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Chinese Sociological Review
ISSN: 2162-0555 (Print) 2162-0563 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mcsa20
New Boundary Work of Rural Migrants: How It
Opens Up New Potential Ways of Remaking Rural-
Urban Symbolic Boundaries in China
Matthew M. Chew
To cite this article: Matthew M. Chew (2019): New Boundary Work of Rural Migrants: How It
Opens Up New Potential Ways of Remaking Rural-Urban Symbolic Boundaries in China, Chinese
Sociological Review, DOI: 10.1080/21620555.2019.1636639
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21620555.2019.1636639
Published online: 01 Aug 2019.
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New Boundary Work of Rural Migrants:
How It Opens Up New Potential Ways of
Remaking Rural-Urban Symbolic
Boundaries in China
Matthew M. Chew, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong
Abstract: There are powerful symbolic boundaries in urban China that
exclude rural migrants. This study identifies and analyzes the new boundary
work that aims at remaking these rural-urban boundaries. Based on data on
previous cohorts of rural migrants in China and elsewhere, current studies
argue that the predominant type of boundary work is personal assimilation. I
challenge this finding by documenting how the most recent cohort of young
rural migrants develop a broad variety of “normative inversion,”
“reclassification,”and “universalistic blurring”types of boundary work.
Although this study does not conclusively prove that the new boundary work
has already successfully remade rural-urban boundaries, it illustrates that new
potential paths to remaking them are opened. Data were mainly collected
between 2014 and 2017 through participant observation in dance clubs in
Beijing and interviews with fifty-seven dance club service workers.
Introduction
Although the rural-urban divide and social discrimination of internal
rural-to-urban migrants (thereafter rural migrants) exist in many countries
around the world, in few countries have they grown into such a broad and
Address correspondence to Matthew M. Chew Department of Sociology, Hong
Kong Baptist University, Kowloon, Hong Kong. E-mail: mmtchew@hkbu.edu.hk
Chinese Sociological Review,0:1–27, 2019
#2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 2162-0555 print / 2162-0563 online
DOI: 10.1080/21620555.2019.1636639
severe problem as in China. While millions of rural residents migrate to
cities every year in China since the 1980s, there is in urban China estab-
lished symbolic and social boundaries that exclude rural migrants (Chen
and Song 2014; Liang 2016). The causes of these rural-urban boundaries
are relatively well-understood. They are discussed in research fields includ-
ing rural sociology, migration studies, consumer studies, and Chinese rural
migrant studies. Some of the causes are common across the world: concen-
tration of nonfarm work opportunities in cities, general perceptions of the
rural as esthetically and morally backward, and sociocultural attraction of
cities for rural residents (Farrugia 2014; Lichter and Brown 2011). Others
are distinctive to China: the rapid pace of urbanization, the hukou system,
an authoritarian government, and enormous wealth disparity between the
rich and poor (Liang 2016). How rural migrants do boundary work that
challenges and remakes rural-urban boundaries is a much less understood
topic. This study helps fill this research gap by adopting Andreas
Wimmer’s(2008) comprehensive taxonomy of ethnic boundary work to
examine the new boundary work of the most recent cohort of rural
migrants in China.
Theoretical Background
Symbolic Boundaries
There are a wide variety of ways scholars characterize rural-urban bounda-
ries in China. They include for example racialization, caste, apartheid, geo-
class, class hierarchy, esthetic discrimination, and incomplete citizenship
(Alpermann 2013; Anagnost 2004;Guang2003;Jacka2014: 241; Kwong
2017;Han2010; Schneider 2015; Tang and Yang 2008;Zheng2003). These
characterizations are robustly critical, and they are not necessarily mutually
exclusive. Yet they reflect the underdeveloped state of the field. They do not
engage each other or systematically clarify how rural-urban boundaries
operate in China. The current state of research on symbolic boundaries is
one of the intellectual background factors of this underdevelopment: the
field heavily focuses on ethnic boundaries and hardly pay any attention to
rural-urban boundaries (Lichter and Brown 2011; Pachucki, Pendergrass,
and Lamont 2007). This study helps bridge this theoretical gap through
uncovering the new symbolic boundary work of rural migrants and through
illustrating how it potentially remakes rural-urban symbolic boundaries.
This study adopts the concepts of “social boundaries”and “symbolic
boundaries”from Mich
ele Lamont and Vir
ag Moln
ar (2002: 168–169):
Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions made by social
actors to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and
space. They are tools by which individuals and groups struggle over
2 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
and come to agree upon definitions of reality. [ …]Socialboundaries
are objectified forms of social differences manifested in unequal access
to an unequal distribution of resources (material and nonmaterial)
and social opportunities. They are also revealed in stable behavioral
patterns of association. [ …] But symbolic and social boundaries
should be viewed as equally real: The former exists at the
intersubjective level whereas the latter manifest themselves as
groupings of individuals. At the causal level, symbolic boundaries can
be thought of as a necessary but insufficient condition for the
existence of social boundaries.
I conceptualize the rural-urban social boundaries in contemporary China
as a hierarchical, relative, and dichotomous pair of terms that delineate two
groups: “rural migrant workers”(nonmingong) and urban middle-class per-
sons. The term “rural migrant workers”has been intellectually constructed,
selected among several alternative terms including “blind floaters”(man-
gliu), and naturalized through discursive efforts in the past three decades. A
well-researched subset of these social boundaries is the suzhi discourse and
its institutionalization in numerous programs, policies, and legislation
(Anagnost 2004;Cartier2016;Jacka2009). This study focuses on new
changes in rural-urban symbolic boundaries and their implications.
I interpret the overall symbolic boundaries existing between “rural
migrant workers”and urban middle-class persons as containing two
dimensions: a rural-urban one and a class-based one. In this interpret-
ation, the symbolic boundaries confronting “rural migrant worker”consist
of a “working-class versus middle-class”component and a “rural versus
urban”component. That is, rural-urban symbolic boundaries should be
distinguished from the symbolic boundaries of class. Current studies of
rural migrant workers are for some reason not taking this distinction ser-
iously. For example, they treat the distinction between class and gender
much more seriously than that between class and the rural-urban divide
(exceptions: Yan 2008; Zhang 2014). This study recognizes the distinction
and focuses on rural-urban symbolic boundaries.
