Peasant traders, migrant workers and “supermarkets”: Low-cost provisions and the reproduction of migrant labor in China

Abstract

This article analyzes the social and spatial dynamics of the mobile trade in low-cost goods by rural people from a mountainous region of China's Zhejiang province and how these interact with the mobility and social reproductive patterns of the rural–urban migrant workers they cater to. Also formally categorized as peasants, the traders not only supply the goods necessary for the maintenance of the workers but also of their spatially divided household, thus contributing to the reproduction of migrant labor power more generally. In doing so, they assume mobility trajectories that align with those of factory production and experience familial trade-offs commonly experienced by migrant workers. Meanwhile, the provision of low-cost goods to migrant workers has enabled a thriving economy employing peasant families for whom agricultural livelihoods slowly disappear. These dynamics indicate the mutual connection between waged and self-employed labor that works in the interest of capital accumulation at the same time with the differentiation of migrant labor. As in other comparable Asian contexts, their connection lies at the heart of the state-sponsored production regime premised on the low-cost reproduction of flexible migrant labor.