LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | Building on Dreams: Chinese Construction, Workers, Rural-Urban Development, and the Making of Masculinity

Over the past three decades in China, the spectacular rise of modern cities has been made possible by the strength and labor of a vast workforce from the countryside. Typically, migrant construction workers spend eleven months each year in cities, returning to their villages only during New Year to reunite with their families. The mostly-male construction workforce makes up the most visible segment of the so-called "floating population," hundreds of millions who are economically and legally suspended between urban employment and rural identities. Questions of gender and migrant experience in China have almost always focused on women’s work in factories. Construction work provides a parallel space to understand sex-segregated labor through the experiences of rural migrant men. The traditional privileges and ideologies of masculinity operate as resources that intensify the exploitation of rural male workers, motivating them to persist in enterprises that entail their own exclusion.

William Thomson is a socio-cultural anthropologist visiting UM this year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies. His research investigates relations of design and labor through China’s contemporary building sites where projects of global capital, labor migration, and architecture converge. His current book project expands on two years of intensive fieldwork with rural construction workers on sites in the city of Xi’an, in local design studios, and through extended visits to workers’ home villages in the Qinling mountains of Shaanxi Province. Before turning to anthropology, Thomson worked for seven years in journalism and media, including five years at WBUR Public Radio in Boston.