Another analytic distinction that this study makes is that among the
economic, moral, and esthetic components in the “rural migrant worker”
identity. This analytic distinction is adopted from Mich
ele Lamont’s
(1992) scheme, which in turn is a refinement of Pierre Bourdieu’s(2013)
classic conception of cultural capital. The economic component, which is
measured by the economic capital of a rural migrant worker, contributes
much more to positioning her on the symbolic boundaries of class than to
positioning her on rural-urban symbolic boundaries. The esthetic and
moral components are different—they mainly contribute to a rural
migrant worker’s positioning on rural-urban symbolic boundaries. For
example, a “provincial rich”(tuhao) is designated as rich yet rural because
her esthetic and moral capitals are regarded as inferior (Ingebretson 2017).
SUMMER 2019 3
Boundary Work of Rural Migrant Workers
Boundary work is performed by individuals to make, maintain, remake,
and/or unmake symbolic boundaries (Gieryn 1983; Lamont 1992). It does
not directly transform social boundaries; social boundaries are macrocul-
tural structures (Alexander 2007). But by way of remaking symbolic boun-
daries, the transformation of social boundaries is a possible consequence.
Given the broad social impact of China’s rural-urban social boundaries,
investigation of how Chinese rural migrants remake symbolic boundaries
through their boundary work is a theoretically and practically important
undertaking (Wang 2017; Wang and He 2019). Yet surprisingly, very few
studies attempt to tackle this problematic (exceptions: Guang 2003; Huang
and Guo 2015; Lan 2014; Ling 2015).
There are many qualitative studies of Chinese rural migrants that offer
details on rural migrants’boundary work, though very few of them frame
the investigation in terms of symbolic or social boundaries. Most import-
antly for this study, almost all these studies interpret Chinese rural
migrants’boundary work as unsuccessful passing (e.g., Chen 2009; He and
Wang 2016;Ip2018; Lee 1998;Ma2006; Otis 2011; Pun 2005;Yan2008;
Zhan 2015; Zhang 2014). Passing is equivalent to “personal assimilation”
in Wimmer’s(2008) taxonomy of ethnic boundary work. These studies
document how rural migrants make inferior esthetic imitations of urban-
ites in the hope to become modern, urban, and middle-class and to shed
their stigmatized rural identity. Some studies document how rural
migrants’hopes are crushed as their mimicry is readily detected by urban-
ites (Chen 2009; Pun 2005; Otis 2011). Other studies show that the recur-
rent esthetic mistakes they collectively make during mimicry have
themselves become new handles of stigmatization (Chew 2003; Yan 2008).
There is a second kind of boundary work documented in a small number
of current studies. It features rural migrants reinterpreting certain stigma-
tized traits of rural folks to be morally superior to urbanites. For example,
rural migrants frame simple-mindedness as being truthful to authentic
human feelings (renqingwei) and contrast this against urbanites’manipula-
tive and calculating rationality (Brandtst€
adter 2009; Feuchtwang 2013).
This boundary work belongs to the category of “universalistic blurring”in
Wimmer’s(2008) taxonomy.
Current Chinese-language publications on rural migrants similarly neg-
lect rural-urban boundary work; they only tangentially treat it alongside
other main investigative foci. Despite adopting very different theoretical
orientations than the previously cited English-language studies, they simi-
larly interpret rural migrants’boundary work as unsuccessful passing. For
example, adopting a policy-oriented and noncritical approach, many stud-
ies describe Chinese rural migrants’consumption as irrational, vain, and/
or materialist (e.g., Yang and Wu 2015). They lament that rural migrants
4 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
and especially young ones spend beyond their means on branded goods to
identify themselves as urban and/or to gain the recognition of urbanites
(Jin and Cui 2013).
Studies on internal rural migrants in countries other than China are
rare and they are intellectually disconnected from Chinese rural migrant
research. Nonetheless, they also find unsuccessful passing to be the main
boundary work of (non-Chinese) rural migrants. A highly cited study the-
orizes rural migrants’boundary work in terms of “dominated consumer
acculturation”(
€
Ust€
uner and Holt 2007). Based on data on internal rural
migrants in Turkey, these authors argue that rural migrants develop a
torn identity between the rural and the urban. On one hand, these
migrants know about global consumer culture and urban youths’lifestyles
and cannot unlearn them. On the other, they are forced by their limited
resources to settle with an inferior imitation of global and urban consump-
tion goods. These torn selves look much like current studies’portrayal of
Chinese rural migrants—both groups of migrants are continually enticed
to imitate middle-class urbanites but perennially fail. A few studies exam-
ine the boundary work of universalistic blurring among rural migrants
outside China (Satybaldieva 2018). This study will show that the new
boundary work of young Chinese rural migrants deemphasizes personal
assimilation.
According to Wimmer’s(2008) taxonomy, personal assimilation and
universalistic blurring are two among the 16 possible types of ethnic
boundary work. The taxonomy is originally designed for ethnic bounda-
ries and it might not entirely applicable to rural-urban boundaries.
Nonetheless, I regard it as a useful framework to help initiate empirical
research on rural-urban boundaries, a subfield that is seriously lacking its
own theorization. Among the 16 types of ethnic boundary work Wimmer
identifies, four are particularly relevant to this study. They are personal
assimilation, reclassification, normative inversion, and universalis-
tic blurring.
Wimmer (2008,2013) deliberately avoids making purely theory-based
descriptions on the sociopolitical characteristics, effectiveness, outcomes,
or desirability of these 16 types of boundary work. I endorse this cautious
approach. He is right that the empirical contexts of different cases of
boundary work can play a key role in shaping their sociopolitical charac-
teristics, effectiveness, outcomes, or desirability. Pre-empirical theoretical
characterization of the different types of boundary work is precarious.
Nonetheless, Wimmer and others still offer some heuristic comments on
the sociopolitical characteristics of personal assimilation, universalistic
blurring, normative inversion, and reclassification. “Assimilation [is] the
main strategies to ‘shift sides’and escape the minority stigma”(Wimmer
2008: 1039). Personal assimilation involves an individual of a subordinated
group attempting to assimilate into the subordinating group (Goffman
SUMMER 2019 5
1963). It is often critiqued as sociopolitically ambivalent due to its ten-
dency to reinforce rather than remake status quo symbolic boundaries
(Kanuha 1999).
In contrast, the boundary work of reclassification is more proactive,
variegated, dynamic, and confrontational. For example, reclassification
often involves an individual of a subordinated group reclassifying herself
as a member of a group that is broadly considered to be superior to the
dominant group. Normative inversion is a similarly proactive, variegated,
dynamic, and confrontational type of boundary work. It also turns an
individual of a subordinated group into one who belongs to a group
superior to the dominant group.
