Caring Enough to Act Migrant Women's Community Organizing and the Culture of Working-Class Feminist Solidarity in Neoliberal Shenzhen, China

This dissertation delivers a timely scholarly conversation on differently imagined grassroots feminist politics in a non-Western neoliberal authoritarian context. The project pivots on a central inquiry: how do Chinese rural migrant women, whose lifetimes are cast under the shadows of “Made in China” global production and punctuated by multiple concurrent neoliberal crises, collectively give birth to community power for radical livability? Drawing from extensive ethnographic fieldnotes, six oral history interviews, and archival studies, the dissertation employs community-based participatory action research to document and advance community organizing efforts by Green Rose (hence GR), a migrant women-led grassroots collective in Shenzhen. Set against the historical backdrop of China’s post-socialist reform when South China emerged as the world’s factory for manufacturing globalization, my study traces the trajectories in which a group of migrant women, upon gaining exposure to transnational labor NGO activism in the early 2000s, asserted collective power at the frontline for intersectional gender and class struggles. In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, when economic downturns and welfare austerity measures entangled with the resurgence of state authoritarianism targeting civic actions, GR women temporarily transitioned to guerrilla activism to bring emancipatory cultural organizing and mutual aid into the social arena of a precarious migrant neighborhood. To survive welfare segregation and economic-political contingencies, GR women tactically established a social work service NGO to translate their depoliticized service labor into radical actions. They animate a sisterhood kinship system to liberate individual care capacity from the privatized household; they reorganize people, spaces, and resources to build a care safety net for all. By foregrounding migrant women as political protagonists in China’s precarious and fragmented civic landscape, my study problematizes both male-dominant labor politics embraced by orthodox Marxist scholars and the mainstream feminist movement sponsored by urban middle-class feminists, all the while exposing the state censorship that attempts and yet fails to erase the history of the marginalized gendered collective.