Ethnographic User Study and Concept Design for Chinese Migrant Workers’ Social Networks

In this chapter, I first focus on the work conditions and the perspectives of Chinese migrant industrial workers in the early 1990s through a careful examination of 76 private letters and show how state, capital, and patriarchal powers dominated workers’ everyday lives. The bulk of the chapter focuses on the current situation. I show how, two decades later, by the early years of the 2010s, Chinese migrant workers’ lives had changed significantly compared to the early 1990s. Workers’ social and material lives as well as their social values had altered, shifting toward increased urbanism, individualism, and a keen awareness of consumerism. All these changes are captured in my ethnography of workers’ everyday life practices.

As urban builders, migrant workers (rural residents working in cities) should fairly enjoy urban educational resources. However, due to their social status, they face numerous educational challenges. This study explores how Chinese migrant workers' attitudes towards Internet usage influence educational equity, particularly in an environment where the Internet has become indispensable for learning, work, and daily life among Chinese residents. Using ANOVA and correlation analysis, the study investigates the relationship and influencing factors between migrant workers' attitudes towards Internet usage and educational equity. The research data were obtained from a 2020 survey conducted by the Peking University Chinese Social Sciences Survey Center, focusing primarily on Chinese migrant workers. The findings reveal that migrant workers' attitudes towards Internet usage significantly impact educational equity; groups that place greater emphasis on Internet usage exhibit better educational equity than others. Although the statistical differences in Internet usage attitudes among different regions are not significant, educational equity disparities among regions remain statistically significant. Based on these findings, recommendations are provided at the family, school, and government levels, aiming to address the digital divide, establish remote open education platforms, and improve the household registration system to enhance educational equity for migrant workers.

ABSTRACTThis ethnographic study examines the forms and functions of ritualizing in migrant families, using Chinese rural-urban migrant workers’ annual Spring Festival family reunions as a case study. In-depth interviews with migrant workers and participant observations of family reunions in rural China reveal that both celebratory and non-celebratory family activities are ritualized. In particular, the study suggests that the Spring Festival family reunion has transformed into a meta-ritual comprised of five categories of ritual activities: festival rituals, reunion rituals, patterned interactions, reunions with friends, and communal rituals. These rituals constitute both the internal and external identities of migrant families, but may also remind them of the traumatic reality of family separation or trigger hidden tensions within the family. Implications for studying family communication in times of mobility and family diversity are discussed.

There have been some debates on Chinese migrant workers’ resistances and their rising rights consciousness in the academia. This paper aims to understand the debates and their problems. This paper investigates the extent to which the forms of Chinese migrant workers’ resistance have diverse impact on their citizenship rights. The conception of citizenship rights can be analytically understood in the individual/collective form and with the passive/active nature; such a dichotomy is also applicable for that of resistance according to the action theory. Both conceptualizations and their linkages constitute an analytical framework in this paper. Within it, the various cases of migrant workers’ resistances and their connections with attainment of rights are discussed comparatively. A main finding in this paper is that the individual resistance, whether passive or active, is almost independent of rights; individuals with the PC model only wait passively for the government’s help; and the AC model (e.g. strike) is much more prospective for the attainment of collective rights, which creates a new power to balance those of state and capital in China.

Understanding the Design of Mobile Social Networking

This study utilized the concept of social right to understand factors affecting migrant workers’ health and healthcare in China. Using mixed methods, this study integrated findings from a survey of 817 migrant workers and a follow-up study of 30 intensive interviews to present an in-depth understanding of cumulative disadvantage of health and healthcare of rural-to-urban migrant workers. Our quantitative results indicated that migrant workers with no more than 5 years of working experience and having a good relationship with employers were 65% and 72.8% more likely to report good self-rated health as compared to their counterparts; those with work-related injury experience and low income were 41.6% and 53.6% less likely to report good self-rated health. Qualitative findings revealed the social contexts of the cumulative effect of the length of work experience and fear of medical cost on migrant workers’ declining health. Even though the participation rate for health insurance in China is reported to be over 99%, the lack of portability in health insurance and different reimbursement rates in health care access are structural barriers in health-seeking behaviors among Chinese migrant workers and in establishing sustainability in China’s healthcare system. This study adds to the literature by delineating the process of the unequal access to social rights in general, healthcare in particular as the major explanation for migrant workers’ poor health beyond the surface of China’s universal healthcare.

This research explores Chinese rural migrant workers' perceived value of tourism from a social tourism perspective. The findings are based on 20 semi‐structured interviews and highlight the benefits that tourism can bring to Chinese rural migrant workers. Theoretically, the study led to the developed of a six‐dimension life work social self‐realization emotional epistemic scale that shows Chinese rural migrant workers' perceived value of tourism based on life value, work value, social value, self‐realization value, emotional value, and epistemic value. Practically, the research provides useful suggestions for government on policy development and opportunities for the design of tourism products for Chinese rural migrant workers. This study challenges the existing understanding of perceived value, which has highlighted tourism value from a macro perspective but neglected to look at perceived value on a micro or individual level.

Since the Reform and Opening-up in China, workers from rural areas have increasingly flooded into cities with the expectation of earning more money. However, there is a considerable gap between migrant workers and native citizens. As a result, the government, researchers, and the public have attached great attention to the social assimilation of migrant workers and have taken a range of measures to eliminate discrimination against this group in order to build a harmonious society. In the Chinese context, social assimilation theory has been applied in studies on migrant workers, who are often regarded as a vulnerable group in political, economic, cultural, and ideological aspects. This paper aims to review Chinese migrant workers from three perspectives of social assimilation theory. First, social fairness impacts migrant workers citizenisation. Second, exclusion indicates low community participation. Finally, resocialisation influences the formation of migrant workers identities. These three aspects are closely connected during social assimilation.

