Between exception and rule

Abstract

This article challenges the all-too-common assumption in the literature on Vietnam that Ho Chi Minh City's political economy has evolved differently from the rest of the country since the economic reforms of the late 1980s. Questioning the association of Ho Chi Minh City with reform, the article charts the rise of new state business interests and the growth of the “gatekeeping” state in the city during the 1990s, as party-state institutions moved to exploit new opportunities that emerged with the dismantling of the central plan and the growth of the market economy. In light of this characterization, the article argues that rather than seeing the city as set apart from the rest of Vietnam we can speak of a “common reform political economy.” If correct, this position casts doubt on existing literature, which commonly explains Ho Chi Minh City's supposedly distinctive evolution under reform with reference to its unique pre-1975 history, especially the period from 1954 to 1975 when the country was divided along the seventeenth parallel. Asking how we might marry the fact ofHoChi Minh City's distinctive history with the reality of its un-distinctive evolution under reform, the article concludes by calling for a rethink not only of the legacy of 1954-75 for Ho Chi Minh City's latter-day development but also of the way in which the city's shorter period under central planning nevertheless left its mark.     

CITY OF GHOSTS

This article links motorbike use with the work and living conditions of young migrant women in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) to highlight an example of the social and economic consequences of migration-assisted economic development in Southeast Asia. It traces a woman's life from her teenage years in the market of a small seaside town in Vietnam to her purchase of a motorbike, migration to HCMC, move into a rooming house, and work in a major department store as a cosmetics saleswoman. The reflections on urban life by the woman and her roommates lead the author to consider the notion that the condition of the unregistered and temporary migrant is like that of the unrequited wandering ghosts (co hon), which are said to invisibly roam the city's streets. While the author details the political economy of marginalization that situates the migrant saleswoman, he also shows how she struggles within it to constitute herself over time rather than in the present and to free herself from abstraction-producing social categories, both old and new.     

Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta: Discourse and Narratives about Work as Sites of Struggle

ABSTRACT

With the introduction of capitalist labor relations into China certain attitudes, competencies, and values associated with global capitalism seem to be increasingly valorized. This article analyzes the values and principles ascribed to migrant workers as part of practices linked to modes of government. The author confronts the dominant form of cultural construction of migrant workers through the Shenzhen official press with migrant workers' own narratives about their experience of work (dagong) in the city as the narratives are mediated through two different sites, namely, participant observation, interviews with rural migrants, and a body of unpublished letters to the editor acquired from several magazines dedicated to migrant workers. The article sheds light on the ways in which migrant workers' narratives confirm or, on the contrary, contest the pivotal elements of the hegemonic construction. Three different narratives that migrant workers produce about their own lives and about Shenzhen are examined. These narratives range from affirmations of dominant discourses about migrant workers and expressions of disillusionment about such discourses, to strategic uses of dominant discourses to justify the claims made by migrant workers.     

‘I came naïve from the village’: on Palestinian urbanism and ruralism in Haifa under the British Mandate

ABSTRACT

During the Mandate period (1920–1948), Haifa attracted thousands of Palestinian rural migrants, who constituted a significant portion of its Arab population. The article examines the experience of rural migrants in urban life and the influence of this social group on urban society. I argue that rural migrants contributed to Haifa’s economic development, participated in political and cultural activity and formed a connecting link between the city and their villages of origin. Rural migrants played a significant role as agents of change in Palestinian society, owing to the conjunction of rural and urban characteristics in their daily life. To demonstrate this, I focus on three arenas of their agency: the labour market, civil society and militias during the Arab Revolt. Their involvement in civil associations and in the Arab Revolt was central to their construction of modernity, and they disseminated it in widening circles in their villages of origin and among their acquaintances in the city.     

‘Only by learning how to live together differently can we live together at all’: readability and legibility of Central Asian migrants’ presence in urban Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper questions the effectiveness and usefulness of the Russian government's policies of migrant integration. Using a unique combination of ethnographic research methods (observations, interviews and survey) with methods from psychology (cognitive mapping) and urban studies (GIS mapping), I depict the presence of Central Asian migrants and their interaction with local long-term residents in two cities of the Russian Federation: Kazan and Saint Petersburg. On the basis of my findings, I argue that the readability (defined as the ease with which the city can be ‘read’ and understood) and legibility (defined as the degree to which individual components of an urban environment are recognizable by their appearance) of urban space in Kazan have positive effects on the relationship between these two communities, while the ambiguity and uncertainty of urban identity in Saint Petersburg make the life of migrants very vulnerable and unpredictable, and result in the growth of xenophobic views among the local residents. This allows me to argue that the policy of migrant integration will be more successful if it is built on learning to live with differences, instead of trying to ‘Russify’ migrants or create various forms of supra-ethnic identity.     

