755652

research-article2018
WES0010.1177/0950017018755652Work, employment and societyChoi

Article

Work, Employment and Society

Masculinity and Precarity:

2018, Vol. 32(3) 493­–508
© The Author(s) 2018
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Male Migrant Taxi Drivers in sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0950017018755652
https://doi.org/10.1177/0950017018755652
South China journals.sagepub.com/home/wes

Susanne YP Choi
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR

Abstract
This article examines how male rural-to-urban migrant taxi drivers’ experience of a loss of control
over their working conditions and increasing financial insecurity are driven by state regulation
and market reorganization of the taxi industry, and their status as second class citizens in urban
China. Precarity, as explored in this article, speaks to feelings of disempowerment, a profound
sense of livelihood insecurity and a crisis of social reproduction that has resulted from workplace
reorganization that marginalizes workers. The findings contribute to the study of precarity and
masculinity by first unpacking how masculine identities are built around men’s access to masculine
service niches and their control over working conditions in these niches. It then shows how
precariousness negates these male workers’ sense of self by simultaneously taking away the
control that distinguishes their work from factory employment and female-dominated service
jobs; and undermining their capacity to meet the provider norm.

Keywords
China, masculinity, migration, precarity, service work, taxi driver

Introduction
On 5 April 2015, a group of over 30 male taxi drivers drank pesticide in a dramatic mass
suicide protest in Beijing, the capital city of China. These drivers came from the north-
eastern province of Heilongjiang and had come to Beijing to petition the central govern-
ment to lift their city’s ban on drivers owning and operating their own taxis. The regulations
passed by Heilongjiang in 2011 compelled drivers to lease taxis through government-
appointed, often state-owned, taxi companies. Drivers complained that these companies

Corresponding author:
Susanne YP Choi, Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, Hong Kong
SAR.
Email: choiyp@cuhk.edu.hk
494 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

extracted high deposits and charged monthly rental fees that seriously undermined their
livelihoods. In fact, between 2008 and 2015 taxi drivers in half a dozen major Chinese cit-
ies went on strike to protest against taxi company monopoly, high monthly car rental fees
and intensified competition from unlicensed taxi operators. In January 2015 in Dongguan
and Shenzhen, two of the research localities of this article, over 1000 taxi drivers partici-
pated in a three-day strike to protest against the same problems and to petition taxi compa-
nies to take over their obligations to pay insurance premiums. They also demanded state
intervention to crack down on ride-hailing services that offered rides in unlicensed cars
(China Labour Bulletin, 2016). Reports from Guangzhou, another research locality of this
article, suggested that the income of taxi drivers had dropped by around a third, prompting
a mass exodus of drivers from the industry (China Times, 2015).
As this article illustrates, the mass suicide protest and strikes of taxi drivers in China,
many of whom are rural-to-urban male migrant workers, were driven by a deep sense of
anger against eroding autonomy at work and increased livelihood insecurity. These taxi
drivers’ experiences reflect two specific attributes of precarious employment – workers’
loss of control over their working conditions and insufficient pay. Both are highlighted
by Rogers and Rogers (1989) in their distinction between precarious work and ‘standard
work’. According to Rogers and Rogers (1989), precarious employment often embodies
four attributes, including employment insecurity, workers increasingly losing individual
and collective control over working conditions, poor pay, and lack of state protection of
workers against unfair treatment by management. Earlier studies on precarious work
have focused on how labour law deregulation and flexible labour arrangements in Europe
and North America have created job precariousness (Kalleberg, 2009). More recently,
scholars have argued that precarious employment has been the norm rather than the
exception under capitalism, with job precariousness a phenomenon prevalent among
female and migrant workers in the global North, and workers in general in the global
South (Betti, 2016; Schierup and Jørgensen, 2016).
Given women’s overrepresentation in precarious work, most existing studies on the
gendered nature of precarious employment have focused on the specific experiences of
female workers (De Ruyter and Warnecke, 2008; Pun, 2004; Webber and Williams,
2008). This body of literature highlights the intersection between femininity and precar-
ity by illustrating how the traditional gender division of domestic labour and care respon-
sibilities, neo-liberal development and welfare models, migration and workplace
practices, have coerced women into precarious work. This article contributes to discus-
sions of gender and job precariousness by examining the relationship between masculin-
ity and precarity. Focusing on male rural-to-urban migrant taxi drivers in post-reform
China, it further explicates how states in developing countries deploy precarity as a
mechanism of labour control in the name of macro-development and national moderni-
zation (Lee and Kofman, 2012).

