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Abstract

Rural-to-urban migration in China has profoundly reshaped Chinese society since 1979, resulting in separated families, so-called “left-behind children,” and socio-economic inequalities as part and parcel of the migration process. This paper examines the impact of rural-to-urban migration by focusing on the experiences of migrant women belonging to the Muslim (Tatar/Hui) community in Jinan, Shandong province of China. Despite the relaxation in restrictions on migration in the post-reform era, migrants—especially women migrants—face persistent legal and emotional challenges. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyses the experiences of eight migrant women employed in formal, semi-formal, and informal work sectors. These in-depth interviews are foregrounded in an intersectional framework to analyse how differentiated forms of precarity and bargaining are produced across the planes of gender, state, religion, ethnicity, age, and class. The case studies demonstrate how migration has resulted in liminal and stretched households and redistributed the caregiving burden among the elderly in the village. Despite the fact that these migrant women are wage earners, the redistributed care burden across the generations has led to intense emotional and economic burdens on migrant women in cities. This research also demonstrates the role of religious and ethnic networks that function both as welfare substitutes for the state and as moral agencies that shape women’s mobility and social legitimacy. The paper demonstrates the concept of “differentiated urban citizenship” and advocates for care-sensitive and equitable labour policies to address the problems of migrant women in rapidly urbanizing societies like China.

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