| Abstract | The transition in the political economy of China has triggered the rural-urban migration of
a huge percentage of the population. Rural-urban migration in China was characterized by
circularity whereby majority of the out-migrants eventually returned to their original
villages, maximizing the returnees' influence on the sending areas. These influences were
not only through financial remittances but also included the influx of new knowledge,
ideas, skills and social capitals to their families and communities, and thereby to some
extent, the confrontation of established gender relations of the villagers.
Inevitably linked to the issues of migration and environment is the argument centering on
human ecology that emphasizes the effects of human activities on the environment.
Migration as a process that entails human movement predictably impacts the environment.
Political ecology involves the possible weakening and marginalization of some groups due
to the changes in political economy. Feminist political ecology underscore the contingent
and structuring nature of gender in environmental knowledge, access and control over
resources and in emancipatory social movements that aim to empower women in
community struggles for resource control and environmental protection.
However, existing literatures regarding Chinese migration were more focused on the
studies of the processes and the patterns of migration than on its impacts and consequences.
Meanwhile, majority of the studies that centered on migration impacts highlighted the
destination area rather than the point of origin. Thus, there was a dearth in studies focusing
on return migration. Despite the growing scholarly interest in the topic of collective action,
little is known about return migrants and their influence particularly on collective action
for natural resource management in their places of origin. Migration itself was a gendered
phenomenon that required more sophisticated theoretical and analytical tools than studies
of sex roles and of sex as a dichotomous variable.
In China, as wider market-driven economic reform and migration combine contingently
and historically, we find it useful to examine the effects of return migration on the natural
environment as mediated through local collective action shaped by the vagaries of
gendered power relations and the workings of social capital. Therefore, this research was
formulated to determine the impacts of social remittances from circular migration on
collective action for water supply and road building from a gender perspective. Four
research questions were addressed in this study: What are the gender-specific patterns of
circular migration in the study site? What new knowledge, skills and values have return
migrants acquired from their travels and migration experiences? What was the background
of the return migrants? How have return migrants harnessed their social remittances for
collective action to improve livelihoods in their village of origin? What were the gender
dynamics of collective action and village leadership and did these challenges serve to
further entrench social and gender hierarchies?
I adopted a post-structuralist view of gender as a fluid process - unstable, reproduced and
multi-dimensional - where it is "performatively materialized through practices", or in short,
how gender becomes "real" through acts. I was also acutely aware of the limitations of
gender as a single analytical category. Thus instead, I situated gender within the intersections of kinship and class as people employ social capital to collectively act to
improve their livelihoods in a village.
The major findings from my study are as follows. First, circular migration in the study site
occurred in waves and was marked by gender, distance and engagement. Second, with the
return of the migrants to the village, they brought with them valuable social remittances
that helped promote collective road and water tank construction and management. Included
among these benefits are the stronger patronage ties with potential benefactors such as
government and county officials that attached to them vestiges of prestige and access to
subsidies, a more democratic and efficiency-oriented consciousness for collective action,
new ideas for material progress and entrepreneurship, a higher level of confidence to
assume leadership positions in the village, as well as newly acquired construction and
engineering skills and financial knowledge. Third, the harnessing of social remittances by
return migrants for collective action to improve their livelihoods had taken place within the
context of socially-embedded and resilient gender and social hierarchies and in-placed
practices. The gender dynamics of collective action and village leadership are still
patriarchy oriented and intricately woven with local kinship ties. Fourth, judging from the
gendered power relationship among the villagers, the social remittances, employed within
the context of the re-emerging kinship system, served to further entrench local social and
gender hierarchies.
Therefore, as concluded from this study, first, there was a dearth in studies focusing on
return migration, especially the female return migration for the sake of its mixed and
contradictory process. As shown by this study, female return-migrants might be able to
economically gain and benefit from their status as out-migrants, but the role that they play
as well as their involvement in village political life had to be mediated by relations of
power in their households and their natal communities.
Second, under the contemporary context when the migration effects on the relationship
between the people and the ecology were increasingly growing, gender issues in natural
resource management should be examined in a translocal setting and embedded within the
processes and practices at a wider macroeconomic level. Meanwhile, the local social
institutions also played a significant role. Social and gender analysis in natural resource
management should also evaluate the impacts of a temporarily successful natural resource
management on the gendered power relations among resource users and their embedded
social hierarchies. This will determine the long-term sustainability of a project.
Third, social remittance was not only a social concept, instead, it was a process that was
socially embedded in social difference and power relations, which allowed a room not only
for holding the integrated evaluation of the dynamic impacts of social remittance on
sending communities but also for modification and variation by the individual who served
as the agent of social change and for institutionalized change. Gender, being also viewed as
a process, therefore obtained more drivers and grounds in deploying the migration
research.
Fourth, the nature of neo-liberal economy has worked to intensify and underscore the
gendered social differentiation. Thus, in order to achieve a more gender equal development
from the migration, in formulating migration and development policy, more gender
egalitarian and gender democratic development policies should be necessarily considered
and advocated by the decision makers. Currently, scholars that were actively involved in studying the impacts of return migration
on the rural areas in China include Cindy Fan, Murphy Rachel, etc. However, their major
findings were focused on the migration effects on rural income, productivity, agricultural
production and labor, poverty and inequality, the social impacts on gender division of labor
within marriage, the constraints preventing return migrant women from acting on their
broadened perspectives and from exercising their agency, the return female migrant's
well-being and the sense of their independence. Little emphasis was placed on the
returnees’ engagement in local politics. In this sense, our research stands as a unique study
in relation to the Chinese context in this field. |