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Previous studies of migration, family, and gender in China are lacking in a number of ways—they have prioritized outcome over process and structural principles over emotionality, and they have marginalized conjugality and failed to include men’s voices and subjective experience in the academic literature. This chapter explains how our book departs from previous research in three important respects in order to address these gaps. First, it examines the impact of rural migration on family dynamics and intra-family negotiation processes rather than looking at quantifiable outcomes, as previous studies have done. Second, it specifically considers the emotional dimension of intergenerational dynamics and devotes considerable space to discussing individual agency in conjugal negotiations. Third, it looks at the voices and subjective experiences of male migrant workers and uses peasant men’s experiences and narratives to analyze how migration has transformed the family.

This chapter outlines the specific socio-cultural context of contemporary China at the beginning of the 21st century. To set the stage for the rest of the text, the chapter discusses the reforms of the post-Mao period, the history of the urban–rural divide perpetuated by the hukou (household registration system), and the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration. Though in the mid-1980s rural peasants had engaged in non-farm work, particularly in township and village enterprises (TVEs) as the urban-and eastern-centered economic reforms progressed and as the old apparatuses of state control were broken down, more and more rural residents were compelled to “leave the land.” The chapter emphasizes how shifting ideologies related to gender, class, and place play a pivotal role in shaping rural women's experience, during both the Mao-era planned economy and China's reform-era embrace of markets and global capitalism.

This introductory chapter briefly discusses mobility—one physical and one virtual—in the lives of young rural-to-urban migrant women in China. It provides an ethnographic exploration of the cultural, social, aesthetic, and economic dimensions of mobile phone use by female migrants working in Beijing. Although mobile in the sense of migration from their home villages, their long work hours, rare time off, and confined social world caused them to be relatively immobile in the city. This immobility however was overcome in certain ways by their use of mobile phones for navigating social networks, enjoying forms of entertainment, participating in China's burgeoning consumer culture, and constructing a “modern” self. Drawing on critical/cultural and feminist theories of subjectivity, power, and technology, the chapter theorizes mobile communication and migrant women's becoming in the city, or how social constructions of gender-, class-, age-, and place-based identities produce particular engagements with mobile technologies.

Foundational ‘bounded container’ models of demography do not allow for spillovers or subdivisions, and hence yield misleading statistical means. Four other spatial models are presented; a space of ‘flows’ is preferred because it accounts well for mid‐nineteenth‐century migration in the American North. Men born in different regions within New England, and into rich and poor social classes, entered different migration streams.

This chapter discusses the multiple strategies migrant men have devised to address the incompatibility of migrant life and the obligation to care for one’s elderly parents. Migration makes it difficult for adult sons to fulfil their obligation to physically care for their parents; it also creates a paradoxical family dynamic in which aging grandparents serve as caregivers for their grandchildren, taking on the caring responsibilities that would normally fall to their sons and daughters-in-law. Our findings suggest that migrant men deal with the elderly care gap left by their migration through frequent utterance of the rhetoric of dedicated care, the mobilization of collaborative and crisis-care strategies. They also resolve the discrepancies between their rhetoric of dedicated care and the inadequacy of actual care provided by redefining their obligations as adult sons and attempting to establish a balance between their sometimes conflicting obligations to their extended and nuclear families.

This chapter examines young rural-to-urban migrant women's use of mobile phones for expanding and enriching various types of social relationships. It situates this discussion within Chinese concepts of selfhood and guanxi (relationship) and relates these to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of social capital. One's guanxi networks of personal relations can be thought of as one's local world, made up of relationships categorized into three zones: the “personal core” made up of family members and very close friends; the “reliable zone” consisting of good friends; and the “effective zone,” which is larger and more open and can include all friends, coworkers, relatives, and potentially (but not likely) all fellow villagers. To Bourdieu, one's position both enables and constrains access to social capital, and those who are linked to others who have a large quantity of various forms of capital—money, knowledge, position, prestige—will have an advantage in the “game of society.”

This chapter addresses what is termed “sociogenetic cosmopolitanism,” the dynamic interplay of social and genetic forces underpinning migration and urbanization. The constant movement of people and communities in Peru’s Huallaga River Valley is influenced by the variegated ecosystems of the Amazon, the vagaries of regional labor markets, and the exigencies of sociopolitical life in Peru. Four primary causes of migration in the Huallaga Valley are addressed: (1) environment and political economy, (2) infrastructure, (3) lifeways, and (4) violence and social upheaval. The consequences of modern migration and urbanization in Peruvian Amazonia include a marked transition in biodemography, an increase in genetic diversity markers, and a discernable shift in nucleotide-level population architecture. Profound sociocultural transformations, namely a move from rural and agrarian-based lifeways to urban, market-driven experiences, have accompanied such trends.

This chapter delineates how migration has allowed men to fulfil their provider role and support their children’s growth and development financially. However, migrant fathers often suffer a double emotional burden. Sadness, guilt, anguish, and worry about the prolonged periods of separation from their children is combined with feelings of inadequacy because of their inability to measure up to the urban image of the “good father.” Migrant fathers use four strategies to manage this emotional burden and compensate the children they left behind for their prolonged absence: satisfaction of their children’s material needs, maintenance of contact through mobile telecommunication, a new disciplinary style, and the assumption of a more active role in bringing up their children. The findings refute the stereotype of the cold and distant Chinese patriarch. The diverse strategies provide evidence of these migrant fathers’ agency and the centrality of fatherhood to contemporary Chinese masculinity.

This chapter describes how migration to the city has created novel contexts that make negotiation of housework responsibilities central to conjugal relationships and the definition of masculinity. It identifies four patterns in migrant men’s responses to housework and childcare: extended exemption, strategic avoidance, selective acceptance, and active participation. Some migrant men who take on an equal or majority share of housework attempt to downplay their contribution in the domestic sphere, some have to withstand the ridicule of their peers, and some have to sacrifice their pride and accept a low-status job that allows them to combine work and family responsibilities. For these men, increased participation in domestic work after migration is problematic; they legitimize it through a discourse that locates manhood in a man’s loyalty to his family and responsibility to care for them.

This chapter builds on the notion of immobile mobility and necessary convergence through examining migrant uses of camera phones. For the rural-to-urban migrant women that were interviewed, a camera phone was their first camera. Though many women involved in the initial fieldwork did not have cameras in their phones due to financial reasons, those who did manifested creativity in asserting a personal digital aesthetic. The chapter engages with theories of imaging and photography in discussing how migrant women use camera phones to represent the world, construct the self, transcend limited circumstances, envisage new possibilities, and plan for the future. It argues that such imaging practices are ultimately about self-making and actively deploying the imagination. The chapter concludes that in using camera phones to both represent and construct reality, migrant women exercise individual agency and engage in efforts at personal transformation, which is a first step toward societal change.