Markets and Bodies: Women, Service Work, and the Making of Inequality in China

By Eileen M. Otis

Insulated from the dust, noise, and crowds churning outside, China's luxury hotels are staging areas for the new economic and political landscape of the country. These hotels, along with other emerging service businesses, offer an important, new source of employment for millions of workers, but also bring to light levels of inequality that surpass most developed nations.

Examining how gender enables the globalization of markets and how emerging forms of service labor are changing women's social status in China, Markets and Bodies reveals the forms of social inequality produced by shifts in the economy. No longer working for the common good as defined by the socialist state, service workers are catering to the individual desires of consumers. This economic transition ultimately affords a unique opportunity to investigate the possibilities and current limits for better working conditions for the young women who are enabling the development of capitalism in China.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780804778350

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Otis, Eileen M., author.

Markets and bodies : women, service work, and the making of inequality in China / Eileen M. Otis.

   pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-7648-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8047-7649-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Women service industries workers—China. 2. Women—Employment—China. 3. Women—China—Social conditions. 4. Sex role in the work environment—China. 5. Equality—China. I. Title.

HD6073.S452C668 2012

331.4’81000951—dc22        2011010336

Typeset by Westchester Book Composition in Adobe Garamond Pro in 11/13.5

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-7835-0

Markets and Bodies

Women, Service Work,

and the Making of Inequality in China

Eileen M. Otis

Markets and Bodies

To Richard and Dorothy Otis, without whose love, support,

and nurturance this book would not have been possible.

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Global Markets, Local Bodies

1   The Customer Is God: Women and China’s New Occupational Landscape

2   Virtual Personalism: Importing Global Luxury and Emphasized Femininity to the Beijing Transluxury Hotel

3   Virtuous Professionalism: Localizing Global Luxury at the Kunming Transluxury Hotel

4   Aspirational Urbanism: Consuming Respect in China’s Informal Service Sector

5   Embodying Consumer Markets at Work

Afterword: Embodiment, the Research, and the Researcher

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

An ethnographer is a student of cultural and social worlds. I am grateful to so many people who opened up their lives to me so that I might learn from them. First and foremost, I am indebted to the employees of the service workplaces I studied who patiently entertained my questions, proddings, and sundry curiosities about their experiences. These experiences form the foundation of this book, and I am thankful for the workers’ thoughtful reflections on the tumultuous changes they have undergone. Many who I interviewed pondered out loud why I would be interested in their labor as a topic for a book. Most could not fathom how their own modest worlds of employment might be compelling to the larger world. My hope is that in this book I have made the case for why these experiences matter.

Without the mentorship of some of the best critical minds and warmest hearts in sociology, this book would not have come to fruition. Vicki Smith was a tireless teacher throughout my training as a sociologist at the University of California, Davis. She read numerous drafts of this book, helping me to see the analytic forest for the descriptive trees in my work. I could not have completed this project without her enthusiastic support, intellectual curiosity, incisive analyses, and, not least of all, good humor and friendship. Fred Block always challenged me to keep an eye on macroeconomic structures as I observed micro-level interactions. When I struggled with finding larger social and political meaning in these observations, it seemed he always provided the theoretical and historical insight that would propel my analysis forward. Nicole Biggart has one of the smartest ears in the business. She had the ability to listen to my endless descriptions of fieldwork and find silver threads of sociological significance. Talking with her often felt like a sociological version of therapy. The late G. William Skinner, renowned China specialist, held me to his uncompromising standards of academic excellence. I am fortunate to have had a mentor who took great care in training his students to practice social science with rigor.

