Ziyou (Freedom)1, Occupational Choice, and Labor: Bangbang in Chongqing, People's Republic of China2

This paper aims to examine the complicated processes and dynamics of rural migrant workers' occupation choice in post-Mao China among a specific migrant population, the bangbang (porters or carriers) in the city of Chongqing in southwest China. By employing ethnographic data from my year-long anthropological field research among bangbang and following the Foucauldian concept of governmentality, this paper explores the question of whether neoliberalism alone deliberately and vehemently transforms these laborers into self-reliant subjects. It argues that for rural migrants, the discourse on ziyou (freedom), as promoted by the state, plays a significant role in facilitating the migrants' subject formation, transforming them into self-reliant and enterprising laborers even as it makes them vulnerable to fierce exploitation. At the same time, bangbang turn this neoliberal rationality around and use it in their struggle for the security and aid refused to them by the state because it externalizes the “technologies of the self.†Bangbang internalize neoliberal techniques of governance that are framed as ziyou (freedom), not from social responsibility or patriotism but from disappointment with and distrust of the state.