Precarity, service work and masculinity

Research of precarious employment commonly associates it with the casualization of
labour in post-Fordist production and the retrenchment of welfare states in the European
and North American contexts (Kalleberg, 2009). To a great extent, precarious
Choi 495

employment reflects a long-term and structural development of capitalism as observed

by scholars of dual labour market theory, labour market segmentation theory and the
theory of labour market flexibilization (Barbieri and Scherer, 2009). Beck (2000) argues
that the spread of insecure, poorly paid work with minimum worker control and protec-
tion from labour law in the West represents a convergence of the world of work of the
so-called ‘first world’ and the so-called ‘third world’, where the labour market has been
characterized by informality and insecurity. While it may be true that informality and
insecurity have been the norm of work in developing regions, the ‘first’ and ‘third’ world
convergence argument risks losing sight of the different roles that states have played in
the precarization of employment. In the West, precarity is experienced primarily as a
result of macro-structural changes in the labour market, and the state has been drawn into
the debate because of its refusal to intervene; or because of its failure to provide a safety
net against the ravages of the market (Casas-Cortés, 2014).
In developing countries in Africa and Asia, where states have historically lacked both
economic resources and political prowess to function as welfare states, they have refash-
ioned themselves as ‘developmental states’ drawing their legitimacy from actively promot-
ing and sustaining economic development (Ong, 2000). Lee and Kofman (2012), for
example, argue that the post-Mao Chinese state created a precarious labour force through
the dual mechanisms of mass lay-off of state employees and the stratification of the work-
force into rural and urban populations. On the one hand, about 60 million state employees
lost their ‘iron bowls’ (secure jobs in Communist China) in the 1990s under various poli-
cies. On the other hand, the household registration system (hu kou) was mobilized to divide
the population into ‘urban citizens’ and ‘rural migrant workers’ in cities. This system first
restricted the mobility of rural peasants to urban areas, and later limited their access to state
sponsored welfare in urban areas after their migration (Pun, 2004). By so doing, the state
ensured the continuous supply of precarious and cheap Chinese labour, the bulk of whom
are rural-to-urban migrant workers, for both local and international capital. In fact, the
close link between migration and precarity has drawn considerable attention from scholars
in different parts of the world, with Schierup and Jørgensen (2016: 949) arguing that ‘The
“migrant” is the quintessential incarnation of precarity.’
Since job precariousness has increasingly become a vital part of the lives of both
male and female workers, it is important that studies examine the interrelationship
between masculinity and precarity as well as femininity and precarity (De Ruyter and
Warnecke, 2008; Pun, 2004; Webber and Williams, 2008). Scholars have argued that
work provides meaning that is central to male gender identity. Being occupied in paid
employment symbolizes a man’s willingness to take on his responsibility to support his
family and to be its breadwinner. In particular, being able to provide for one’s children
is central to many men’s identities as fathers, with men feeling emasculated if they fail
to bring home an adequate wage (Nixon, 2006). Precarious jobs that generate wages
which fall short of what workers need to support their families therefore undermines
male workers both instrumentally and symbolically. Instrumentally, precarity related to
low pay means that they are unable to meet the financial needs of their families; sym-
bolically precarity undermines their sense of manhood. In addition to providing for their
families, work also provides space for men to demonstrate masculine attributes of phys-
ical toughness, technicality, power, control and authority (Willis, 1979). Nixon (2009)
496 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