In normative inversion, the symbolic hierarchy is turned on its head,
such that the category of the excluded and despised comes to
designate a chosen people, morally, intellectually and culturally
superior to the dominant group. […It] reverses the existing rank
order (Wimmer 2008: 1037).
Note that the word “normative”in “normative inversion”does not nar-
rowly refer to moral types of inversion but broadly to intellectual, moral,
and esthetic ones.
Compared to reclassification and normative inversion, the boundary
work of universalistic blurring is similarly proactive in remaking existing
boundaries though it is less confrontational.
Boundary blurring reduces the importance of ethnicity as a principle
of categorization and social organization. [ …] [N]on-ethnic
principles are promoted and thus the legitimacy of ethnic, national
or ethnosomatic boundaries undermined. General human qualities
and the ‘family of mankind’are often evoked [in universalistic
blurring …] to de-emphasize ethnic, racial or national boundaries
and to create a global [ …] community of belonging (Wimmer
2008:1041–1042).
One only needs to replace the words “ethnic,”“racial,”and “national”
in this citation with that of “rural-urban”to adapt Wimmer’s insight for
this study. Universalistic blurring has been criticized as insufficiently soci-
opolitically progressive because it only indirectly challenges existing sym-
bolic boundaries (Satybaldieva 2018). It tends to be nonconfrontational in
the sense that its effectiveness heavily relies on the dominant groups’
inattentiveness.
In line with Wimmer’s cautious empirical approach, the previous few
paragraphs are not meant to be a conclusive sociopolitical characterization
of personal assimilation, reclassification, normative inversion, and univer-
salistic blurring. I simply compare the formal characteristics of the four
types of boundary work. Reclassification and normative inversion are
more proactive, variegated, dynamic, and confrontational than any other
6 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
boundary work. Universalistic blurring is less confrontational. Personal
assimilation is the least confrontational and dynamic.
New Boundary Work Enabled by Migrants’Agency and Favorable Social
Circumstances
While I appreciate the critical import of current accounts of rural
migrants’boundary work and regard them to be largely accurate in
describing Chinese rural migrants in the past, an obvious problem is that
these accounts leave little room for rural migrants’agency. Their findings
look suspicious one-sided when compared with those of two relevant clus-
ters of scholarship. The first cluster examines how minorities and inter-
national migrants react against discriminatory racialized boundaries.
Wimmer (2013) delineates a broad range of ethnic boundary work that
minority groups can pursue to make, unmake, or remake ethnic bounda-
ries. Lamont and collaborators analyze a wide range of boundary work
that marginalized ethnic groups in different societies develop to negotiate
stigmatization (Lamont 2009; Lamont et al. 2016). Critical consumer stud-
ies in the marketing discipline formulate a “post-assimilationist”consumer
theory that argues that international migrants—including mainly those
from the global South—develop hybrid consumer identities that do not
simply assimilate into host societies (Askegaard et al. 2005; Chytkova
2011). Critical migration studies elaborate on how international migrants
carry out kinds of boundary work other than assimilation (Alberti 2014;
C¸elik 2018; Lan 2006; Lugosi et al. 2016). There are also streams of studies
that show how migrants develop new and unfamiliar boundary work to
remake boundaries. An example is migrants’construction of “assumed
ethnicity,”which involves reclassifying oneself as a high-status ethnic
group to which one does not belong (Chew and Wong 2013; Becker 2015;
Ivory 2017; Jim
enez 2010).
The second cluster concerns esthetic boundary work successfully car-
ried out by the working class. American working-class individuals contest
socioeconomic and esthetic hierarchy with a universalistic blurring type
of boundary work (Lamont 2009). The urban poor in China is doing
boundary work against the rich. It is found that the rich are palpably
affected by it, which implies that the social boundaries between the urban
poor and urban middle class have been challenged (Cho 2013; Osburg
2013). There is preliminary evidence that upper-market service workers
are capable of mobilizing their role as gatekeepers of prestigious cathe-
drals of consumption to do boundary work against the middle class
(Sherman 2007). Esthetic boundary work is also intensively analyzed in
subculture studies, though these studies do not adopt the symbolic
boundary vocabulary. Punk and hip-hop exemplify the world’s most
SUMMER 2019 7
successful cases of collective esthetic boundary work of working-class
youths (Hebdige 1979). If various working-class groups inside and out-
side China are found to have carried out esthetic boundary work, it is
unlikely that Chinese rural migrant workers are an exception. In fact,
Chinese rural migrant workers have already carried out large-scale
esthetic boundary work. The subcultural style of shamate has attracted
tens of millions of followers in the early 2010s (Liu 2014;Wei2016). The
rise and temporary success of this subcultural style is evidence that illus-
trates that the latest cohort of young rural migrants does not only focus
on personal assimilation.
In debates regarding “post-assimilationist”consumer theory, it is
found that proactive and confrontational types of boundary work are
more likely to thrive when there are “sufficient capital resources among
migrants to participate in consumer culture”(Chytkova 2011: 267). Few
in the field of Chinese rural migrant studies has yet appreciated or
explored the implications of this finding (Chen and Liu 2018). Earlier
cohorts of Chinese rural migrants were indeed in serious lack of mater-
ial and symbolic resources. They lived near subsistence levels, earned
meager income, lacked leisure time, had low levels of education and
other cultural capital prior to migration, and lacked chances of accumu-
lating cultural capital after migration.
However, new circumstances in China in the 2010s are likely to be ena-
bling the latest cohort of rural migrants to pursue new boundary work.
Chinese rural migrant workers’average wages hovered a little under 1,000
yuan per month between the late 1990s and the late 2000s but climbed to
around 3,000 yuan by the mid-2010s (Knight, Deng, and Li 2011;Mao
and Liu 2016). (The exchange rate of US dollars to Chinese yuan stayed
around one USD to six RMB across the period.) Migrant factory workers’
chances of accumulating urban cultural capital used to be seriously
restricted by the Chinese dormitory labor regime, which obstructed their
interaction with urbanites, urban spaces, and urban cultures (Pun and
Smith 2007). By the 2010s, factories relaxed the dormitory regime and a
growing minority of factory workers rent their own apartments (Siu 2015).
Older cohorts of rural migrants received very little formal education and
had almost no informal knowledge of urban culture prior to migration.
