Upgrading skills, downgrading women’s work in China

Since the late 2000s, the Chinese state has embraced new industrial policies that have focused on upgrading its manufacturing quality, resulting in labor, welfare and population law reforms. According to ILR Assistant Professor Yiran Zhang, an unintended result of these policies is a shift in the workforce that has driven women from factory jobs that were on par with their male counterparts into precarious and lower-quality home-based industrial work in their inland hometowns.

Zhang has published a pair of papers exploring the garment supply chain in China—both factory jobs and informal, home-based ones that have sprung up out of need as women try to make money while also serving as “companion mothers” to their school-aged children.

“I think the biggest theoretical takeaway is that we really have to understand gender dynamics and family dynamics as being integral to economic developmental policies and to the transformation of industry jobs,” Zhang said. “If you don’t understand those dynamics, you cannot make full sense of the changes.”

The first paper is “The Paradox of Upgrading: Standards of Social Reproduction and the Gendered Precarization of Garment Work in China,” published in Critical Sociology. The second, “Gender, Value-Chain Upgrading, and The Costs of Human Capital: The Case of a Garment Supply Chain in China,” is forthcoming in the Cornell International Law Journal.

They draw on Zhang’s fieldwork in one coastal industrial town and two inland labor emigration regions while she was researching China’s law and policy, as well as sociological and ethnographic aspects of China’s migrant workers.

For her research, Zhang traced a group of garment workers and the reconfiguration of their migration and labor strategies. Drawing on interviews conducted between 2018 and 2019, she provides a case study of China’s “recent transition from an export-oriented cheap-production development regime to a value-chain-upgrading regime” and its impact on the labor, migration and family strategies of female internal migrant workers.

“On the industrial side, the state’s goal has been to upgrade manufacturing industries and jobs,” Zhang said. “In congruence, the policy promotes a more skilled and educated workforce.”

China’s shift to value-chain upgrading has led to better labor regulation, more social protection, and significant, albeit substantively inadequate, state efforts to close the urban-migrant social welfare gap.

The upgrading reform also heightened the expectation of parents’ role—especially mothers—in investing in their children’s human capital. As a result, women, who have constituted the backbone of China’s position as the “world’s factory” in the global supply chain, have been pushed out of factory jobs due to the increased focus on becoming “student companion mothers” and preparing the next generation to be college-educated, skilled workers.

This shift has also reshaped the division and value of paid and unpaid labor in the migrant household. Before the shift, childcare had fallen primarily on grandparents, allowing both parents to take full-time and better-paid factory jobs in coastal areas.

In the new labor landscape, many returning mothers dropped out of paid work entirely, while others became involved in a new form of precarious garment work in home-based workshops, dubbed “mothers’ workshops” by locals, which subcontract piecemeal work from coastal garment factories.

“Moving to a more skilled economy, or a ‘knowledge’ economy, brings with it a higher expectation of child-rearing,” Zhang said. “So, it intensifies the expectation of childcare duties and pushes women out of formal jobs. This is the paradox of upgrading that I identified.

“Thus, investing in human capital has a presumed expectation of what mothers are doing in this process. And too often, mothering, or care labor, is seen as not having economic value or costs.”