Quan Gao

This paper examines the connections between the neoliberal governance of migrants and Christian theo-ethics. Although regulating migrant labourers has been explored as one of the primary mechanisms of neoliberal governance, the ‘actually existing’ workings of this neoliberal migrant regime and in particular its everyday encounters with locally based ethical agents are relatively unexplored. On the one hand, I draw attention to how neoliberal subjectivities are materialised in the disciplinary migrant labour regime in Shenzhen, China. The reconciliation of neoliberalism and autocratic power has resulted in the hyper-exploitation of migrant workers. On the other hand, I explore how lived enactment of Christian theo-ethics in the everyday praxis of care and justice for marginalised migrant workers can open an ethical space that reconstitutes the subjectivities normalised by autocratic and neoliberal agendas. I argue that theo-ethics not only negotiates but also co-constitutes neoliberal governance by either ameliorating neoliberal subjectivity or drawing on neoliberal logics per se; regardless, it creates possibilities of more hopeful spaces and hybrid subjectivities.

In the reform era, China appears to be caught in a contradictory dual process – the entrenchment of secular values and simultaneously, the notable revival of all forms of religion. However, the existing literature has achieved limited success theorizing how the thriving of faiths constitutes, and co-evolves with, secular modernity and capitalism. This article contributes to this re-theorization by bringing migration, labour and industrial capitalism to bear on faith and religious practices. Our empirical study in Shenzhen focuses on the formation of rural-to-urban migrant workers’ Christian faith. We examine the ways in which migrant workers manoeuvre religion as a cultural, symbolic and discursive resource to come to terms with, but also sometimes to question and counteract, the double exploitation enforced by state regulation and labour relations. In the meantime, however, this article also argues that migrants’ efforts in self-transformation through the discourses ofbenfenandsuzhi, and their theologically mediated interpretation of alienation, labour exploitation and social inequality, overlap with, and reinforce, the agenda of producing docile, productive bodies of migrants, an agenda endorsed by the state–capital coalition. This research opens new opportunities for theorizing how capitalist secularity and religious orientation implicate one another in the current Chinese society.