From Factory to Platform: Gender, Labor, and the Human-Machine Reconfiguration in China’s Reform

Jun Zhou, University of Michigan

Once known as the “world’s workshop,” China has risen to become a key player in the digital economy, contributing over one-third to the nation’s GDP amid rising youth unemployment rates. The allure of digital technology has drawn millions into digital labor. While many studies highlight the disruptive nature of digital technology, my research adopts a comprehensive “micro-macro” perspective to analyze the emerging trend of feminized digital labor within the broader women’s labor history. This approach examines both the continuities and changes from historical patterns of capital accumulation and control. Female digital labors, embodying the historical archetypes of factory and service workers, now function as “platform factory women” under the relentless surveillance of algorithms. Despite such surveillance, they seem to enjoy greater autonomy and flexibility within the digital labor regime compared to their counterparts in traditional, pre-digital work settings. Leveraging historical data on women workers in the factory and service sectors from the 1980s, along with 14 months of ethnographic research in the influencer industry—a sector at the cutting edge of digital technology yet grappling with deep-seated power disparities—this study uncovers how digital technologies have reshaped gendered labor relations as China transitions from an export-oriented manufacturing base to a domestic-centric digital economy. The advent of cybernetic control within the digital labor regime has profoundly transformed human-machine interactions at work, changing workers’ subjectivity and, hence, modes of resistance within and beyond the workplace. By historically analyzing the discourse on the precarious nature of digital labor and the purported emancipatory potential of digital technologies, this study not only highlights the immediate effects of this shift but also uncovers the wider and more enduring impacts of digital labor on women, both in personal and political realms.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 64. Commemorating Xiaohong Xu: Historicizing the Cultural Revolution and the Reform