argues that working class men often reject entry-level service work because they con-
sider that this work requires feminine skills such as deference and docility. Instead of
‘fronting up’ and ‘shouting back’, workers in service employment are obliged to do
emotional labour and hide their feelings during conflict with their managers or custom-
ers. Nixon (2009) finds that working class men are attracted to masculine service niches
– service work that is dominated by men and that requires skills that are considered
masculine – such as driving and security work. This preference arises because men
prefer working alongside other men and holding jobs that allow them ‘more freedom to
get out and about and involve much lower levels of surveillance and control’ (Nixon,
2009: 317). How would male workers in these masculine service niches respond if the
power, control and autonomy underpinning their work were to be taken away and
replaced with demands to do emotional labour in order to be deferential to customers
just as women in female-dominated service jobs must be? As will be elaborated in this
article, one aspect of job precariousness that the male taxi drivers interviewed for this
research experienced was the loss of valued control over working conditions and power
over customers in service encounters, in other words, the feminization of their mascu-
line service niche.
Studies suggest that there is declining support for the male breadwinner/female home-
maker model in western societies (Roberts, 2013). On the other hand, masculinity in the
Chinese context has continued to centre on the male breadwinner norm and men’s capac-
ity (ben shi) to establish and support a heterosexual family (Yang, 2010). While rural-to-
urban migrant men generally lack the resources to live up to the urban hegemonic
masculine ideal that values entrepreneurship, wealth, educational credentials and profes-
sional occupational status (Choi and Peng, 2016; Lin, 2013; Zhang, 2010), many aspire
to set up their own businesses. Running their own business is perceived by them to be an
indication of their capabilities (Lin, 2013). They have also developed an alternative mas-
culinity that anchors respectable manhood on a man’s willingness to ‘eat bitterness’ (chi
ku) and make self-sacrifices to meet the hetero-normative family requirement of being a
head and provider of the family by raising children to continue the family line (Choi and
Peng, 2016). It is within this context that this article examines the meaning of work and
how its increasing precariousness has impacted on taxi drivers’ masculinity.

Method and data

The analysis of this article was based on in-depth interviews with 47 male rural-to-urban
migrant taxi drivers that were conducted by the author and her research assistants between
2012 and 2015 in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Dongguan. The research sites were the larg-
est cities in Guangdong province, which hosted the largest number of rural-to-urban
migrants in China according to the 2000 census (Liang and Ma, 2004). The author gained
access to taxi drivers through her personal network and used convenience sampling.
While the gender of respondents was not part of the sampling criteria, the author ended up
with an all-male sample. According to the respondents, taxiing in the three research locali-
ties was dominated by male rural-to-urban migrant workers. Female or local taxi drivers
were rare. The interviews were conducted in rented hostel rooms in migrant enclaves
(cheng zhong cun) where the respondents resided. All interviews were conducted in
Choi 497

Mandarin and lasted between two to three hours. Informed consent was received from all
respondents. After completion of the interviews, respondents were given 100 yuan (around
11 British pounds) as an expression of gratitude for participating in the study. Each inter-
view included a semi-structured discussion on issues related to migration, work and fam-
ily and a questionnaire on their sociodemographic characteristics.
The mean age of the respondents was 37.7 years. Thirty-seven respondents were
intra-provincial migrants who came from rural Guangdong and the other 10 were inter-
provincial migrants. None of the respondents had household registration (hu kou) that
would enable them access to welfare and benefits in the cities. The majority (36%) of the
respondents earned between 2000 to 4999 yuan monthly (around 230 to 576 British
pounds), 30% earned between 5000 and 9999 yuan monthly (around 577 to 1153 British
pounds) and 32% earned more than 10,000 yuan monthly (above 1153 British pounds).
One respondent did not provide income data. Thirty-seven respondents were married,
one was divorced and nine were single at the time of the interviews. Among the married
respondents, all had children and the mean number of children was two.
Full verbatim transcripts were prepared for detailed analysis of significant issues and
episodes related to respondents’ work lives, the circumstances leading to these issues, the
impact of these issues on their well-being and their feelings and responses to the issues.
The next section illustrates the key characteristics of taxiing in South China; and how
this industry has undergone various changes in work organization that has led directly to
increased job precarity for taxi drivers.

