Precarious Geographies: Migrant Labor in China’s Network Production

Speaker: Na Fu, Postdoctoral Associate, the China Initiative and the Watson Institution for International and Public Affairs, Brown University

Moderator: Nick R. Smith, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies Program, Architecture Department, Urban Studies, Barnard College

As industrial production decentralizes, rural China has become a new hub for networked manufacturing, blurring the boundaries between factory and home. Migrant workers like Mrs. Wang are returning to their hometowns to set up workshop-style facilities, driven by labor shortages, infrastructure improvements, and digital connectivity. This study examines how mobility, once seen as a path to opportunity, now reinforces labor precarity, reshaping spatial and economic relations under China’s evolving network production system.

Speaker’s Bio: Na Fu holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the New School for Social Research and is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at China Initiative at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Her research explores the intersections of digital labor, political economy, and smart production, focusing on how technological advancements reinforce social inequities and drive resource extraction in industrial transformations.

Na was a student fellow of the Mellon funded Sawyer Seminar on Imagined Mobilities, and received the Student Research Award from the New School in 2018. She is part of the India China Institute (ICI), who worked on the Urban Inequality project that included collaboration between India and China fellows. Her dissertation research has also been funded by Summer Fieldwork Scholarship from ICI and the Politics Dissertation Fellowship from NSSR in 2020. Before coming to New School, Na joined the Center for Urban and Global Studies (CUGS) as visiting scholar in Trinity College at the Fall 2017 semester, supported by Luce Foundation. She was the head of the research department at The Shenzhen Center for Design and received the master’s degree on the Community and Regional Planning from University of Texas, Austin in 2012. Her research practice looks at the social inequality issues related to urban gentrification on migrate settlement. Her book chapter “The Spatial Decoupling and Recombination of Capital and Labor,” written in collaboration with Xiangming Chen, was published in Mobilities of Labour and Capital in Asia in 2020. Her article “Evolving Rural Typologies for Rapidly Growing Cities” was published in Architectural Design magazine in 2018. She worked on the “Community Building: Releasing the Pressure” book chapter in Shenzhen from Factory of the World to World City, published in 2016.

This event is hosted by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

Registration: To attend this event in-person, please register HERE.