Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) (27 page)

6
. This parallels the bipolarization of the work force in Japan as discussed by Arai (
Chapter Seven
in this volume) and is arguably causally connected to the phenomenon of Chinese society as “pyramidal” in structure (see Ren,
Chapter One
in this volume) as Japanese and Taiwanese corporations seek sources of cheap labor on the Chinese mainland.

7
. The difference between individualism and conformity in the United States can be chalked up to differences between collective endeavors and individual ones—in particular consumption; it is in consuming practices where people generally have the broadest scope of choices (Borgmann 1984: 140). In Taiwan, there is a similar division.

8
. For example, in the state telecommunications industry that I studied in the 1990s, the difference in pay between an average engineer and a local general manager was only US$2,000 to US$3,000 per month (Pazderic 1999: 83–120).

9
. For a discussion of how this value system in its contemporary institutionalization affects the production of academic knowledge at Taiwan’s leading national research institute, see Chun 2000.

10
. As recently as May 2006, the deputy minister of the National Science Council was indicted on corruption charges, to provide but one example (Ex-Science Council Deputy Minister Indicted for Graft 2006).

11
. The history of population control in Taiwan can explain the shrinking student base for these new educational institutions. Although space constraints do not allow a full treatment, it should be noted that the population policies in Taiwan have been as influenced by Cold War politics as economics. Once acclaimed for its success in the 1960s and 1970s for implementing fertility limitation as a strategy of development, Taiwan is now facing a population implosion. Presently, the Taiwanese government seeks to increase the population of the island for its political purposes. The irony, of course, is that Taiwan’s population would rise very quickly if the labor imported to produce success were allowed to remain and reproduce. Instead, Taiwan pursues neoliberal globalization through the production of human capital for its postindustrial economic future alongside off-shoring industrial labor elsewhere and importing a temporary workforce for low-skilled jobs at home.

12
. See Song (
Chapter Ten
in this volume) for a discussion of the relative privileged labor status of PhD students in government responses to the IMF crisis in South Korea.

13
. See 1111 Manpower Bank 2006, 2007.

14
. Other problems of proper scientific investigation implicit in the student evaluation process include lack of reliability checking, lack of multiple scales to measure latent variables, validity (are questions understood as they are meant to be understood?), and descriptive statistics (including the problem of normal distribution).

Chapter
Six

“What If Your Client/Employer Treats Her Dog Better Than She Treats You?”

Market Militarism and Market Humanism in Postsocialist Beijing

YAN HAIRONG

In May 2002, the Beijing Fuping Professional Training School opened in a suburb of Beijing. As a private boarding school for training rural young women as domestics for urban households, Fuping appeared to fill an unmet need. State-funded professional training schools are part of the system of formal education. They parallel junior or senior high school education, with programs lasting several years. Workers in state-owned enterprises or other formal sectors have formal apprenticeships. Migrant workers, however, often learn their skills on the job. New migrant domestic workers are sometimes given a brief “training” by recruitment agencies, which may take from thirty minutes to a couple of hours of lectures on labor discipline. Fuping offers a dozen or so courses in its month-long training program and has pioneered a new style of training with private initiatives.

It was not long before both domestic and international media picked up the story.
1
Less than twenty years before, the establishment of the first government-affiliated company to recruit rural women as domestics for Beijing households had still faced some uncertainty about the ideological correctness of this business for a country with a socialist heritage. Since then, many private recruitment agencies have mushroomed. In 2002, the newsworthiness of the Fuping story was in its being a private training school and the brainchild of two eminent economists, Mao Yushi and Tang Min. In 1999 Mao had
stepped
down as director of Unirule Economic Research Institute (Tianze jingji yanjiusuo), a nongovernmental think tank, a post he had assumed after retiring from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. With connections to the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., he is a self-proclaimed supporter of the neoliberal economics of Friedrich Hayek. Unirule has produced economists influential in Beijing policy circles. Tang Min, Mao’s former student, was the chief economist of the Asian Development Bank.

Fuping
is a play on words for the Chinese phrase meaning “poverty alleviation.” Accordingly, on entering the school’s main office building, one would see the publicity board:

Renowned economist Professor Mao Yushi, Dr. Tang Min, the Chinese chief economist in Asia Development Bank, and other well-known figures, taking upon themselves the task of social development, established the nonprofit Beijing Fuping Professional Training School and Beijing Fuping Domestic Service Center in 2002. By providing professional training and creating job opportunities, they hope to contribute their own meager strength to help the urban and rural
ruoshi qunti
[literally, “weak-powered groups”] to gain employment and set themselves on the path of development. At the same time, the [provision of] professional and standard domestic service and community service will enable urban residents, who have the means and the need, to attain a higher quality of life.

Tuition: 700 Yuan [just under US$90]

Qualifications for Recruitment:

(1) Age 17–40. Female, with a height above 1.55 meters. In good health and able to speak and understand Mandarin.

(2) Have full documentation (ID card, health exam card, marriage-fertility card, migrant work permit, and academic diploma).

The Fuping School is nonprofit in the sense that the proceeds do not accrue to shareholders but are reinvested in the operation and expansion of the school. The required academic qualifications for enrollment were not specified, but most of the trainees have a junior or senior high school education. Located on the grounds of a former driving school, it has a spacious campus with classrooms, dorm rooms, a cafeteria, and even a sports field. Classes begin with the sound of an electric bell. Trainees, mostly in their teens or early twenties, wear pink uniforms and address the staff as “teacher” (
laoshi
).

