Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how and why 'energy' and 'skills' offer contending parameters of a 'good life' for Chinese rural dwellers and migrant workers. Contestations about their relative value articulate an active engagement with the contradictory demands of past and present moral and political economies

Paper long abstract:

Since the start of market reforms in the 1980s, increasing numbers of Chinese villagers have been migrating to more prosperous urban areas in search of work. While the economic implications of their activities has been widely debated, little is known about how diverse parameters for well being are constituted through embodied experiences of farm work and wage labour. Based on long-term fieldwork in rural China, this paper will critically examine the processes by which divergent attitudes to the body have been produced by the moral and political economies of the Mao (1949-1976) and post-Mao (1976-present) periods. It will take perceptions of farming and wage labour in terms of 'energy' (you jin) and 'skills' (you benshi) as emblematic of this transition both in ideology and in socio-economic conditions. I show that given the rising cost of living, the value of farming has consequently decreased, and therefore the bodily qualities associated with it are no longer sufficient to constitute a 'good life'. Yet farming remains central to the local economy, alongside wage labour, and offers a supplementary (if not fully alternative) definition of well being based on energy, family values and family produce. By unpacking how different types of work redefine the contours of a 'good life', I challenge the simplistic assumption that wage labour eradicated the value of farming as foundational to well being. Local attitudes to well being highlight an active engagement with the contradictory demands of collectivism and market, communism and neoliberalism.