Recent cohorts benefit from more years of formal secondary education (Li
2015). As digital natives in a country with leapfrogged internet infrastruc-
tural development, many rural migrants of the new cohort are internet
savvy digital natives and hence have learned about global consumer cul-
ture even before migration. Smart mobile phones and social media also
afford new cohorts of rural migrants more chances of cultural capital
accumulation after migration, as almost all young Chinese rural migrants
use smartphones (Wallis 2015). While only low-end frontline service work
was open to rural migrants before the 2010s, upper-market ones
8 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
increasingly welcome them now. It needs to be further empirically verified
but my preliminary observation is that much fewer urban youths accept
upper-market service jobs. With their college degrees and expected inherit-
ance of high-value urban property, they do not feel like serving tables at a
restaurant even if the restaurant is an upper-market one. Rural migrants
with upper-market service jobs are in better positions to accumulate global
and urban cultural capital.
With these transforming circumstances, the repertoire of boundary
work of today’s young rural migrants’is unlikely to remain identical to
that of two decades ago. Recent studies have barely begun to explore this
change (Tian 2019). For example, a recent study still cannot envision any-
thing other than personal assimilation and universalistic blurring in its list
of recommended boundary work for rural migrants (Huang and Guo
2015: 192). Another recent study discovers the “equalization”type of
boundary work among rural migrants (Ling 2015). But it only manages to
do so by focusing exclusively on second-generation rural migrant students
who are born and raised in cities.
Methods and Data
This study’s data belong to a larger project of mine on rural migrant ser-
vice workers’consumption practices. The data were collected through par-
ticipant observation, in-depth formal interviews, and informal
ethnographic interviews. It was conducted by myself and a full-time
research assistant, whose name is Chris, in an upper-market dance club
(DG) in Beijing. I collected data by myself and directly from the field
from June to August of 2014, from June to August of 2015, August of
2016, and June of 2017. Chris conducted additional interviews and worked
as a recording assistant for participant observation from September 2014
to August 2015. I visited the Gongti nightlife district and DG for at least
six nights of a week. I entered the club as a “free guest”and stayed in the
club for between one to five hours. I informally chatted with waitstaff and
observed their work. Chris arranged for me to interact with the waitstaff,
other frontline staff, and managers. Both Chris and I went with partici-
pants to post-work meals, went shopping with them, and hang out with
them on their holidays.
Chris graduated from a sociology department in China in 2014 and she
had prior experiences of doing fieldwork on rural migrants. We lived in
the same apartment and met daily in August 2014, during which I thor-
oughly informed her about my research objectives, trained her to be a
recording assistant for nightlife participant observation, and familiarized
her with my interview design through conducting pilot interviews together
with her on several rural migrants. In early September 2014, she started to
SUMMER 2019 9
work in DG as a full-time waitperson. From early April 2015 to June
2015, she worked in a lower-market club. I was prevented from doing this
part of the fieldwork entirely by myself due to my age. All DG waitper-
sons are young. Between September 2014 and May 2015, Chris sent me
field notes, short videos, and photographs at least twice every week. We
discussed online once or twice a week on newly collected data and
adjusted directions for subsequent data collection. She participated in all
routine work and leisure activities of her coworkers, including working in
the DG workplace, living in the company dormitory, having post-work
meals, feasting on paydays, and chatting online with waitpersons of DG
and other Beijing clubs.
For the larger project, Chris and I carried out multiple sessions of for-
mal and informal interviewing on boundary work, consumption, and ser-
vice labor process with fifty-seven participants. We did not arrange formal
interviews for twelve of the participants because they did not feel comfort-
able with it. We made up for it through additional in-depth informal
interviews. The main informal interview settings were conversations over
post-work meals, hangouts during holidays, and online communication. I
also informally interviewed middle-level and high-level managers of DG
and a few other clubs. All those who were interviewed were informed that
we were collecting data for nightlife research. Partly because I have been
researching on Chinese nightlife for the past fifteen years and I have been
a native of Chinese nightlife since 1999, the fieldwork and interviews gen-
erally went efficiently.
This study focuses on forty-six male rural migrant waitpersons in
DG. Additionally, there were eleven female rural migrant waitpersons in
DG. Among these fifty-seven participants, thirty-seven males and nine
females came from rural villages. I trace where they were from through
DG’s employment data (to which Chris had access) and interviews with
them. The rest (nine male participants and two female ones) came from
county-level cities or outskirt areas of subprefectural level cities; I adopt
the common practice in Chinese rural migrant studies and count them
as rural migrants Woodman 2017). None of these fifty-seven rural
migrants were second-generation migrants. None of them have lived in
Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, or Guangzhou since a young age, though
some have worked in small cities for a year or two before they moved
to Beijing. I was informed by low-level managers of DG and other clubs
that second-generation migrants rarely join nightlife service work. Given
their familiarity with the city and social networks in the city, they would
choose service occupations such as fashion retailing, which offer similar
wages but better work environments and less stigmatized occupational
images. Aside from these fifty-seven rural migrants, there were three
waitpersons in the DG waitstaff who came from big cities; I do not
include them in this study’s analysis. These three are urban youths with
10 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
lesbian and gay sexual identities. Lesbian and gay youths constitute an
exceptional urban group that eagerly participate in nightlife service work
in China.
The Issue of Generalizability
The generalizability of ethnographic studies of factory workers is less
problematic than those of service workers because differences between
various service industries are bigger than those between various manufac-
turing industries. This well-understood methodological difficulty in the
sociology of service work certainly also apply to research on Chinese
workers. But it should not discourage research on Chinese service workers.
In 2015, 34.7 percent of rural migrants worked in the four largest catego-
ries of service occupations, 31.1 percent of them were factory workers, and
21.1 percent were construction workers (National Bureau of Statistics of
the PRC 2015, 2016). The percentage of service workers is in a slightly
increasing trend since 2008 (National Bureau of Statistics of the PRC
2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016). It is impossible to determine
from published statistics the exact percentage of rural migrants in the doz-
ens of service occupations offering a favorable environment for new
boundary work. But it would likely be a non-negligible portion of the
34.7 percent.
Although DG waitstaff is not the largest service occupation in China, it
is more representative than it appears. I estimate that there were around
3,000 DG waitpersons working in the forty upper-market clubs and ten
middle-market ones in Beijing in 2015. The Chinese nighttime economy
offers additional waitstaff employment in various types of nightlife venues
including for example bars, karaoke clubs, massage parlors, late-night
cafes and teahouses, hostess clubs, live music venues, and late-night eat-
eries. Online sources indicate that there were around 20,000 nightlife ven-
ues in Beijing in 2016 (Farrer 2018: 1114).
