論文摘要｜Workshop: The Production and Reproduction of Social Inequalities
2024-09-20
日期：2024年9月20日－21日
地點：國立陽明交通大學光復校區人社三館HC201室，同步線上進行
活動連結：點擊進入
活動錄影：觀看錄影
舉辦人：國立陽明交通大學文化研究國際中心、德國科隆大學社會不平等研究中心、台灣非中研究網絡
所屬子計畫：遷移、不平等公民、批判法律研究 & 大中國體系中社會區域間的地緣政治和文化經濟
子計畫主持人：劉紀蕙教授、邱羽凡副教授、陳奕麟教授
日期：2024年9月20日
相片：點擊查看
作者: Joyce C.H. Liu(Director, International Institute for Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
題目：Compound Capitalism, Samoan Supply Chains, and SEZs: The Darker Side of China's TIANXIA 2.0
摘要：This project raises several questions: Why does the discourse of Tianxia resurface in the 21st century alongside China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’? How does it prefigure the map of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? What are the material logistics and infrastructure of Tianxia 2.0? How do they impact geopolitical power relations and what are the driving forces behind this perspective? I plan to develop my theorization of the Tianxia discourse, examine why it has re-emerged in the 21st century with the rise of China, explore how the Belt and Road Initiative has materially and technologically implemented the Tianxia vision, analyze its impact on the geopolitical order, and understand why it has fostered the production and reproduction of the global underground rhizomes of the scam economy and the subsequent primitive extraction of labor. The structure of this presentation is arranged in four sections: First, I will explicate the discourse on Tianxia and its implications. Second, I will explain how China’s Tianxia has materialized through its Maritime Silk Road and Digital Silk Road, as well as their global impacts. Third, I will highlight the BRI's unintended side effects, the dark corners of scam compounds, and their underground rhizomes, emphasizing their geo historical factors and semi-tributary trading practices. Fourth, I propose the V – M+ mode of digital capital operation in the 21st century, focusing on the techniques of capital operation through compound capitalism, or the Samoan Model, that produce legal exceptional zones. “V” stands for the void with no cost and violence with no law, and there is no limit to the multiplication of capital. This model integrates transnational corporations, overseas Special Economic Zones that facilitate various favorable legal exceptions, and digital automation that accelerates capital flow and human labor extraction transactions and hence fosters the production and reproduction of primitive extraction of labor.
關鍵詞：forced labor, human trafficking, scam compounds, ASEAN, transnational labor supply chain, outsourcing recruitment, organized cybercrime, legal void
日期：2024年9月21日
相片：點擊查看
作家: Tu Huynh(Principal Investigator, Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne)
題目：Beyond Boundaries: Migration, Identity Transformation, and the Shifting Social Status of Chinese Laborers
摘要：This paper explores the intersection of global capitalism, Chinese labor migration, and social status transformation in the 19th century, focusing on the ways migration offered Chinese laborers opportunities to renegotiate their social standing both abroad and within China. Through a speculative inquiry, the paper brings together disparate bodies of literature on global economic systems, racial hierarchies, and Confucian social stratification. It argues that while Chinese laborers in colonial societies faced racialized exclusion and restrictive social categories, moments of mobility emerged through their economic success abroad, enabling them to renegotiate China’s rigid liangjian (良贱) system. Using three key vignettes – centered in the Philippines, the United States, and South Africa – the study illustrates how migration acted as both an agent of exploitation and a potential means of social reconfiguration. By engaging with Weber’s concept of social status and the rigidity of Confucian hierarchies, this paper expands the discussion on migration and social stratification, contributing to the ongoing debates about how global capitalist forces disrupt traditional social systems. It also suggests that transnational labor migration impacted both receiving and sending societies, challenging the enduring rigidity of social status systems and opening new avenues for social mobility, albeit under constrained and temporary circumstances.