越南的伊斯兰教

越南穆斯林以占族人为主,主要分布在南方的胡志明市、西宁省和安江市,人数约10万。越南伊斯兰教经阿拉伯和波斯商人传入,后受马来人影响较大。占族人与他族的族群差异以及越南政府的民族同化和宗教歧视政策造成族群偏见和越南穆斯林同伊斯兰世界的隔离,导致越南穆斯林在宗教知识与实践、信仰传承、文化教育、机构团体、社会融入等方面存在着诸多困难。其处境亟待越南政府的理解和支持,以及穆斯林世界的帮助。     

From the workplace to the household: migrant labor and accumulation without dispossession

Working class studies on China commonly use the lens of proletarianization to understand class formation among peasant workers who move into cities to work in China’s manufacturing sector. However, in the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, proletarianization is an increasingly fading possibility for the Chinese peasantry, as urban labor markets remain saturated. Instead of peasants being transformed into proletariats, new patterns of class formation have emerged, where the interconnections between agrarian and urban remain central to peasant-workers living without dispossession. The Marxist feminist centering of practices and social arrangements of social reproduction, i.e. workforce maintenance, provides a welcome point of departure for redrawing some of our class maps in the shadow of the 2008 global economic crisis. This contribution draws on multi-sited ethnographic research among migrant workers toiling in the petty-commodity workplaces of Kunming, and in the adjacent countryside of Yunnan Province, to document the fluid class formation among families living on labor’s frontier. Through examining different experiences of workforce reproduction for families and migrant laborers as they move in and out of the workforce and household self-provisioning for subsistence, alternative imaginations for the possibilities of subsistence autonomy emerge.     

DISPLACEMENT,RESETTLEMENT, AND MULTI-LOCAL LIVELIHOODS

This article examines shifting attitudes toward rural migrants in Lampung Province, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, in the context of a history of enclosure, commercial expansion, and dispossession. The author examines how contemporary multi-local livelihoods in Lampung reflect an adaptation to the vulnerabilities associated with being a migrant, as people position themselves to qualify for livelihood resources. The author's interpretation draws on Michel Foucault's analysis of the production of governable subjects and, in particular, norms of conduct that produce subjectivities and identities that “fit.” The article explores how different policy phases associated with environmental governance in Lampung have created contrasting positionings and norms of conduct for migrants, as they have been defined, on the one hand, as pioneer entrepreneurs, bringing progress to Indonesia's hinterland, and, on the other, as forest squatters, threatening the cultural and ecological integrity of the province. The author suggests that rural migrants have attempted to resolve their problematic positioning through multi-local livelihoods, which combine access to nonlocal income through temporary migration with the maintenance of a foothold that signals belonging and legitimate entitlement to state resources.     

UNDOCUMENTED INDONESIAN WORKERS IN MACAU

Presenting new research findings on undocumented Indonesian migrant workers in Macau, this article explicates the dovetailing arrangements between public and private sector interests that are systemically creating undocumented labor migration flows. It then shows how these arrangements are structurally inherent in the mutual competitiveness of globalizing nodes of wealth creation. Undocumented migration cheapens production costs and results in a flexible black market of vulnerable, right-less, and exploited workers. Contrary to illusions of an urbanizing Asia with expanding spaces for civil liberties, the development of globally competitive megacities, built and supported by low-skilled migrant workers, rests on a global underclass of transient workers who bear the human costs of transience and labor flexibility, enabling megacities to externalize such costs and enhance their global competitiveness. The article analyzes the vulnerabilities of undocumented Indonesian workers in the context of Macau's rapid economic development as an aspiring megacity The Macau government's laissez-faire tolerance of such workers is grounded in its need for human labor that is abundant, cheap, marginal, and disposable. The flow of Indonesian migrant workers into Macau is linked to Hong Kong's exclusionary immigration policies, which aim at extricating surplus migrant labor. Meanwhile, the Indonesian government refuses responsibility for its migrant workers in Macau because Macau is not recognized as an official destination. The article shows how public and private interests motivate increasing numbers of migrants to become undocumented overstayers in Macau, as they try to avoid oppressive practices in labor migration from Indonesia and the exclusionary policies of Hong Kong.     

Keeping labour mobility informal: the lack of legality of Central Asian migrants in Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan's legal–regulatory framework provides for a small number of quotas for highly skilled foreign workers but has no provisions for legal employment of semi-skilled or low-skilled migrants from the Central Asian states, who enter under the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) visa-free regime and work informally in construction, household and service sectors. The lack of acknowledgement of the scale of informal labour migration has denoted an act of strategic neglect on the part of the state, allowing it to render migrant labour illegal, disposable, and keep migrants legally and statistically invisible. Unable to obtain a legal status, migrants nominally comply with the existing legal framework as they also circumvent and subvert it. The article details the entrenched informal regime of labour migration and explains why recent efforts to ‘legalize’ labour through the introduction of a labour patent (licence), as is the case in Russia, are unlikely to bring in significant reforms.     