Service work and especially upper-market service work is increasingly
available to rural migrants (Woronov 2012). I take my sample to represent
young rural migrant groups with favorable levels of material and symbolic
resources for doing boundary work, but not so favorable that few other
rural migrants can realistically achieve. For example, rural migrant sex
workers in hostess clubs, who can easily make more than 6,000 yuan a
month since the late 1990s, constitute a very unrepresentative group
(Zheng 2009). My participants’median income in 2015 was around 5,500
yuan per month. This level of income is higher than young factory work-
ers’wages and the national average of college graduates’salary in 2015,
but it is not uniquely high compared with other major service occupations
that rural migrants participate. Even with higher income, my participants
SUMMER 2019 11
and other rural migrants confront a huge wealth gap between themselves
and urban youths. Almost no rural migrant youths will inherit urban
property, but many youths will (Zhan 2015). Rural property is not sell-
able. Property prices are extremely high in urban China: Beijing ranked
fifth and Shanghai ninth in world rankings of property price-to-income
ratio in 2014 (Numbeo 2015).
To what extent is upper-market DG service work generalizable to other
service occupations available to young rural migrants? This is ultimately
an empirical question to be answered through further research. I can only
offer preliminary thoughts here. Upper-market service work encourages
workers to consume with customers, to consume work and the workplace,
and to consume the city. The common characteristics of these workplaces
are their being “cathedrals of consumption”and “contact zones”(Pratt
1991; Ritzer 2010; Valentine 2008). Intensive interaction with wealthy cus-
tomers let workers in these upper-market service workplaces accumulate
substantial cultural capital on one hand and compel them to do boundary
work against these wealthy groups on the other (Farrer 2011). Many other
service occupations offer a similar workplace environment. They include
upper-market hair salons, shopping malls, theme parks, restaurants, caf
es,
hotels, retail stores, logistics, beauty parlors, and nightlife venues (other
than DGs), and middle-market fashion retail stores, exhibitions and con-
ventions, tourist services, and some varieties of household service. The
middle-market segment of many service occupations including domestic
work offers similar though less favorable environment for new boundary
work (Su, Ni, and Ji 2018). This study’s finding is at least partly generaliz-
able to them. This study’s finding is less applicable to factory and con-
struction workers.
Work in upper-market Chinese cathedrals of consumption and contact
zones is not less exploitive than that in conventional manufacturing occupa-
tions. DG’s waitstaff work demands heavy manual and symbolic labor; it is
typical of upper-market and middle-market clubs in China. My participants’
job responsibility includes bussing tables assigned to them, creating a good
vibe for the club through acts such as dancing, continuously monitoring and
serving customers of their table, and cleaning up after customers leave. They
work in cigarette smoke-filled spaces from 6 pm to 4 or 5 am with only a 20-
min break. The labor process is overall less structured than that in typical
Chinese factories. They only have 3 or 4 days off per month. Most of them
live in the company dorms, which tend to be decent but overcrowded.
Data on Female Rural Migrants
Nightlife service work in China is highly gendered in a aspect: they heavily
stigmatize female workers and only slightly stigmatize male ones. Nightlife
12 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
work’s tendency to stigmatize is rooted in their perceived association with
sex work, sexual promiscuity, drug use, gangs and crime, and/or other
antisocial behaviors. Male workers are only slightly stigmatized because
many of these vices are to some extent endorsed as a proof of masculinity
by hegemonic conceptions of masculinity. However, given the paternalis-
tic, conformist, and (superficially) moralistic social culture of contempor-
ary Chinese societies, association with nightlife production or
consumption is slightly stigmatizing even for men. This is my personal
experience and judgment as a native of Chinese nightlife; it can certainly
be falsified by future research.
This occupational stigmatization affects rural migrant workers differ-
ently by gender. Interpreted with the theoretical framework of symbolic
boundaries and cultural capital, male rural migrants gain decent chances
of enhancing their masculine attractiveness and risk being slightly morally
questionable. Female ones can obtain esthetic capital by being present in
cathedrals of consumption and contact zones as male ones do. But they
do not gain the additional enhancement of feminine attractiveness and
they risk powerful moral sanction for choosing to work in nightlife
occupations.
This occupational stigmatization is quite unique among upper-market
and middle-market service occupations in China. Young woman working
in an upper-market restaurant or fashion retail store do not confront such
stigmatization. Those who work in luxury hotels may experience it to a
degree (Otis 2011). This means that my data is not very suitable for
exploring female rural migrant workers’new boundary work. Future
research on service occupations that do not stigmatize women more than
men (e.g., fashion retailing) can reveal the new boundary work of women
more fully.
Contested Views on What Constitutes Adequate Evidence of Successful
Remaking of Symbolic Boundaries
There is no cross-disciplinary and cross-field consensus on what consti-
tutes adequate evidence for the successful remaking of symbolic bounda-
ries. I am referring to the methodological issue of how to operationalize
the theoretical concept of “remaking symbolic boundaries”in empirical
research. Current empirical studies of boundary processes mostly collect
and analyze qualitative data on what boundary work participants do, say,
and think (Pachucki, Pendergrass, and Lamont 2007). Symbolic bounda-
ries “exist at the intersubjective level,”as Lamont and Moln
ar’s(2002:
169) defines them. If someone who is disadvantaged by a certain symbolic
boundary doubts it, then the intersubjective status quo between her and
people who subordinate her can be said to have been undermined to some
SUMMER 2019 13
extent. Many studies of boundary processes and symbolic interaction,
including those in Chinese rural migrants, tacitly take this undermining as
good enough evidence of remaking symbolic boundaries (e.g., Tian 2017,
2019). A problem is that scholars who do not work on culture may find
this methodological view as too “culturalist.”For example, an alternative
view would define adequate evidence as the permanent repudiation or for-
getting of a symbolic boundary by everybody in society. Another possible
view is that both persons in an intersubjective pair permanently deny a
given symbolic boundary.
Because this study aims to broadly speak to an interdisciplinary audi-
ence of rural migrant scholars, it must avoid this contested methodological
issue. This study’s analysis will focus on proving that new boundary work
arises; it does not try to argue that this new boundary work has already
successfully remade rural-urban symbolic or social boundaries. The two
questions do not have to be bundled. Simply by ascertaining and analyzing
the emergence of new boundary work, readers will be informed of a var-
iety of potential ways that rural-urban symbolic and social boundaries
may be successfully remade in the future in China. Moreover, there is the
practical issue of not being able to treat both with an adequate level of
detail in a single study. The data I collected for the larger project indeed
contain evidences that indicate a degree of success in the remaking of
rural-urban symbolic boundaries. But these data will have to be analyzed
in a separate paper.
