| Author: | Tong, Feifei |
| Title: | Raising children in the cities : social reproduction and mothering practice of rural-urban migrant mothers in China |
| Advisors: | Wu, Qiaobing (APSS) Zhu, Shimin (APSS) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2026 |
| Department: | Department of Applied Social Sciences |
| Pages: | xi, 338 pages : illustrations |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | As China's market-oriented reforms intensify and family migration becomes more prevalent, the organisation of daily care in migrant families has undergone significant changes. Guided by theories of social reproduction and intersectionality, this thesis examines how migrant mothers raise their children in the city, how social policies and institutional inequalities intersect to shape their mothering practices, and what role migrant mothering plays in the broader process of social reproduction. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork across four megacities—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen—this thesis combines in-depth individual and focus group interviews, participant observation, and policy and document analysis. The thesis makes four main contributions. First, this thesis identifies multidimensional mothering: alongside economic and care mothering, mothers perform "Hukou-linked Motherhood," evident in four domains: securing local education, obtaining hukou for children, providing mobile caregiving, and managing the economic strain due to limited public resources. Pressures across these three domains of mothering are intensifying and mutually reinforcing. In particular, Hukou-linked Motherhood has been intensified under post-2014 policy tightening in megacities, which expands mothers' psychological load, financial strain, and motherhood penalty, making both care and economic mothering heavier. Second, this study theorizes a conditional social reproduction regime to explain how these pressures are structurally organised. Access to schooling, social insurance, and housing are stratified by the intersection of hukou status and employment form. Families with local hukou and formal employment receive greater support, while those without must self-fund the requirements for accessing public services. Within this regime, migrant families also face expanding care deficits and rising costs of social reproduction, revealing the persistent absence of the state in supporting their everyday reproduction. Third, this study reframes migrant mothering functions as urban infrastructure. As social reproduction provisioning becomes conditional and exclusionary, mothers are compelled to compensate for institutional deficits through unpaid and underpaid labour: economic mothering that absorbs rising financial and social costs; care mothering that fills the urban care deficit; and Hukou-linked Motherhood that converts documents, credentials, and insurance contributions into eligibility for children's education. The thesis further demonstrates that these costs compound across the life course, producing a cumulative mothering penalty. Theoretically, the thesis demonstrates the analytical productivity of combining social reproduction theory and intersectionality. SRT explained why care costs have been transferred from the state onto families; intersectionality explained how those costs are distributed in a patterned way organised by the intersection of hukou status, employment form, and gender. In extending intersectionality beyond its original race-centred formulation, the thesis offered a localised analytical framework for understanding gender inequality in China, while also providing empirical support for a core claim of social reproduction theory. Policy interventions should therefore avoid valorizing maternal resilience as a substitute for institutional support. Instead, they should aim to redistribute reproductive responsibilities across the state, communities, and employers. The findings point to structural remedies: decoupling public services from hukou status, expanding affordable childcare, recognising caregiving labour in social insurance calculations, and extending gender-sensitive labour protections to workers in precarious and platform-based employment. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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