Street-level Politics: Labour Protests in Post-authoritarian Indonesia

This article discusses the promotion of economic “reintegration” programs among migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. The programs include training migrants in savings and investment, business planning and entrepreneurship, with the immediate aim of helping them to achieve some steady income as an alternative to continued working overseas, and the longer-term objective of channelling migrant savings into national economic development “back home.” The reintegration programs are analysed in the context of hegemonic neo-liberal or popular capitalism, which inter alia, encourages the transformation of citizens with rights into entrepreneurs who can be held responsible for their own failures. It argues that such programs discipline rather than liberate migrant workers and that despite good intentions on the part of progressive non-government organisations (NGOs), represent individualistic solutions to structural problems which may undermine campaigns like the campaign for the rights of migrant workers and their families.     

Unsettling Narratives: Overcoming Prejudices in the Hostel Stories Project

ABSTRACT

In 1988, Jock Collins boldly suggested that Australia’s earlier migrant arrivals, the subject of prejudice themselves, often become the perpetrators of prejudice. Indeed, as we collect oral histories from post-war migrants, we are regularly confronted with angry statements such as “asylum seekers are just let in and given everything”. What lies at the heart of this phenomenon? Clearly, prejudice and stereotyping exists in all societies but seems to be particularly evident in societies where an ongoing flow of migrants continues to change and alter the ethnic and racial mix. This article reflects upon research conducted in the Hostel Stories project, where we frequently were confronted with stereotyped, prejudicial, and even racist comments about other migrants and refugees during interviews with migrants. These statements made us ask whether Collins was correct in his observations. Drawing on the literature from various disciplines, we consider various influences on migrant attitudes towards other migrants. We propose that it is critical to continue to progress beyond the conventional topics explored in migration studies and ask difficult questions in order to contribute to a growing global discussion on ethnicity and intergroup relations, especially in relation to prejudice and racism.     

Book Reviews

This article examines East European migrants’ relationships with other communities in the context of waged work through in-depth interviews with recent Polish and Lithuanian migrants to London. These migrants found themselves newly surrounded by greater racial and ethnic diversity. By distinguishing themselves from other workers on the basis of skin color and legal status, they present themselves as members of the host country's ‘white’ majority, which places them in a position of power in relation to other migrant groups in London.     

Vietnam’s and China’s Diverging Industrial Relations Systems: Cases of Path Dependency

ABSTRACT

This article explains why Vietnam and China, one-party states that allow only one official trade union, are traversing different paths in their trade unions’ institutional structures, the state’s and trade union’s attitudes towards strikes, their willingness to allow independent trade unions and willingness to engage with the international labour union movement. These will be examined in terms of the path dependency of their recent histories, in which changes have been incremental on a path laid down by pre-existing entrenched institutions, until each national system no longer operated properly and new contingencies obliged the leadership to revamp the system. As a consequence of China’s and Vietnam’s divergent path dependencies, when external contingencies finally forced institutional change, countries have veered onto divergent trajectories – the Trans-Pacific Partnership energising Vietnam to debate the acceptance of autonomous trade unions, while Xi Jinping in China has intensified Party control over industrial relations.     

Avoidance and appropriation in Bishkek: dealing with time,space and urbanity in Kyrgyzstan's capital

ABSTRACT

Much has changed since Frunze was renamed Bishkek in 1991 and became the capital of independent Kyrgyzstan. Though it was once considered to be among the ‘greenest’ and most ‘orderly’ cities of the Soviet Union, today many of its long-term residents complain about the new settlements (novostroiki) that have emerged during the last two decades. To Bishkek's urbanites, the recent arrival of migrants is not associated with an escape from rural poverty and a rightful struggle for civic rights, but indicates a massive cultural and aesthetic degradation of familiar urban life. In this article, beyond contesting narratives of cosmopolitan nostalgia vs. legitimate belonging, I investigate how urban practitioners in fact produce and deal with different spaces in the city. My ethnographic accounts not only identify social avoidance as an essential pulse of Bishkek's current rhythm, but also illustrate that after a period of post-rural socialization previously stigmatized migrants may manage to smoothly blend into urban spatial flows and lifestyles.     