Personal Assimilation and the Old Version of Universalistic Blurring Are
Still Present but Marginalized
I find that personal assimilation is not conceived as urgent or meaningful
for both male and female participants. It is largely because they are not
frequently recognized as rural migrants on daily occasions. I make the fol-
lowing observations during fieldwork, some of which are corroborated by
findings in recent Chinese-language studies (Feng and Shi 2015: 39).
Although most customers cognitively know that most youngsters working
as waitstaff in DGs are from rural areas, they cannot tell by looks alone if
a waitperson is rural or urban. Urbanites that my participants meet in
supermarkets, restaurants, and street corners do not even have this cogni-
tive knowledge—they would not even suspect that my participants are
from rural China. Current studies find that Chinese rural migrants have
been racialized through quasi-phenotypical characteristics such as dark
and burnt skin and rural ways of dress and hairstyles (Ip 2018; Pun 2003:
487). None of my participants have dark and burnt skin. Like most rural
migrants of the most recent cohort, they have never practiced farm work.
Some of my participants who are indifferent to fashion, but they dress like
14 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
the urban poor instead of typical rural residents. Others embrace alterna-
tive fashion styles that look urban rather than rural. Daily microaggres-
sion based on rural migrants’looks does not befall my participants.
Passing as an urbanite is hence not perceived as urgent by my participants.
There is hence room for them to explore other kinds of boundary work.
I find that the second type of boundary work documented in current
studies, universalistic blurring, still exists. I observe that it is invoked when
my participants discuss the DG management and seldom in other occa-
sions. My participants quite frequently chat about their managers. Like
other DG service workers in the Gongti nightlife district, my participants
go for supper every night after work at a food street with many low-priced
food stalls. They usually stay there and chat for an hour or more. A cen-
tral part of this chat is about their work, workplace, management policies,
and managers. The phrase “they don’t have renqingwei”and similar
expressions frequently come up when they criticize middle-level and high-
level managers. Both male and female participants join this discourse.
However, this boundary work is by no means the central one through
which my participants construct self-identities. It is also not the main
boundary work with which they negotiate rural-urban boundaries. As I
will show, the new boundary work that they pursue fundamentally con-
flicts with the self-identification as simplistic rural folks.
Boundary Work Involving Wealthy and Middle-Aged Men: Normative
Inversion and Reclassification
I observe two types of boundary work that my male participants develop
in relation to wealthy middle-aged male customers. The first combines uni-
versalistic blurring and normative inversion. It is infrequently invoked.
But I discuss it because it has not been explored. This boundary work is
carried out when stingy customers neglect to give tips or when wealthy
customers pay a fat bill to the club but only a tiny tip to them. Some of
my participants would then angrily complain that the customer “has no
suzhi”(quality), usually with a loud enough voice so that the customer
hears it. The suzhi discourse is a major part of rural-urban social bounda-
ries. It is so influential that it is not only embraced by urbanites but also
by rural migrants. My participants turn the suzhi discourse upside down
and recast wealthy urbanites as occupants of the low-quality side of the
suzhi boundary. It is a persuasive recasting in the sense that these stingy
customers are given service but do not pay a fair price for it. However,
this boundary work is not a central one for my participants’, partly
because it focuses on wealthy urbanites and not rural migrants themselves.
Moreover, it is not the main boundary work with which my participants
SUMMER 2019 15
characterize wealthy urbanites. An obvious reason is that most wealthy
customers pay a reasonable large number of tips.
The primary boundary work that my participants do in relation to
wealthy middle-aged customers is normative inversion with an esthetic
emphasis. During my interviews, different participants use a range of
adjectives to esthetically contrast themselves with their wealthy customers.
They describe themselves as “stylish and fashionable”(shishang), “young,”
“beautiful,”“cool,”and “knowledgeable about partying”(huiwan). They
interpret wealthy customers as “middle-aged,”“unfashionable,”“fat,”
“and “ignorant about partying.”They think wealthy customers may “have
much money but still provincial and pass
e”(tu). The nationally popular
dichotomy between tu (provincial and pass
e) and yang (Westernized and
trendy) is a frequently used symbolic boundary device to distinguish
between rural migrants and urbanites (Zheng 2009). My participants turn
it thoroughly upside down, recasting themselves as yang and wealthy cus-
tomers as tu.
My participants confidently enunciate these confrontational discourses.
It is objectively true that they are younger, more fashionable, and more
knowledgeable about partying than the average middle-aged customer. A
large portion of wealthy middle-aged male customers in Beijing’s DGs
tends to be unfashionable occasional clubbers. The clientele of Beijing’s
upper-market clubs consists of a mix of many groups. There are many
occasional clubbers including, for example, domestic tourists, white collar
persons who attend Westernized nightlife to buttress their self-image of
living a sophisticated lifestyle, and wealthy middle-agers who treated DGs
as an equivalent of commercial sex joints.
Reclassification is the secondary component of this new boundary
work. They reclassify themselves as an esthetically superior group that
commands nightlife subculture and fashionability. This esthetic superiority
may be characterized as more urban than rural. Nonetheless, it is mislead-
ing to interpret this reclassification effort as an attempt to become urban
or modern. As numerous interview excerpts from current studies show,
older generations of rural migrants self-consciously identify their objective
of consuming fashion as becoming urban or modern (e.g., Zhang 2001,
2014). I find that none of my participants think in those terms. Instead,
they resemble urban born youths who dress fashionably simply for being
fashionable. One may argue that both urban youths and my participants
are still unconsciously and deep in their psyches aiming at becoming urban
or modern. But this argument is moot for understanding rural migrants’
boundary work.
If there is a single most important type of boundary work through
which my male participants’construct self-identity, this is it. They rightly
believe that they know and embody nightlife culture better than most
wealthy middle-aged urbanites. Nightlife is a highly recognized strand of
16 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
urban, Westernized, and middle-class consumption culture in contempor-
ary China. My female participants practice this type of boundary work to
a much smaller extent than male ones. It is insignificant to their self-identi-
fication. Chloe is the only exception. She seriously wishes to develop her
career path as a manager of nightlife venues. She is successful and subse-
quently becomes a middle-level manager of another club. Through talking
to her and observing her actions, I find that female rural migrants are not
able to strongly claim esthetic superiority over urban women in the gen-
dered settings of DGs. Many of the urban female clients of Beijing’s clubs
are very stylish and pretty. Chloe cannot reasonable and credibly feel
superior to them in fashion-esthetic and physical terms, although Chloe is
much more stylish than for example the average college student in Beijing.
