3. Gerard Greenfield and Apo Leong, “China's Communist Capitalism: The Real World of Market Socialism,” Socialist Register 33 (1997).

4. Lisa Hoffman, “Autonomous Choices and Patriotic Professionalism: On Governmentality in Late-Socialist China,” Economy and Society 35 (2006): 550–70.

5. Danwei, also called cellular state danwei or work-unit, an urban form of production emerged from the early years of the PRC. Usually with an area equivalent to that of a city block or less, it consisted of one or more compounds surrounded by a wall with a gated entrance. In their most developed form, danwei included “workshops, residences, meeting rooms, clinics, bathhouses, childcare centers, and sometimes even schools. Danwei of this sort provided not only the physical but also the institutional space for urban people's lives during the period of high socialism. Post-Mao China's economic reforms in urban areas have consisted more than anything of the removal of both the physical and the institutional walls.” Steve Harrell “The Anthropology of Reform and the Reform of Anthropology: Anthropological Narratives of Recovery and Progress in China” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001):144.

6. Lisa Hoffman, “Autonomous Choices and Patriotic Professionalism.”

7. Hairong Yan, “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks,” Cultural Anthropology 18 (2003): 493–523. According to Yan, post-Mao reform in 1978 refers to the breaking up of the communes in the countryside and the establishment of household-based land use and production. “The Dengist negation of Maoist collective farming, carried out in the name of liberating the productive forces (jiefang shengchanli) from the fetters of the collective economy, ushered in the transition of the People's Republic of China from a Maoist development state and its collectivist values to the Dengist neoliberal state with its market-oriented policies” (501).

8. C. Cindy Fan, “The State, the Migrant Labor Regime, and Maiden Workers in China,” Political Geography 23 (2004): 283–305.

9. The term suzhi, which is roughly translated into English as “quality,” has become central to contemporary Chinese governance and society. Andrew Kipnis, “Suzhi: A Keyword Approach.” The China Quarterly 186 (2006): 295–313); Rachel Murphy defines suzhi as “an amorphous concept that refers to the innate and nurtured physical, intellectual and ideological characteristics of a person” and claims that suzhi discourse facilitates state policy implementation through qualifying the disparate policies with seemingly coherence, disguising the state intervention and intrusion, forming the national subjects who are responsible for raising their quality, and encouraging a self-management and self-discipline in accordance to the needs of the state. Rachel Murphy, “Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: “Population Quality” Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education.” The China Quarterly, 177 (2003): 1–20); Hairong Yan argues that suzhi is a new system of value coding that inscribes, measures, and mobilizes human subjectivity as the powerhouse for productivity and development; Yan, “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism”; Ann Anagnost points out that suzhi is not an entity that one can achieve or lose. It is a value coding that “can be expressed only in terms of a differential.” (Ann Anagnost “The Corporeal Politics of Quality: Suzhi.” Public Culture 16 (2004):191); The discourse of suzhi has an impact on the subjectivity formation of rural migrant workers in many ways. First, the rural migrant laborer is devalued as having “low quality” while the tough working conditions in the city are seen as the education and training provided to migrant workers to “improve their quality.” This discourse, thus, legitimizes the overexploitation and mistreatment of migrant laborers. Second, the discourse of suzhi masks the fact that value is produced by the migrants’ bodies from where the living labor is extracted. So it justifies the exploitation of surplus value out of the migrant body. Moreover, the discourse of suzhi is what lures the migrant laborer to the city as an escape from the “valueless” rurality.

10. Hairong Yan, “Neoliberal Governmentality.”

11. Gary Sigley, “Chinese Governmentalities: Government, Governance and the Socialist Market Economy.” Economy and Society 35 (2006): 487–508.

12. Lisa Hoffman, “Autonomous Choices.”

13. There is a body of scholarship that considers neoliberalism as the “tactics of governmentality.” For example, Grahman Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two lectures by and An Interview with Michel Foucualt (Chicago, 1991). Nikolas Rose, “Government authority and expertise in advanced liberalism,” Economy and Society 22 (1993): 283–299. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose eds, Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago, 1997). Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmantality, and Critique,” paper presented at the Rethinking Marxism Conference, University of Massachusctts, Amherst. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception. Duke University Press, 2006.

14. Lisa Hoffman, “Autonomous choices.”

15. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC, 2006): 1.

16. Ibid., 1–3.

17. Ibid. 12.

18. Ibid., 3. Similar argument can also be found in many scholars' works, for example, Piere Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism: Utopia of Endless Exploitation.” Le Monde Diplomatique (English edition), December 1998; Colin Gordon, “Government Rationality: An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991): 1–51; Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose ed., Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government (Chicago, 1997).