Jan Gouldner has been a stalwart supporter and a central, caring influence in directing my trajectory as a sociologist. My work has also been nurtured by the friendship of Michael Schwartz, who never failed to bubble with enthusiasm when I shared the findings and insights from this study. His questions and suggestions helped me to distill the final comparative analysis of this book. I have shared ideas about this book project from its inception with Elizabeth Rudd, who has offered abundant advice and insight, not to mention invaluable moral support. She attentively edited the final draft of the manuscript. Maxine Craig has also influenced the development of this book with many a theoretical and pragmatic insight. Rudy Sil’s friendship, insight, and tireless commentary on all things social scientific have sustained me personally and professionally. My sincere thanks go to Yang Guo Cai, professor at Yunnan Nationalities University, who welcomed me into her home for many a meal and provided key on-the-ground introductions and advice that made this project possible. I am indebted to Jackie Armijo for giving me a bed and meals and making me a part of her family during my early fieldwork in Kunming. Both she and Peg Swain generously showed me the ropes of ethnographic research in China. What a gift to have two such able teachers in the field! And thanks to Caleb Southworth for the editing, strategizing, morale building, and timely glasses of whiskey.

This book has benefited from the wisdom of many kind critics who have read and commented on chapters, including Javier Auyero, Dan Buck, Maria Charles, Catheryn Clayton, Robert Culp, Shao Dan, Deborah Davis, Kenneth Foster, Arienne Gaetano, Tom Gold, Gail Hershatter, Bill Hurst, Jerry Jacobs, Jack Katz, Michelle Ladensen, Ching Kwan Lee, Ming-cheng Lo, Susan Mann, Joya Misra, Jen Myhre, Seio Nakajima, Estee Nuewrith, Sean O’Riain, Winifred Poster, Carlos Rojas, Preston Rudy, Bindi Shah, Hsiu-Hua Shen, Xiaoling Shu, Eva Skuratovich, May-fair Yang, and Emily Yeh. I am grateful for the opportunity to present the manuscript to Michael Kimmel’s gender seminar at SUNY Stony Brook and thank him and his students for their perceptive questions and discussion. Thanks to Maram Epstein for help with the finer points of translation, to Amy Braksmajer for sending me articles relevant to this research, and to Clare Yan for helping with some of the transcription. My appreciation also goes to Rebecca Rudd, who helped edit this book. I am most grateful for feedback from two reviewers recruited by Stanford University Press, who engaged thoughtfully with my book manuscript. The manuscript has been ably shepherded through the publication process by Stanford University Press editor Kate Wahl. I am quite lucky to have had the opportunity to work with such a competent, smart, and kind professional. I appreciate all of her careful suggestions and support. Let me also extend appreciation to two institutions that supported the write-up of this research: SUNY Stony Brook and the University of Oregon.

The research for this book has been presented at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the University of Oregon; the University of California, San Diego; SUNY Stony Brook; Harvard University Fair-bank Center; the University of Illinois, Urbana—Champaign; the University of California, Davis; and the National University of Singapore. Thanks to the many audiences who listened, queried, and offered commentary on the work. Research and writing of this book was generously supported by the University of California, Pacific Rim Research Program, and the Harvard University Fairbank Center.

My heartfelt appreciation especially goes to Roland Vilett for all of his love and support during the time that I researched and wrote this book. And thanks to Helen Vilett for finding newspaper clippings, documentaries, and books of relevance to my research interests. My parents, Richard and Dorothy Otis, provided a rich, lively, nurturing, and supportive home environment throughout my life. I am most certain that our rousing family debates about the state of the world at the dinner table with my three older brothers, Michael, Stephen, and Frank, inspired my choice of career. My mom has been a best friend and a role model in my life. My dad has always communicated a calm and loving confidence in me. I love you, Mom and Dad. Finally, thanks to Milo Koretsky for being gently by my side during the final stages of this book.

Markets and Bodies

Map of China.

