Young and Restless in China: The Rise of a New Generation of Migrant Workers

The Moynihan Institute's East Asia Program presents Xiaoshuo Hou from Skidmore College.

At a time when the gig economy and precarious labor is on the rise on a global scale, what happens to the largest work force in the world? This talk explores both the institutional and the individual processes that lead to an increase in informal employment and the clustering of day laborers—predominantly male born in the 1990s—in major cities in China such as Shenzhen.

In this talk, Professor Hou draws on her ethnographic studies of two of those communities and shares the experiences of a new generation of rural-to-urban migrant workers who are concurrently facing the normalization of migration, the rising costs of living in urban cities, the slowdown of China’s economic growth, the stagnation of social mobility, the penetration of the social media, and the proliferation of a consumerist and sexualized culture.

Xiaoshuo Hou is professor of sociology and Asian studies at Skidmore College where she held the inaugural Frances Young Tang ’61 Chair in Chinese Studies and is currently the chair of the Department of Sociology. She is the author of Community Capitalism in China: The State, the Market, and Collectivism (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Young and Restless in China: Informal Economy, Gender, and the Precariat (Cambridge University Press, 2024). She is also the co-editor of The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism (2016) and The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (2020).