Digital Networking and Digital Governance in the Process of Labor Migration in China

Principle Investigator：Tzu-kai Liu

I am a cultural and linguistic anthropologist at National Chengchi University. My research focuses on the dialectical and discursive relations between digital technology and labor migration and, in particular, explores social media and its impacts on the modes and multimodal practices of digital networking that affect Wa migrant workers’ rural-to-urban labor migration and their intermittent returning to the homelands in the China/Myanmar borderlands. It also underscores the ways in which these migrant workers develop and reconfigure digital networking and interscalar sociality under state control of digital governance and the affordance of algorithmic technology. Meanwhile, my research anticipates the communicative contexts to contextualize digital governing and networking and pay attention to the workings of multimodal digital networking and interscalar digital governance. Situated in the field of digital governance, technological affordance allows Wa workers to promote personal story-sharing through algorithmically-designed social media networking, to convey the generic, intimate expressions of labor life in a language of everyday Chinese and to negotiate their hope and anxiety in daily labor life.

The employment of digital governing, namely facial recognition software, increased surveillance and amalgamation of personal information, provides or denies access is commonly targeted at the disadvantaged, who are engaged in informal and indeterminate zones or working-class sectors, rather than the advantaged. Using the perspectives of digital governance and networking to explore the integration of labor migration and digital media at least involves three different levels of challenges in terms of research methods. One is to conduct research within and outside the Great Firewall of China. In the face of digital governance and surveillance by the state, I aim to understand the diverse perspectives of Wa migrant workers using digital media, understand the authoritative knowledge information dissemination and challenge the influence of authoritarian discourses on migrant workers. The second is the perspective of outsiders and insiders, using digital media culture and digital narratives as alternative "texts." Conducting digital ethnographic research is a continuous shuttle and ongoing dialogue between the inside/outside. Social media culture and digital narratives Wa workers engaged with become alternative texts to critically understand daily experiences, values and social networks and to understand the correlation between authoritarian systems and local digital practices. Finally, digital governance and digital networks involve no binary opposition between online/offline. Such governance is both real and virtual, both remote and ubiquitous.