19. Colin Gordon “An Introduction,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991): 4.

20. Thomas Lemke, “The Birth of Bio-politics.” Economy and Society 30.2 (2001).

21. Aihwa Ong, “Neoliberalism as Exception,” 4.

22. Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmantality, and Critique,” 8.

23. Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmantality, and Critique.” 5–12.

24. Aihwa Ong “Neoliberalism as Exception.” Please also see Lisa Hoffman “Autonomous Choices,” note 8.

25. Ibid., 3.

26. Gary Sigley “Liberal despotism: Population planning, subjectivity, and government in contemporary China,” Alternatives 29 (5): 557–575, 2004. Cited in Lisa Hoffman, “Lisa Hoffman, “Autonomous Choices,” 555.

27. Aihwa Ong, “Neoliberalism as Exception,” 14.

28. Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmantality, and Critique,” 12.

29. Yu Gao, “Selection, Borrowing, and Transformation: On the Formation of the Discourse of Freedom in Modern China,” Journal of Nanjing Social Academy 8 (2004).

30. Briane Becker and Yang Gao, “The Chinese Urban Labor System: Prospects for Reform,” Journal of Labor Research 4 (1989): 411–28.

31. Muqian Xue, China's Socialist Economy (Beijing, 1981), cited by Becker and Gao, in “The Chinese Urban Labor System.”

32. Becker and Gao, “The Chinese Urban Labor System.”

33. Du Haiyan, “Interim Report on Research Project Entitled ‘The Question of Staff and Workers in Reforming State-Owned Enterprises,’” Jingji Yanjiu, January 20, 1983: 58–65, cited in Pat and Roger Howard, “The Campaign to Eliminate Job Security in China,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 25.3 (1995), 348.

34. Gordon White, “Politics of Economic Reform in Chinese Industry: The Introduction of the Labour Contract System” The China Quarterly (September 1987):365–389.

35. Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, And Social Networks within China's Floating Population (Stanford, 2001); Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley, 1999).

36. Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China.

37. Jeffrey. Taylor, “Rural Employment Trends and the Legacy of Surplus Labor,” The China Quarterly (December, 1988, No. 116): 726–766; Delia Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China (New York, 1999), cited in Li Zhang, Strangers in the City.

38. Yan, “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism,” 498.

39. Zhang, Strangers in the City, 33.

40. Zhang, Strangers in the City, 34–37.

41. David Lague, “China: Growth Creates Migrant ‘Underclass,’” New York Times, March 3, 2007; Jim Yardley, “In a Tidal Wave, China's Masses Pour from Farm to City,” New York Times, September 12, 2004.

42. Li Guo, “Chongqing Speeds Up in Transferring the Rural Labor Force,” The People's Daily, April 4, 2004.

43. Howard W. French, “Big, Gritty Chongqing, City of 12 Million, is China's Model for Future,” New York Times, June 1, 2007.

44. “China's Chicago,” The Economist, July 26, 2007.

45. Shiming Jian, ed., The Army of Bangbang in the Mountainous City: A Survey on the Social Life of Rural Migrant Workers (Chongqing, China, 2000).

46. Author's conversation with Professor Shiming Jian, October 16, 2007.

47. I have met a total of 124 bangbang. The oldest was 65 and the youngest was 27.

48. A bangbang hotel is a cheap hotel, often with many bunk beds in one room. It often charges a bangbang one yuan (i.e., about thirteen cents) per night. Some bangbang hotels also provide free hot water for drinks, running water for use, and sell simple meals. Bangbang hotels are often run by private individuals, but recently the Chongqing government began to build bangbang hotel/apartments.

49. The monthly rent for such a shelter is often about ten dollars. Normally the shelter is about several square meters, with secondhand furniture. Some shelters have a used television set and DVD player bought by the bangbang themselves. Many bangbang cook their meals with free firewood they seek from the workplace. Some of them buy cheap meals at small food stands. Their daily food expenditures are usually very low, around five to ten yuan (about sixty cents to one and a half dollars).

50. The author's fieldnotes, November 3, 2006.

51. Ngai Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC, 2005).

52. Yan, “Neoliberal Governmentality.”

53. Jim Yardley and David Barboza, “Help Wanted: China Finds Itself with a Labor Shortage,” New York Times, April 3, 2005.

54. Wei Li, Xing Li, and Changqin He, “The New Policy of Three Social Welfares Benefit 23,790,000 Local Citizens,” Chongqing Evening, November 17, 2006.

55. Peng Liang, “Why We Can Not See the Migrant Workers in a Hospital Designated for Migrants?” Chongqing Business Daily, July 19, 2005.

56. Lemke, “Foucault, Governmantality, and Critique.”

57. Hoffman, “Autonomous choices.”