Cultural Repression And Cultural Autonomy: A Case Study Of New Generation Peasant Workers In Village Q, City B

With the fast economic growth experienced by China in recent years, newgeneration peasant workers play a more and more important role in Chinese society.However, current studies seldom pay attention to the cultural condition of these peasantworkers. Based on the survey conducted in Q Village, City B, this paper raises thisquestion: Which culture have new generation peasant workers developed due to beingaffected by both hukou system and social stratification? Furthermore, this paper tries toprobe into these following questions: Into which position are these peasant workersthemselves placed in their culture? How are they related to the upper class, urbandwellers, and the urban society as a wholein their discourse and culture?This paper finds that the culture of Chinese current new generation peasantworkers can be described as negative and repressed in general. Firstly, the peasantworkers tend to depict the relationship between them and their bosses in terms ofweakened moral economy. Moreover,“masculinity”, which is usually a main source ofprotest for the laborers in other countries and regions, becomes repressed. Secondly, thepeasant workers are unable to claim their “positivity” with an autonomous culture. Theirconformity to education and cultural capital, their mobilizing social Darwinist or othermiddle class norms to confirm the legitimacy of upper class, their lacking a powerfulidentity which can help them to struggle for their dignity, and their cultural activities’bearing the characteristics of neither value nor instrument, being nothing but the way inwhich their body force is reproduced, all of these discourses contribute to theirself-negation. Thirdly, owing to the repression and self-negation, these peasant workersbegin to exit the urban life, lead a self-excluded life. This “exit” is simultaneouslyself-coercive. Finally, their hope is greatly restrained by the mechanismsaforementioned.This paper argues that the interaction between cultural repression, economicpoverty and social exclusion has intensified the agony suffered by new generationpeasant workers. To overcome this agony, this paper proposes that, besides recognition,cultural autonomy is a necessary approach. This paper further defines cultural autonomyat two levels: formal and substantive, it also discusses the components of culturalautonomy in the conclusion.