Introduction

Global Markets, Local Bodies

Each day, scores of international professionals traveling to Beijing disembark from cocoon-like first-class cabins of jetliners arriving from Europe, North America, and Australia. The most affluent of these professionals board limousines for the Beijing Transluxury Hotel.¹ Groggy and disoriented after the long flight, the well-heeled itinerants are received by butlers in the genial space of the Transluxury lobby. The butlers greet the new arrivals by name and lead them to graciously appointed guest rooms designed to evoke the warmth of a residence, with over-stuffed comforters and low-slung lighting, as well as linens, carpets, and upholsteries in rich hues of chestnut and hunter green. With English-speaking staff, familiar Western foods, and cable TV piping in American sitcoms, the BBC, CNN, and ESPN, these global professionals can imagine that they have never left home, or that they have entered a new and improved version of it, insulated from the dust, noise, and crowds churning outside. The Beijing Transluxury and hotels like it are staging areas for forays into the new economic and political landscape of China, and they re-create home for entrepreneurs, diplomats, and politicians in unfamiliar terrain.

Just over a mile away from the hotel, Limei, a waitress at the Transluxury, awakes at 5:00 a.m. in her parents’ two-room section of a ramshackle courtyard house. In the morning she uses iron tongs to place a flat, round brick of coal in the stove for heat, then gobbles down a steamed bun and mounts her bike to join the dense cluster of slow-moving cyclists that contend with crowds of cars choking Beijing’s avenues. Arriving at the bare concrete staff entrance at the back of the Transluxury Hotel, Limei greets the security guard, punches in, and heads for the locker room, where she begins an aesthetic routine central to her paid work: showering, hairstyling, manicuring her fingernails, changing into a new uniform, and, finally, applying makeup.

Showered, dressed, and painted, Limei navigates a labyrinth of dull corridors, passing wall-poster injunctions to smile and improve the self. She enters double doors that deliver her from the ill-lit monochromatic employee backstage into the airy elegance of the Transluxury Café, where she serves breakfast to the hotel’s international guests. After studying a list of the hotel’s patrons and their breakfast predilections, she carefully places a double macchiato with cinnamon sprinkles, along with the Wall Street Journal, in front of one customer, a middle-aged American man wearing a charcoal gray suit. She greets him in English: Good morning, Mr. Harrington. Mr. Harrington returns a half smile, makes a barely audible sound of recognition, and takes up his newspaper. Limei later delivers his fresh orange juice (with a splash of grapefruit juice) and crisp Canadian bacon. She presents other guests with their preferred breakfast items; each set of preferences has been recorded in a computer database. Other guests are served fresh tomato juice with lemon and soda, Marmite with rye bread, prosciutto crudo and melon, and one of the major Western daily newspapers: the International Tribune, Der Spiegel, or the Financial Times. Again, each guest is greeted by name.

Staff members tailor their services for each guest at the Beijing Transluxury so that customers are treated with a certain familiarity. To produce this congenial atmosphere, management subjects Limei and her fellow workers to an intensive service-protocol training program, instructing them to adopt a middle-class feminine sensibility so they may effortlessly inhabit the world of wealth in which they labor. At the same time, Beijing Transluxury workers reproduce a kind of old-world service in which servants personally tended to the particular predilections of the employers with whom they lived; however, workers at the Beijing Transluxury produce personal attention using new-world, impersonal technologies. I call the set of labor practices used to produce such attentiveness virtual personalism.

While Beijing is now a hub in the international network of global cities, China’s tourist capital, Kunming, attracts as many domestic guests for its exotic remove. Domestic travelers flock to the City of Eternal Spring for its clean air, mountainous terrain, and ethnic minority culture, which is deliberately made exotic for the tourist economy. Kunming is the capital of China’s impoverished Yunnan Province, where tourism and tobacco are the two pillars of the regional economy. Drawn to Kunming for its nationally renowned sex-tourism industry and sizzling nightlife, domestic businessmen travel from distant provinces to entertain clients at the Kunming Transluxury Hotel. By day they tour the Stone Forest to peer at haunting karst formations, or the Western Hills to stroll through the old Buddhist temple, or Kunming’s World Horti-Expo Garden to marvel at the kaleidoscope of semitropical foliage. By night they party in the karaoke lounge and sauna, employing one or two of the escorts who mill about in shimmering cocktail dresses and stiletto heels.