Powerful as it is, a single type of boundary work cannot supplant all
symbolic boundaries between rural migrants and wealthy urbanites. I ask
Chris to ask my participants whether they would trade their fashionability
and party knowledge for customers’wealth. Many say they would, though
some refuse to give a clear answer. A male participant jokingly says: “I’d
rather be a provincial rich (tuhao) than a poor urban person.”Their
response illustrates a point I raised in the theory section about the distinc-
tion between the class-based symbolic boundaries and the rural-urban
symbolic boundaries. Although my participants are confident about their
esthetic normative inversion of rural-urban symbolic boundaries, this nor-
mative inversion does not contribute much to remaking class-based sym-
bolic boundaries. Their claim to prefer to be provincial rich reflects their
assessment that their overall social position would remain subordinate in
even if rural-urban symbolic boundaries were successfully remade.
Boundary Work Involving Westerners and Western Culture: Normative
Inversion, Reclassification, and Universalistic Blurring
My participants do new boundary work that involves Westerners and
Western culture. Differential proximity to Western culture and Westerners
constitutes a key part of rural-urban symbolic boundaries in China. This
applies not just to China but other societies in the global South (
€
Ust€
uner
and Holt 2007). Admittedly, who count as Westerners are to some extent
ambiguous in China. While “Westerners”in China certainly include white
ethnic groups from North America and Europe, honorary Westerner sta-
tus can be conferred to a variety of other ethnic groups such as the
Japanese in practice.
There is a group of Westerners that both male and female participants
strongly dislike. They are designated “foreigner guests”(waiji) by the DG
industry in Beijing. They enjoy complimentary drinks and tables. Many of
them are knowledgeable clubbers. Many of them are from North
SUMMER 2019 17
American and Europe and some are from South Asia, East Asia, and
South America. Invitation of foreigner guests is a standard practice of
many though not all upper-market clubs in Beijing. Having foreigners in a
club would boost the club’s status. A materialist interpretation of my par-
ticipants’dislike of them is that foreigner guests almost never pay tips. A
culturalist interpretation is that my participants consider them incorrigible
violators of what they envision as the orderliness in a DG. For instance, a
female participant complains that they “place beer bottles on speakers and
often French-kiss in open areas of the club.”A participant claims he “does
not dislike them because of their foreign origins and ethnicity.”Most
other participants make a similar claim. I believe this claim because there
is another group of Westerners to which my participants maintain very
good relations.
“Foreigner guest”Westerners are recognized as high-status and cosmo-
politan persons in most social settings in current China. But my partici-
pants describe them as “low-class,”“unruly,”“inconsiderate,”“stingy,”
“outrageous,”“stupid,”and “trashy.”This discourse suggests a combin-
ation type of boundary work that contains normative inversion, universal-
istic blurring, and expansion. I categorize it as universalistic blurring
because of its moral accusation of Westerners as stingy (i.e., skipping tips
despite consuming waitstaff’s service) and unruly (i.e., bringing disorder to
the club). It is to some extent an inversion of the ethnic hierarchy that
most contemporary Chinese recognize white Westerners are dethroned
from the top position in the global racial hierarchy and considered trashy.
It is also to some extent “expansion”:“to shift a boundary to a more
inclusive [ …] level than the existing one”(Wimmer 2008: 1031). Some of
my participants focus on the demarcation between Chinese and foreign-
ers—rather than that between working-class rural migrants and middle-
class cosmopolitan urbanites—when they confront these Westerners.
The other group of foreigners with which my participants often interact
is called “foreigner models”(waimo) by the club industry in Beijing. They
are young part-time or professional models sojourning in China for jobs.
Most of them are fair skinned but some have black or dark skin. They are
paid by the club to party, dance, and look like they are having great fun
in the club. Similar practices are found in upper-market clubs in North
America and Western Europe. My participants are friendly with the mod-
els although the models never pay tips and although my participants have
limited spoken English ability. They think of these Westerns as “co-work-
ers”and “beautiful people.”A waiter feels very sad when one of these
models leaves China: “she is such a gorgeous and successful person, yet
she never treats us rudely; unlike some of our much less successful custom-
ers.”This participant does not detest the hierarchical symbolic boundaries
between himself and these models. A waitress respects these foreigners
because “just like [her], these foreigners courageously travel far away from
18 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
home to pursue their dreams.”She is performing universalistic blurring in
a sympathetic and friendly way by stressing similarities between her and
foreign models (i.e., both being young migrants) and de-emphasizing their
differential positions in the rural-urban divide.
Upper-market service work in China often brings rural migrants into
contact with Western cultures. How they negotiate these cultures matters
much to boundary work. I examine two ways my participants negotiate
with Western cultures. The first way is best illustrated through an incident
concerning English names. Current studies find that when (older cohorts
of) rural migrants are assigned English names by their employers in urban
workplaces, they feel excited and view it as an additional step toward
becoming modern and Westernized (Hsu 2005;Ma2006: 31). A few
months after DG’s grand opening, its management decides to assign
English names to all waitpersons. How my (male and female) participants
react to the name assignment surprises me. Many of them frown, some
chuckle, and some roll their eyes. After Chris observes these reactions, she
asks why they respond in these ways. A few say they are indifferent. The
majority opinion is that it is “laughable”and “a cheap trick”of the club.
They “won’t call each other in pretentious foreign names.”They laugh at
Chris’s suggestion that naming oneself in English can improve one’s social
status. Although naming oneself in English can help raise one’s status in
some social circles in China, my participants reject this opportunity as
inauthentic and ineffective. They refuse to carry out what they consider a
feeble attempt of passing.
But my participants are not generally dismissive of learning and imitat-
ing high-status global cultures. My male participants gladly follow the
hairstyles of South Korean celebrities and my female ones adopt South
Korean make-up styles. Many middle-class and lower-middle class urban
youths in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan do the same. Many of my par-
ticipants love the Austrian energy drink “Red Bull,”which brands itself
through association with the global cool subculture of extreme sports.
The second way they negotiate Western cultures is vividly demonstrated
by their adoption of American subcultural gestures and body language.
Most of my male participants learn to express themselves with the “shaka”
or “hang loose”sign (which is a greeting gesture associated with American
surfer culture), and black American ones including for example high five,
respect, and different secret handshakes. I witness them performing these
gestures in quite authentic and accurate ways. They learn it informally
from Beijing’s waitstaff community and from foreigner models and inter-
national customers; it is not part of the club’s training or imitation of cus-
tomers. A male participant thinks “the learning of these gestures is
superior to adopting English names,”though both entail imitation of glo-
bal culture. Most urban Chinese, including middle-class youths, do not
know these gestures well and cannot perform them authentically. By
SUMMER 2019 19
performing these gestures, my participants prove that they are more
authentically global and Western than the average urban Chinese. If per-
forming these gestures were to be categorized as assimilation, my partici-
pants assimilate into cool global subcultures and not Chinese urban
culture. It is more accurate to interpret this performing of gestures as an
esthetic kind of reclassification and normative inversion.
