"We are not weak people in cities!" : an empirical study of the identity-reconstruction of the Chinese rural migrant workers

Abstract

Viewing the rural-urban migration as a change of life world for each individual, this study aims to investigate how the individual constructs the meaning of the self from the new experiences in the migration process. The author examines through the self in three different stages of the migration process. She shows respectively through empirical studies how the self had been pre-shaped in the rural context in the decision-making stage; how the migration can bring a cleavage to the individual’s self-identity in the migrating stage, and how the continuity of the self can be achieved again with a reconstructed self-identity in the individual’s later stage of living in cities. With a critical point of view towards the researches in the same study field, the author argues that in the study of the rural migrant workers, the agency of the rural migrant workers should not be ignored; and to fully understand the rural-urban migration in the Chinese context, researchers, especially western researchers, should give a special attention to the cultural patterns.