Taxiing in post-reform South China

While work hours were generally very long for taxi drivers and many had only one rest
day every 20 working days, drivers considered themselves to be running their own busi-
nesses (shengyi) and treasured the earning potential and freedom this offered, as Huo, a
32-year-old driver in Guangzhou, explained:

In taxiing, the more you work, the more you earn (duolaoduode), you are running your own
business … When I first came to Guangzhou I did not consider factory work because it offered
lower pay and less freedom compared with taxiing. A taxi driver could decide whether you
work or not work today … there is more autonomy … if you take up other jobs, there definitely
would be regulations about time schedules. For taxiing, you arrange your own schedule with
your partner. If you do not feel well today, you can ask your partner to swap.

Chen (2015: 1) has argued that ‘taxi drivers were some of China’s original entrepre-
neurs in the Reform Era’. However as the economy of China took off following the
economic reforms in the early 1980s, local governments were eager to increase the
branding and profile of their cities to attract overseas investors. Taxis were part of these
branding projects (Chong, 2014). To ensure effective government control of the taxi
industry and to stamp out irregular practices such as refusing hire, refusing destinations,
overcharging, not taking the most direct route and bad attitudes towards customers, the
Ministry of Construction and Ministry of Public Security promulgated ‘Measures for the
Administration of Urban Taxis’ (chengshi chuzuche guanli banfa) in 1998. Following
498 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

the implementation of these measures, city governments across China gradually scrapped
individual taxi operators (geti jingying) in the early 2000s. In their place, they gave the
rights to operate licensed taxis to either state-owned enterprises or taxi companies with
special ‘guanxi’ (connections) with local governments (Chen, 2015). These companies
paid local governments 50,000 yuan (around 5900 British pounds) for each taxi licence
franchise. They in turn leased vehicles out to individual taxi drivers for lump sum depos-
its of around 50,000 yuan and monthly fees (fenziqian) of between 9000 and 12,000 yuan
for periods of five years each. While taxi drivers generally perceived taxiing as a busi-
ness and themselves as ‘partners’ (huoban) instead of workers (yuan gong) of taxi com-
panies, they were required to sign labour contracts with taxi companies and were
increasingly under the control of these companies. Taxi companies recruited, trained and
supervised taxi drivers. Taxi companies had the right to punish taxi drivers upon receiv-
ing complaints from customers. They also had absolute power to fire taxi drivers and
take back their vehicles. An increasing concern of taxi companies was the provision of
good service to customers. The respondents surveyed in this research alleged that not
only did taxi companies operate at nearly zero costs – as the franchise fee they paid to the
local government was completely shouldered by taxi drivers – they also possessed
supreme power over drivers. For example, taxi companies in the research sites ordered
drivers to wear uniforms to work. When drivers were interviewed for their jobs, they
were checked to make sure that they did not have tattoos. Those with tattoos in bodily
areas that would be exposed to customers were disqualified. Taxi drivers were also not
allowed to have long hair. Local transport police conducted regular and unannounced
check-ups of taxi drivers’ appearances and the appearances of their vehicles at airports
and in taxi ranks at railway stations. Companies also reminded their taxi drivers to keep
their finger nails short during their monthly training sessions. In sum, as brand repre-
sentatives of the city, taxi drivers were required to ‘sound polite’ and ‘look right’. While
taxi drivers saw themselves as individual operators running their own businesses, they
were increasingly treated by taxi companies as service workers whose emotions and
aesthetics had to be managed and controlled to meet the expectations of customers
(Warhurst et al., 2000).

Stuck and suck: Inadequate provider and the crisis of social

reproduction
It is cool to drive a car, but it sucks to be a taxi driver.

Choi, a 43-year-old taxi driver, summed up how he felt about being a taxi driver in
Guangzhou for 11 years. Although the pay of taxi drivers in the sample compared favour-
ably with other migrant workers, whose mean monthly income was around 3072 yuan
(approximately 352 British pounds) in 2015 (National Bureau of Statistics of China,
2016), the respondents considered their income to be inadequate and were anxious about
the rental loss during rest days, unless they could find temporary replacements to run
their cars. As Shui, a driver in Dongguan told us: ‘If you rest for a day, you lose the rental
fees … We need to continue working even when we have flu and fever … there are four
mouths to feed … of course the pressure is enormous.’
Choi 499

Wang, a taxi driver in Shenzhen since 1998, lamented that the lives of male migrant
taxi drivers had become increasingly difficult because while their salaries had more or
less stayed the same for the past five or six years, living costs in the city had soared. As
he explained:

Back a couple of years, it was easy for a taxi driver to make 4000–5000 yuan a month. Now we
struggle to make this amount … I need to pay for my two daughters’ education … My finances
are very tight …Our work keeps our stomachs filled, but not full … It is my responsibility as a
father to support my children … I cannot even support my parents … We cannot compare
ourselves with city folks. They have higher positions, make more money, have better houses,
and have savings and time to enjoy socializing with friends.