Yundan is a cocktail waitress who caters to these guests at the Kunming Transluxury’s Panther Nightclub. Each day she dons a red miniskirt and silvery blouse in preparation for work. She is 17 and lives in a two-room, socialist-era apartment with her parents, who work at a local pharmaceutical processing plant. In contrast to the semivisible and customized service that Limei provides at the Beijing Transluxury, Yundan coaxes and prods customers to buy high-priced beverages and foods in the Panther Nightclub. Like Limei, she carefully tends to her bodily aesthetic in preparation for work. But as she applies her makeup, she carefully moderates color and quantity. Her hair is simple and unadorned, and she wears a thin silver chain around her neck. By dressing and acting with professional modesty, she self-consciously distinguishes herself from the sex workers stationed throughout the hotel, whose work is illegal. In so doing, she avoids the otherwise inevitable propositioning and pawing by customers. Yundan’s use of professionalism to control customer responses reflects a set of labor practices I term virtuous professionalism.

Lodging in venues like the Transluxury hotels is far beyond the means of the average urbanite in China. Instead of patronizing high-priced hotels and restaurants, urbanites with more modest resources frequent the street-side cafés, restaurants, bars, and karaoke clubs that populate China’s new cityscapes. When traveling they lodge in affordable guesthouses. These venues and the services provided in them would not be so widely available were it not for the low-wage labor of migrant workers like Shaolei from China’s countryside. Shaolei journeyed 650 miles from her rural village in Anhui to Beijing so that she might find paid employment to help support her family. She lives and works in Little Sichuan, a closet-sized restaurant located in a Beijing suburb. On a typical shift she wakes at 5:00 a.m. to open the restaurant’s doors at 6:00, having spent the evening sleeping on one of the dining tables.

In contrast to urban-born laborers like Limei and Yundan, Shaolei cannot gain access to full-time, formal employment in international hotels. As a migrant laborer from an agricultural region, Shaolei lacks rights to urban citizenship (Solinger 1999b). The state permits her only a temporary right to work in the urban center, where she is unprotected by labor laws covering urban workers and excluded from work reserved for urbanites. The absence of legal protections for informal sector workers coupled with workplaces that do little to regulate customer-worker interaction creates a labor context that allows customers to exert direct control over, and often dominate, workers. Customer control is reinforced by fundamental and long-standing inequalities between rural and urban peoples. Urban customers feel deeply anxious about their position in a rapidly shifting urban status order; they readily express disdain for the migrant workers who serve them, exhibiting behavior that ranges from merely patronizing to downright caustic. In response to these customers, Shaolei tries to disguise her rural origins, dedicating much of her meager wages to the purchase of lipstick, mascara, dresses, and shoes so that she might gain the respect of urban customers. She and migrant service workers like her use cosmetics and other accoutrements in abundance to counter urban stereotypes of rural people as unclean and backward. The systematic attempts to conceal their rural roots at work epitomize migrant workers’ self-initiated labor practices, which I term aspirational urbanism. Tragically, these efforts only accentuate their rural roots.

Young women like Limei, Yundan, and Shaolei are performing labor that was virtually nonexistent in China’s socialist Mao era, when an ethic of serving the people, predominated. The Mao era (1949–1976) takes its name from the man who was chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) when it claimed leadership of China, Mao Zedong. Soon after rising to power, the CCP eliminated private property and dissolved most markets for goods, services, and labor. A multitiered state bureaucracy controlled the nation’s major economic and political institutions. The CCP’s leadership focused economic production on heavy industry; consumer goods and services beyond basic necessities were thus in short supply. The CCP concentrated the labor of urban workers on developing an industrial base, at the same time striving to achieve a socialist ideal that would eventually provide full employment and equal benefits to all. During this time, labor was conceived of as promoting the common good of all people in a collectivist society.

