Guerrilla Workfare: Migrant Renovators, State Power, and Informal Work in Urban China

The article explores Chinese rural migrants’ perspective on work and their relations with each other and with the Chinese state by drawing upon the ethnographical study of a group of rural home renovators in Beijing in the 1990s. The rural renovators were dubbed “guerrilla” workers because of their physical mobility, irregular employment, and unregistered status. After considering the novelty of guerrilla workfare in China, the article demonstrates the bifurcation of migrants’ social networks along the lines of work and everyday association, locates the politics of worker-state interaction at the place of their everyday living, and explores their understanding of work that is remarkably devoid of nostalgia for state socialism.