Worse Than a Monolith: Disorganization and Rivalry within Asian Communist Alliances and U.S. Containment Challenges, 1949–69

Abstract

This article makes the counterintuitive argument that in the first two decades of the Cold War the communist alliance in East Asia was easiest for the United States and its allies to contain through coercive diplomacy during the period in which the communist alliance was most cohesive and unified under Soviet leadership (1954–57). With a focus on the Korean War and two Indochina Wars, this article shows how internal problems in the communist alliance significantly complicated the containment of communism. In the formative years of the East Asian communist alliances (1950–53), the alliance’s lack of organization and cohesion made it more difficult for anti-communist forces in the region to deter communist expansion and to control escalation of wars once they started. Between 1958–69, internal rivalry for leadership in the communist alliance made containment of the alliance particularly difficult for the United States and its allies. Until the Chinese and Soviet communists actually turned their guns on each other in early 1969, the Sino-Soviet rivalry for leadership of the international communist movement in the 1960s only served to increase the expansionist fervor of the communist movement as a whole, make peace agreements with anti-communist forces in the region more difficult, and maximize the amount of military assistance local revolutionaries, like Ho Chi Minh, received from both Moscow and Beijing.     

The existentialities of Ethiopian and Nigerian migrants in South Africa

Many studies on international migrations have concentrated on South-North migrations, causes and consequences of such migrations, sending and receiving countries and characteristics of migrants’ interfaces. there is much less scholarly work on South-South migrations, and academic and policy works on wider Africans’ migrations into South Africa are particularly scarce. even among the very few existing studies on South-South migrations, very few account for migrants’ existentialities in South Africa – a nation experiencing the largest scale migrations in Africa and strategising to cope with associated issues, especially among the hard-to-reach migrant communities. This article therefore, examines the ramifications of experiences and existences or existentialities of ethiopian and Nigerian immigrants in South Africa as crucial case study for the growth of pan-Africanism. the approach adopted for this article is transnational systematic interactions and observations in Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa. Secondary sources from unclassified documents, scholarly journals, reports and reliable Internet sources were utilised. The findings suggest the need for more robust, inclusive and dynamic social/migration policies in South Africa, as well as other southern nations experiencing high immigration. the argument is that the receiving nations of migrants must pay more attention to objective and comprehensive understanding of migrants and migrant communities to sustainably appropriate migration’s gains and to ameliorate unintended migration consequences.     

Migrant labor at ASIAD '82 construction sites in New Delhi

Abstract

Throughout India the scale of migrant labor is reaching alarming proportions. Apart from the spontaneous migration of essentially free labor from impoverished rural areas to urban centers, there exists a deliberately planned migration of bonded or semi-bonded labor over distances ranging from 200 to over 2000 kilometers. With the rising demand for labor in the oil-rich countries of the Persian-Arabian Gulf, labor migration in India has also taken on international dimensions.     

The prostitute

Migrant domestic workers rarely take part in — let alone organize — public protests in the countries where they work. Public protests are virtually unheard of among migrant domestic workers in Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, and especially in the Middle East and the Gulf States. Over the past decade and a half, however, migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong — mostly Filipinas and Indonesian women — have become highly active, organizing and participating in political protests. Hong Kong's migrant domestic workers protest in a place where they are guest workers and temporary migrants, denied the opportunity of becoming legal citizens or permanent residents. Increasingly, these workers, their grassroots activist organizations, and the nongovernmental organizations with which they are affiliated frame their concerns in terms of global, transnational, and human rights, not merely local migrant worker rights. This article takes the “Consulate Hopping Protest and Hall of Shame Awards” event — part of the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Hong Kong in 2005 — as an ethnographic example of domestic worker protest and as an entrée through which to ask what it is about Hong Kong and about the position of women migrant workers — whose mobility and voice is both a product and a symptom of globalization — that literally permits public protests and shapes their form and content. The article illustrates how migrant workers’ protests and activism have been shaped by domestic worker subjectivities, by the dynamics of inter-ethnic worker affiliations, and by the sociohistorical context of Hong Kong as a post-colonial “global city” and a “neoliberal space of exception.”     

Educational infrastructure created in conditions of social exclusion: ‘Kyrgyz clubs’ for migrant children in Moscow

ABSTRACT

This article demonstrates how social exclusion affects the strategies that migrants and their children experience vis-à-vis the preschool education system of the host society. We use the example of two private institutions established in Moscow by Kyrgyz migrants to explore their role in helping integrate migrant children into the host society. I examine the role the Kyrgyz community plays in the life of labour migrants in Moscow, and why private migrant infrastructure is created today by people from this particular country, though eventually migrants from other countries use it as well. I find that in recent years migrants have been creating private infrastructure in Russia as an alternative to the public one. It replaces state institutions for migrants that are not accessible to them. Migrants also view it as one of the channels for entering the Russian society and state institutions. These centres do not so much help migrants’ children escape social isolation as compensate for the lack of adjustment programmes in Russian schools.