When China embarked upon market reforms in 1978, it was one of the most equal societies in the world with a relatively flat distribution of income and resources (Davis and Wang 2009). Even though rural and urban peoples experienced differences in standard of living, they had little contact with each other and were largely unaware of this disparity. Since then, trade in goods, services, and labor has expanded at a historically unprecedented rate, fueling higher incomes for some but sharply polarizing the overall distribution of resources and opportunities. Today, China exhibits levels of inequality that surpass those of most developed nations (OECD 2010), churning up social and political tension, even as the nation’s political leadership continues to adhere, at least nominally, to a communist ethic. Sociologists are scrambling to understand China’s economic metamorphosis and especially the forms of inequality that threaten to rend the country’s social fabric.

A neglected mechanism of China’s new inequality is the nascent consumer service economy, which is a new source of employment for millions of workers.² Most of these workers are young women whose parents labored in factories and on state-run farms. As China’s urban centers grow wealthier, service purveyors and retailers design novel ways for their customers to display and experience wealth and status. Service workers are carefully disciplined to provide these new experiences to consumers. The emergent class of service worker is thus the bedrock of a new commercial culture that converts the material resources China’s new affluent consumers have at their disposal into the attention, care, effort, and regard of workers, thereby forming the basis for new expressions of gender and class inequality.

Given their role in forging a new status hierarchy, the labor experiences of these workers depart dramatically from those of their parents, who labored in the Mao era. Instead of working for the common good as defined by the socialist state, these service workers cater to consumers’ individual habits, predilections, and desires. Rather than state-run factories or farms, their employers are organizations whose objective is to maximize profit. And whereas their mothers would have been penalized for overt displays of femininity in dress, the new service work requires performances of femininity and deference. Today, rather than serving the people, workers like Limei, Yundan, and Shaolei are merely serving people—in the double sense of becoming people who serve and of providing services to people; in the process they occupy a very low rung on China’s emergent status ladder.

At first glance, it may seem that these workers are merely engaging in the routine and fairly banal tasks of delivering food or greeting guests. But their emergence as a labor force has profound social and economic consequences. Not only does their work form a basis for growing profit in the consumer economy; it also aids the flow of people across regional and national boundaries by providing basic food and shelter for customers in hotels and restaurants. Moreover, by supporting social spaces where economic actors meet, workers in hotels, lounges, restaurants, and karaoke bars, as well as tea and coffee shops, facilitate the development of social capital and thereby support market growth. The creation of a service class has also fundamentally transformed women’s social status by segregating them into work that is low wage, low prestige, and temporary. Employers hire young (not past the age of 28), nubile women workers to ensure status consistency between their age, gender, and low-status work, ensuring that they do not pose a status threat to any potential customers (Brinton 2007). Employers then train workers to exhibit social deference. Ultimately, service firms and their employees construct a public domain of interaction that is undergirded by gender and class inequalities.

To investigate the formation of China’s emergent service class, I immersed in three arenas of service labor, each chosen to illuminate different positions of women service workers in relation to globalizing consumer markets. I followed new service protocols as they traveled from the United States to Beijing and I again tracked their movement outward into the relatively remote metropolis of Kunming. I compared how they were implemented in two formal sector workplaces and observed their virtual absence in the informal sector. I performed more than a year of participant observation and conducted 168 in-depth interviews with workers and managers in two different Chinese cities, in formal and informal service sectors. The research field sites include an international five-star hotel hosting Western businessmen and diplomats in Beijing; a luxury tourist hotel in Kunming, whose guests are mostly affluent entrepreneurs from Chinese cities more economically advanced than Kunming; and the informal service sector in Kunming and Beijing, where local urbanites are served by young female migrants from China’s countryside. Beijing and Kunming are 1,700 miles (about 2,700 kilometers) apart and are separated by four provinces. Beijing is an ancient national capital city and a center of Han Chinese culture, whereas Kunming is the provincial capital of Yunnan, a remote, poor, and ethnically