as the “industry regime” or “sector regime”.

Labor exportation, transnational production politics, and the formation of exploitation relationships—a case study of Chinese migrant workers in Japan

Xinghua Liu and Yong Wang

2022, 8(2):  210-242.  doi:10.1177/2057150X221090359

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In the context of globalization, the exporting of labor from developing countries to developed countries has shaped a relationship of exploitation between employers and employees. This study presents the case of Chinese migrant workers’ overtime pay in Japan and explores the formation mechanisms of exploitation using the analytical framework of “transnational production politics”. Transnational migrant workers often see overtime as an indispensable opportunity to generate extra income to support families back home. This need is being taken advantage of by employers who habitually reduce overtime pay or do not pay for overtime at all. Overtime pay often becomes a focal point of labor conflict. Because of the limited protections for migrant workers in the labor laws of host countries, the power granted to employers by the host country's labor system, competition from migrant workers of other nationalities, and the selective involvement of transnational intermediaries, Chinese migrants suffer a dilemma of either surrendering to low overtime pay or losing overtime work, or even their job altogether. Whether to resist or surrender, it seems that the outcome is all the same for migrant workers: they lose and employers win. This “transnational production” polity exercises its market authoritarianism. Elements such as the constraints of the foreign labor system, loopholes in the system used by employers, the global surplus labor supply, and the separation of the processes of labor maintenance and labor renewal in the mode of labor reproduction typical to migrant labor reflect the transnational production politics peculiar to international contract labor mobility. This becomes an important mechanism for the re-emergence of the forced exploitation of capital in developed capitalist countries. Unlike the exploitative relationship between local workers and employers in developed countries, the exploitation between migrant workers and employers is born out of imbalanced development between countries. Migrant workers not only have no access to protections afforded by the host country's welfare system, but also are controlled by strict laws regarding foreign labor and are threatened by competition from other migrant workers. All this has put employers in a strongly advantageous position in labor conflicts.

The barriers of identity: Population diversity, social trust, and crime

Jiang Jin, Yangjin Shi, and Libo Zhu

2022, 8(2):  243-267.  doi:10.1177/2057150X221091078

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Based on the 2014 China Labor-force Dynamics Survey data, this paper constructs a population diversity index to test the impact of population diversity on crime rates. The results suggest that population diversity is one of the causes of increasing urban crime. After considering the endogeneity problem and testing the robustness from different perspectives, the conclusion remains unchanged. The results of mediation tests indicate that social trust is an important mediator variable, that is, population diversity leads to an increase of crime rate when the level of social trust is low. Moreover, the results also show that the impact of population diversity on crime is much weaker when property rights protections are more complete, people have more confidence in the court system, and the government spends more on education and social security. This shows that better institutions can, to some extent, replace the role of non-market forces, thereby curbing the negative impact of population diversity on crime rates. It also suggests that public expenditure can reduce the likelihood of crime by increasing the opportunity cost of crime. This paper provides empirical evidence valuable to government crime control policies in China. Governments at all levels should pay full attention to the adverse effects of cultural differences in governance and promote mutual cultural recognition and integration of different groups.

Taxi dancers, Chinese laundrymen, and Peking prisoners: Strangers in the city

Yue Du

2022, 8(2):  268-290.  doi:10.1177/2057150X221091423

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This paper points out that the concept of the “marginal man”, derived from Simmel’s concept of the “stranger”, embodies a fusion of formal sociology and American pragmatism in early Chicago School theory. This kind of theoretical fusion gave birth to a research method that focuses on life history and, at the same time, an investigation of the objective “new” and “old” life stages of the individual and the individual’s subjective grasp of the conflict between the new and the old life, which served as the predecessor of the later “career approach” of the Chicago School. In the early 20th century, some Chicago School ethnographers studied three types of urban strangers: “taxi dancers” (female dancers hired to dance with clients), Chinese laundrymen in the US, and prisoners in Peking. These studies revealed profoundly different images of old life–new life conflicts. Taxi dancers were able to “move on” from their old lives, Chinese laundrymen firmly held on to the traditions of their home country and their families in order to cope with the new challenges, and prisoners in Peking had failed to adapt and turned to crime after being uprooted from their old lives. This paper concludes that neither the Chinese laundrymen nor Peking prisoners were able to adapt to the new urban life by “moving on” from their old family and village life. Thus, their paths to modernity differed fundamentally from those of the marginal man. Finally, this paper applies Robert Park’s views on “civilization” to explain these different Chinese and Western individuals’ paths to urban life.