The Fabric of Care:
Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China
A historically women dominated realm, care work refers to both paid and unpaid labor that attends to our daily subsistence and that takes care of the young, the sick, the disabled, and the elderly. In the global North since the 1970s, middle-class women’s entry into the workplace, population ageing, and the weakening of the welfare state all have contributed to a caring labor market that disproportionally relies on women of color, working-class women, and immigrants. So far, almost all proposals addressing inequalities and injustice in the realm of care speak to the context of liberal democracies, be it enhancing redistributions in the welfare state, upgrading care infrastructures, or counting care work toward a country’s GDP. What about care politics in other social contexts? The Fabric of Care shifts the focus to China and scrutinizes the relationship between care work at the micro level and social change at the macro in this world’s second largest economy under authoritarian rule. Extending the conversation about care politics beyond the global North, my study aims to open up conversations towards justice of care that is truly global.
Based on a case study of textile and iPhone workers in a major industrial city, Zhengzhou, Fabric of Care is the first monograph that examines the century-long social transformation of care work in China. It asks how and why the cultural meaning, value, institutional infrastructure, and social practices of care have changed during the country’s multiple waves of industrialization in the past century, and how industrial workers and local communities negotiated such changes.
Through identifying and comparing four distinct regimes of care, I argue that far from being a personal, and typically feminine, issue confined in the household, “care work” has been a highly contested terrain, subjected to China’s tumultuous political economy from the nationalist industrialization in the early 20th century to the mid-century socialist revolution and its recent capitalist turn. Moreover, rather than passively shaped by macro forces, the politics of care has in turn disrupted or deflected the top-down political and economic programs at different historical moments. Demonstrating the indispensable and constitutive role of care and reproductive labor in industrial accumulation, this book offers a feminist critique of the conventional, masculinist approach to political economy analysis that is blind to gender power-relations. It shows that gender is not an add-on but rather a built-in element in the structure of political economy.
Yige Dong 