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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
189022
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| Summary/Abstract |
China is considered to be the biggest beneficiary of globalization, as evidenced by the growing volume and diversity of people, goods, and information moving across its borders. However, the increase in scholarly attention on China’s borderlands that is warranted by such economic, social, and political activities is absent. This special issue of China Information is committed to new research that addresses mounting challenges facing studies on China’s borderlands, as well as borderland studies in general. This special issue presents the work of emerging scholars who investigate cross-border migration and the key characteristics of China’s borderlands, focusing on previously understudied places that were out of the reach of scholars for years. These studies offer a lens through which the socio-economic and politico-institutional changes in China’s borderlands can be understood within the broader context of China’s time-compressed global rise. A cursory glance at the research topics may give the impression that this special issue appears to investigate migratory phenomena in geographically remote places on the peripheries of the country. However, we suggest that China’s rise is inseparable from, and critical to, a variety of complex phenomena that should be scrutinized and re-evaluated respectively in each contribution to this special issue. As areas experiencing rapid changes, China’s borderlands are the sites of a multitude of processes embedded in the social transformation which affects the country’s borderlands as much as its coastal regions.
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| 2 |
ID:
189026
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| Summary/Abstract |
We investigate the labour regime of an agricultural sector in the China–Myanmar borderland. The extant literature on labour generally stresses the hyper-precarity of workers, especially migrant workers. Our case study of the sugar cane cutting industry in Dragon Village, Yunnan Province, suggests that contractors who hire workers from Myanmar are also in a state of hyper-precarity which is shaped by multiple layers of socio-economic and politico-institutional circumstances. We develop an analytic framework for investigating transnational labour contractor regimes, which highlights the strategies jointly adopted by contractors and workers to mitigate the hyper-precarity within which both parties are embedded. We find that contractors are in a hyper-precarious position due to limited micro-level transnational social networks to meet outpaced labour demand, unfavourable meso-level market conditions, and macro-level politico-institutional factors such as the added responsibilities of immigration management, a fast-evolving legal system, and military coups. We also find that contractors adopt strategies to control both workers’ labour process and everyday life, while workers use some counterstrategies to regain agency. Together, they stabilize the labour force for this industry despite their shared hyper-precarity.
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