The emergence of Chinese migrant worker theatre constitutes one of the most noted developments in contemporary Chinese culture and has prompted debate over its artistic and discursive value. This article focuses on the theatrical practice of Chinese migrant workers and a community-based play WE 2s: Labour Exchange Market (2019) created by the New Worker Theatrical Troupe, arguing that this labour theatre provides precarious workers not only with drama education but also a shared space for civic education and dissident political expression. By centring Chinese migrant workers’ voices, it examines how they create anti-neoliberal narratives through collective theatre-making and what that means for the global precariat.

In China, people who migrate from rural areas to cities for employment are mainly engaged in physical, repetitive, and low-skilled jobs. Artificial intelligence (AI) increases their unemployment risk, which can harm their mental health. We constructed a moderated mediation model of the link between perceived risk of unemployment and depression, and conducted a survey with 255 rural-to-urban migrant workers. Results revealed that perceived risk of unemployment had a positive association with depression, and AI anxiety mediated this relationship. Further, mindfulness moderated the association of AI anxiety and depression, and the mediating role of AI anxiety between perceived risk of unemployment and depression was negatively moderated by mindfulness. This paper extends research on the antecedents of depression under the impact of AI, providing a theoretical basis for organizational intervention in migrant workers??? mental health problems caused by the transformation of AI.

Driven by the rapid advancement of both cellular network technologies and mobile devices, mobile social network (MSN) services significantly facilitate personal and business communications and therefore inevitably consume substantial network resources and potentially affect the network stability. Despite of their huge user base and popularity, little work has been done to characterize the service model of MSN services. Thus, in light of many works on MSN services focusing on their various different aspects, this paper aims to provide a deep understanding of the service model of MSN services from different levels. In order to reach credible conclusions, our research is based on a large-scale data set collected inside a province wide 4G cellular data network in China. Specially, we choose WeChat Moments (WM) as a case study since it is one of the most popular MSN services in China with 600 millions of active users per month.

Drawing upon Clifford Geertz’s interpretive approach to ritual, this study examines the meaning of the annual Spring Festival homecoming performed by rural-to-urban migrant workers in China. Built on participant observation of the ritual and in-depth interviews with 25 migrant workers, I suggest that the homecoming is a secular pilgrimage, the meaning of which emerges around travelers’ communication about suffering on the journey and the pursuit of an ideal “home” through communal traveling. This ritual exemplifies symbolic forms of communication used to cope with and make sense of social changes in modern societies.

With the development of Internet technology and the increasing popularity of mobile terminals, mobile social network service has become a convenient way to publish information and share resource in our daily life. However, there lacks a good tool to control the granularity of information dissemination in social network. This paper proposes a method for information or resource sharing with precision control, which can measure distance of users in mobile social network and obtain the level of relationship between users to determine how much, and to what precision level, of users' information and resource can be shared. The method can provide a friendly way to protect privacy and decrease the network burden in mobile social network. We take the positioning information service as an example to illustrate the feasibility of the method. Experiment results have shown that this proposed method can effectively reduce the amount of published information.

In the social media era, the ever-increasing utility of Online Social Networks (OSN) services provide a variety of benefits to users, organizations, and service providers. However, OSN services also introduce new threats and privacy issues regarding the data they are dealing with. For instance, in a reliable OSN service, a user should be able to set up his desired level of information sharing and securely manage sensitive data. Currently, few approaches exist that can model OSNs for the purpose, let alone a model the effects that attackers can have on these networks. In this work a novel OSN modeling approach is presented to fill the gap. This model is based on an innovative game-theoretic approach and it is analyzed both from a theoretical and simulation-oriented view. The game-theoretic model is implemented to analyze several attack scenarios. Honeytokens, which are an information security tool based upon deception, are defined and identified as a security tool that could help in OSN security. As the results show, there are several scenarios where OSN services are very vulnerable and hence more protection mechanisms should be provided to secure the data contained across these networks, including the use of honeytokens. In this work we introduce a novel OSN modeling approach for optimal data sharing based on innovative game theories, considering the states/optimal policies of data sharing on OSNs and possible confrontations between the attacker and the user. After we develop the theoretical framework, we conduct experiments, integrating our ideas with honeytokens in several attack scenarios. Finally, we analyze our experimental results and discuss recommendations based on the results.

With the widespread adoption of cloud computing, it is increasingly popular for online social network (OSN) service providers to leverage the public cloud as a back-end to manage their services for the cloud’s well-understood benefits. However, the cloud is also notoriously subject to a wide attack surface, making it an imperative need to embed security in the cloud-backed OSN service from the very beginning. In light of this, in this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate PeGraph, the first system simultaneously allowing private, efficient, and rich queries over encrypted social graphs. PeGraph is aimed at safeguarding the confidentiality of the social graph at the cloud, while preserving the functionality of social search, a key enabler for quality OSN services like friend discovery and user targeting. PeGraph is built from a delicate synergy of insights from social graph modelling and lightweight cryptography such as searchable encryption and additive secret sharing, supporting rich social search queries like exact queries, fuzzy queries, and mixed queries. PeGraph also allows the cloud to obliviously render the encrypted social search results in a ranked order according to their importance, as per users’ preferences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PeGraph can securely process a wide range of practical social search queries within 1 second, over a real-world social graph consisting of millions of entities.