作家: Tzu-Chi Ou(Assistant Professor, International College of Innovation, National Chengchi University)
題目：Navigating Reproductive Rights and Inequalities: Indonesian Migrant Mothers in Taiwan
摘要：The long-standing guest worker program in Taiwan has historically hindered Southeast Asian migrant workers from forming and maintaining families. However, recent shifts in gender equality law enforcement have enabled pregnant migrant mothers to give birth without jeopardizing their employment. Notably, in 2019, the Control Yuan, a supervisory and auditing body within the Taiwanese government, proposed “corrective measures” aimed at enforcing the Act of Gender Equality in Employment, thereby establishing a platform for migrant activists to provide shelter and support to migrant mothers. This paper delves into the recent advancements in reproductive rights for migrant workers and paints a nuanced picture of the evolving and intricate humanitarian infrastructure in Taiwan. Through policy analyses, in-depth interviews with Indonesian migrant mothers, and a six-month ethnographic observation in a migrant shelter, the argument is put forth that humanitarian initiatives aimed at bolstering reproductive rights are constrained. The absence of systemic changes necessitates migrant mothers to navigate the challenges of childbirth and child-rearing in Taiwan independently. Despite unyielding advocacy and support from activists, disparities persist in the areas of legal consultation, financial assistance, and childcare networks for migrant mothers. This study illuminates the limitations of humanitarian assistance and suggests potential pathways for reform within the guest worker program in Taiwan and East Asia.
日期：September 21, 2024
相片：點擊查看
作家: Qi Li(PhD student, Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University)
題目：Informal Housing and the Future of the Chinese Urban Villages: Observation from Shanghai
摘要：Located in eastern Shanghai, Zhangjiang Science City is the core hub for the Chinese strategic high-tech industries of semiconductors, biomedicine, and artificial intelligence. Over the past three decades, Zhangjiang has developed from a rural commune to the most critical infrastructure supporting the Chinese high-tech power. The shifting structure of capitalist transition and the manipulation of rural-urban development are invisible in the technopolis scenery. The image of Science City highlights skyscrapers and garden-style street views; the “rest” of the development – irregular farmlands and temporary, inadequate settlements that accommodate landless migrants are hiding underneath the highway that crosses through gorgeous buildings, and, lying in the life paths of people who have been forced to move again and again because of endless development plans, urban regenerations, village displacements, and environmental governance. In Zhangjiang, I traced the routes of the Science City’s expansion by mapping the moving paths of the displaced people. Their stories led me to many places that exist beyond the planner’s expectation – I see them as the gesture of re-occupation and re-production of the given space: informally reclaimed lands, extralegal housing, and the irregular boundaries of the Science City. Distinct from the elaboration of investment, innovation, and advancement, the stories of the displaced offer another narrative of the Science City; it is about their homes, works, and dignity.
關鍵詞：Zhangjiang Science City, Shanghai, infrastructure, displacement, governance, territoriality
日期：September 21, 2024
相片：點擊查看
作者: Derek Sheridan(Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica)
題目：Going to Africa to Develop: Chinese Migrants and the Moral Geography of Uneven Development in Africa
摘要：How did “Africa” become imaginable as a destination for Chinese migrants pursuing economic and social mobility? Based on the life histories of Chinese migrants and their families in Tanzania and Uganda, I examine how decisions and rationales for moving to Africa fit into longer family histories, and how these histories relate to broader transformations in uneven global political economies. In these histories, “going to Africa to develop” becomes possible at the very moment existing livelihoods and strategies of mobility were no longer possible to continue in China. Chinese migrants describe Africa is attractive as a destination because it is underdeveloped, empowering Chinese migrants to realize their personal potential in ways possible in neither China nor Euro-America. While extant relationships between China and Tanzania and the unfinished historical horizon of Third World solidarity and socialism are one historical basis for contemporary relationships, it is the historically contingent uneven development between Tanzania and China after neoliberalism which is one of the conditions of possibility for Chinese migrants to accumulate capital; and the sustainability, reproduction, deepening, and transformation of relationships. I argue that it is this relational condition-the uneven interdependence between Chinese and Tanzanians, which produces “Chinese” and “Africans” as distinct historical subjects. Chinese migrants rank China, Africa, and other destinations in terms of contending "moral geographies of development" (Gaetano 2004); on the one hand, a developmentalist ideology which promises convergence through successive waves of “flying geese” development, and on the other hand, racialized hierarchies which imagine Chinese and Africans as people with fundamentally different kinds of “cultural” practices and capacities for economic accumulation. The Chinese who go to Africa are either looked down upon as those who are unable to keep up with China's development or migrate and succeed in the West; or those who best exemplify the capacity of "the Chinese" to do things neither Africans nor even Westerners can. Through an examination of life histories, I both denaturalize and historicize the “comparative advantages” of Chinese and Tanzanian actors; and examine how contingent historical inequalities reproduce hierarchical imaginings.
近期新聞 Recent News
.jpg)
.jpg)