At
the beginning, Fuping operated strictly as a private institution following market principles. The school initially tried to recruit trainees from among urban laid-off workers, graduates from junior high vocational schools, and rural women. This private model of recruitment proved unsuccessful, bringing in fewer than 200 recruits in seven months. Mao revealed to me that potential trainees tended to distrust institutions that lacked government support. With too few recruits and some not being able to afford the tuition, the school found it difficult to survive. Fuping revised its strategy by entering into a partnership with the Anhui Provincial Government’s Poverty-Alleviation Department. This affiliation ensures a supply of 2,000 trainees a year and an allocation from the local government’s poverty-alleviation fund to cover half of the tuition for each trainee. The other half is deducted through installments from trainees’ wages once they are employed. With the assistance of the Central Government Poverty-Alleviation Department, the partnership has quickly expanded to other provinces. Graduates of the school are channeled into the domestic service labor market in Beijing. This practice of “a private establishment with /files/19/61/f1961/public/government assistance” (
min ban gong/guan zhu
) is now stylized as the Fuping model. Since its establishment, mainstream media and researchers have expressed only praise and support for Fuping and Mao Yushi. In the story of the school’s development, however, we can see very clearly how Mao’s utopian vision of the private sector providing training and jobs had to be adjusted to the complexly sedimented history of postsocialist China. The partnership is telling in several ways: It speaks volumes about popular distrust of the market in an environment where there is little regulation or protection from state oversight; it also suggests the historical paradox on which this neoliberal project rests, in which the state is both the legitimating power but also the constraint against which neoliberalism constructs its project.

Nonetheless, the idea behind this partnership is the commodification of labor power. China’s Mao-era (1949–1976) state ideology valued workers and peasants as the political foundation, with manual labor as an important basis for class identity. By way of contrast, an institution such as Fuping trains migrant women to embody a new ideal of what it means to be a proper worker in postsocialist China. Neoliberalism, promoted as a global hegemonic ideology since the Thatcher-Reagan era, has become embedded in labor relations reform in China, creating a discourse of self-enterprising individuals
as
millions of urban workers are laid off and millions of rural migrants are brought into urban areas as the informal workforce.
2
The case of Fuping demonstrates the deployment of neoliberalism as a pedagogical process that teaches trainees how to understand their labor in a rapidly marketizing and stratifying society. This should be seen as a project of social engineering producing new kinds of worker-subjects. In this regard, the production of domestic labor is a process parallel to the self-making practices of the middle class explored by Hai Ren in
Chapter One
of this volume. The restructuring of the postsocialist economy requires an integral “restructuring” of the worker’s subjectivity.

This chapter is based on several trips I made to the school in 2005 and my interviews with Mao Yushi and some of the school teachers. However, my analysis is also grounded on my research on domestic service first begun in 1998. My interactions with trainees were limited to conversations with them during the breaks, but some of the comments made by Mao and the teachers I interviewed reveal how some trainees have reacted to the training. Liberal intellectuals, such as Fuping’s founders, view migrant workers as a “weak-powered group” (
ruoshi qunti
). Intellectuals, media, and nongovernmental organizations latch on this term to voice their concerns about justice, social cohesion, and development in the context of growing inequality and instability. But what role of mediation and representation do these actors take on themselves in using this term? What might be the limits embedded in the invocation and mobilization of this term? Is not empowerment a governance technology? How is it that the problem is seen as one of reforming the consciousness or the capacity of the worker rather than one of the economic system itself?

The Logic of Equivalence: Potatoes, Pork, and Trainees

Let’s visit the school to observe how trainees are taught about their relationship with their employers. It is instructive to note here that one of the first lessons is a shift in language. Students must discard their customary use of the term “employer” (
guzhu
) for the school’s term “client” (
kehu
). This apparently insignificant substitution is nonetheless loaded with significance. This language form becomes the sign of the worker’s “professionalization”
and
also of her “empowerment” as a sovereign subject who is a service provider. It registers her service as a commodity form severed from any association with a master–servant relationship. Just as the concept of human capital is invested with the notion of the worker as his or her “own capitalist,” so the domestic worker becomes an entrepreneur. The class relation is thus made invisible in language.

At the time of my visit, there were about fifty trainees in the school. Sometimes a class has as many as 100. Courses include cleaning, cooking, ironing, caregiving, and babysitting. The program ends with an intensive preparation for job seeking and a practice job interview. During training, trainees rise at 6 a.m. to receive one hour of military-style physical training prior to attending eight to ten hours of class a day (including weekends). In the evenings, they watch television until lights go off at 10 p.m. But even their evening leisure relates to their training, as we will see in the following discussion. The military training, supervised by two ex-soldiers, consists of disciplined line formation, running, and group exercise. When I expressed surprise at this, Teacher Lu explained, “Because clients have various demands, the school’s training strategy is to extend our battle line (
lachang zhanxian
) and enhance trainees’ adaptability for all situations.”

The class that prepares trainees for upcoming job interviews was taught by an experienced Teacher Yin. The class I visited had more than forty students from Shaanxi Province. In this session, Yin was to go through the list of “do’s and don’ts” each student had learned as part of their curriculum. In noting the possibility of two different job options for them—domestic work plus either childcare or eldercare, she instructed, “You cannot be picky. You cannot say ‘I just want to take care of babies’ or ‘I just want to look after the elderly.’ If you are picky, then you will have fewer employment opportunities.” According to the guideline, trainees must sign a one-year contract with their clients. “You are obliged to honor the contract and cannot leave at will. Otherwise, you will have to bear all the consequences. Do you have any objections?” Yin did not specify what these consequences might be; however, the threat of reduced employability enunciated just a moment before still lingered, and the trainees seemed to understand. They answered in a chorus, “No.”