Boundary Work Involving Middle-Class Urban Youths: Reclassification and
Universalistic Blurring
It is the receptionist’s (i.e., a subtype of waitstaff) job to lead customers
from outside a club’s door to tables inside the club. When some customers
are uncertain whether they will spend the night in a club, they may tell the
receptionist they are “just browsing.”The waitstaff community in Beijing
has developed set responses for such a situation. One of them is a remark
that taunts customers and subtly pressures them to spend their night at
the club. I witness my participants posing the question “just browsing?”in
a satirical tone but a friendly face to some customers. The customers, who
seem to be middle-class urban youths by the way they dress, momentarily
show embarrassment on their faces. This taunt makes them lose face as it
questions their middle-class status. It is equivalent to saying, “if you’re so
hesitant about spending money, you’re not good enough for us.”This
kind of incident, which has been found in other upper-market service
work, documents the boundary work of normative inversion and univer-
salistic blurring.
Middle-class and wealthy urban youths who regularly go clubbing rep-
resent a relatively difficult case against which my participants do new
boundary work. Esthetic normative inversion cannot be convincingly car-
ried out against them. Many young and middle-class urban customers are
similar or superior to my participants in terms of trendiness,
Westernization, youthfulness, and knowledgeability of partying. My par-
ticipants’reclassification of themselves as members of global cool subcul-
tures works to some extent. But the previous incident reveals a different
way of doing new boundary work on young middle-class customers—they
capitalize on their role as gatekeepers of a prestigious cathedral of con-
sumption. This boundary work combines elements of universalistic blur-
ring and reclassification. The universalistic blurring element deemphasizes
the rural identity of my participants and the urban identity of the custom-
ers on one hand, and emphasize their identities as the functionaries and
customers of a cathedral of consumption on another. The reclassification
element redefines the situation as one in which a customer hopes to get
admission to a coveted cathedral of consumption and to obtain decent
treatment by gatekeepers. The more prestigious the cathedral of
20 CHINESE SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW
consumption is, the more powerful the gatekeeper identity is and the more
effective this boundary work is.
Conclusion
The previous analysis finds that the most recent cohort of young rural
migrants carries out new kinds of boundary work. The new boundary
work does not focus on personal assimilation, but on normative inversion,
reclassification, and new versions of universalistic blurring. Through an
esthetic kind of normative inversion, my participants recast themselves as
superior and urbanites as inferior. They react against “dominated accul-
turation”by circumventing Chinese urban culture and directly learning
from Westerners and Western culture. They also perform a normative
inversion on certain parts of Western culture and certain groups of
Westerners. They can perform new boundary work with confidence
because their claim to superior status is supported by personal resources
(e.g., my participants’youthfulness and stylishness) and powerful institu-
tions (e.g., prestigious cathedrals of consumption).
My analysis illustrates that the new boundary work opens a variety of
new and potential ways of remaking rural-urban symbolic boundaries in
China. Personal assimilation leaves status quo boundaries largely intact. If
it were successful, the personal status of the individual doing the boundary
work would certainly improve. But other fellow disadvantaged individuals
in her group are not positively affected. In contrast, the new boundary
work is confrontational and dynamic. If it were successful, the individual
doing the boundary work would be contributing to dissolving status quo
boundaries for herself as well as others in her group.
The broadened repertoires made available in the new boundary work
also potentially contribute to the remaking of boundaries. For previous
rural migrant cohorts, universalistic blurring was achieved mainly with an
appeal to the superior morality of rural people. For my participants, the
conventional version and at least four new ones become available. They
include the appropriative use of the concept of suzhi for boundary work,
the combative boundary work of dismissing “foreigner guests,”the
friendly boundary work of relating to “foreigner models,”and the adroit
boundary work of posing as gatekeepers of a prestigious cathedral of con-
sumption. A variety of versions can similarly be found in my participants’
boundary work of reclassification. My participants have reclassified them-
selves as fashion-esthetically superior to wealthy middle-aged customers,
as more culturally globalized than the average urban customer, and as
powerful gatekeepers of a cathedral of consumption. My participants also
perform three versions of normative inversion. They involve inverting the
established suzhi hierarchy between urbanites and rural migrants, the
SUMMER 2019 21
conventional dichotomy between provincial rural migrants and globalized
urbanites, and the social status hierarchy between middle-class white peo-
ple and working-class Chinese (in the case of “foreigner guests”).
How meaningful my findings are depends on three issues: the generaliz-
ability of my data, the success of the new boundary work in remaking
rural-urban symbolic boundaries, and the potential of the boundary
remaking for social change. I have already discussed the first issue and
show that my data are generalizable to a considerable and increasing num-
ber of rural migrants. The exact extent to which the new boundary work
successfully remake rural-urban symbolic boundaries is not completely
knowable from this study’s data, as I explained in the methods section.
Despite this, this study has established that rural-urban symbolic bounda-
ries are successfully undermined in some rural migrants’minds. This
undermining is remarkable and not merely culturalist. Personal assimila-
tion—seen by current studies as the major type of boundary work of rural
migrants in China, Turkey, and elsewhere—do not undermine rural-urban
symbolic boundaries in rural migrants’minds. On the contrary, it reinfor-
ces them. The new boundary work reveals rural migrants’agency and its
potential for social change. The third issue is a metatheoretical one and
difficult to resolve. As discussed in the theory and methods sections, schol-
ars who do not endorse culture approaches to studying society would pre-
fer very strict criteria for judging whether symbolic boundary remaking
qualifies as social change. Scholars sympathetic to culture approaches to
studying society would recognize boundary remaking as a challenge
against established cultural structure and view cultural structure as an
integral part of social structure.
Funding
This work was supported by the General Research Fund [241813], University
Grants Committee, Hong Kong SAR .
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About the Author
Matthew M. Chew (mmtchew@hkbu.edu.hk) is an associate professor at the
Sociology Department of Hong Kong Baptist University in Hong Kong. His
research interests include social theory, cultural sociology, sociology of con-
sumption, media sociology, and sociology of knowledge. He has published
numerous articles in the following journals: Current Sociology,International
Sociology,The China Quarterly, and New Media and Society.
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