Ai, a 40-year-old driver in Guangzhou, shared similar grievances:

I make around 4000 a month, but things are expensive in the city. Life is very difficult … my
wife, my parents, and my three children stay in the village … supporting the children is very
hard … they need money for schooling, they need to eat … everything costs money … every
week they ask for money.

Both Wang and Ai defined manhood by the ability of a man to adequately provide for his
family. They migrated to the city and entered taxiing to achieve this goal, and yet despite
their gruelling efforts, they felt that they had failed miserably as men. Not only could they
barely support their children, they could not support their ageing parents, not to mention
achieving the all-consuming standard of city manhood that defines success through a man’s
possession of high status and a high paying job, a flat and savings that would allow him to
enjoy some leisure and the opportunity to socialize with friends (Zhang, 2010).
While older and married taxi drivers struggled to provide for their families, younger
and single taxi drivers battled to save enough money to marry and set up a family. To
marry in post-socialist China is a gendered and complex project. A man needs to own a
house, have financial means to pay for the bride-price and the wedding banquet to
become a qualified suitor in the marriage market (Lin, 2013). Excluding costs for build-
ing a house or purchasing a flat, a wedding may cost around 150,000 yuan (equivalent to
17,535 British pounds). As Guo, a 25-year-old taxi driver from rural Guangdong, pointed
out, unless a young man could achieve the goal of finding a wife and getting married, he
remained only ‘50% man’.
The problem is that the standard of male marriage eligibility is inflating fast (Choi and
Peng, 2016). Ten years ago, a rural man would be considered marriageable material if he
had a house in his rural home. In the new millennium, this is simply not good enough. As
Mei, a 25-year-old taxi driver in Shenzhen, explained:

My parents built me a house in our rural home, but it is of no use now. Regardless of how many
floors your rural home has, regardless of how beautifully decorated it is, it is useless now. Now
you need to have a flat in the town, or in the city, to be able to find a wife.

While living costs and standards of manhood are rising, the earnings of taxi drivers
have stagnated. Not only do monopolized taxi companies take a big cut out from their
500 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

earnings, they now also face fierce competition from unlicensed motor taxis and ride-
hailing services such as Uber. The importance of being an adequate provider, and the
discrepancy between this ideal, stagnant incomes, soaring living costs and inflating
standards of manhood, gave rise to grievances among the respondents in this study.
Adding to their resentment was their feeling that they were increasingly losing control at
work and were subject to intensified managerial control and consumer power.

Diminished control over working conditions

Our respondents conceded that some state regulation of the taxi industry was necessary
to tackle taxi driver misconduct, such as refusing hires. They also reckoned that in the
1990s, taxi drivers often preferred to bargain than charge metered prices. This in turn
allowed them to overcharge customers. Yet they argued that after the implementation of
the ‘Measures for the Administration of Urban Taxis’ in 1998, and the increased penalty
over misconduct in the late 1990s, taxi drivers hardly had any opportunities to engage in
irregular practices. They argued that despite these changes, the disempowering control
over their trade had not lessened. Rather, it became even more excessive, top–down, and
authoritarian over time. Taxi drivers considered existing and intensified state regulation
unfair and that it had resulted from collusion between state and taxi companies to exploit
individual drivers. As Wang, a 47-year-old taxi driver in Shenzhen, complained:

It is important that the state regulates the taxi industry. Yet they do it in such a top–down way
that completely ignores our views. The taxi company gives you a contract and demands that
you sign it. The company drafts the contract to protect its own interest. … If you refuse to sign
the contract, the company will not hire you … We workers have no say … The taxi companies
refused to negotiate with us. When we organized strikes, they asked the government to intervene
and arrest us … You see the taxi company and the government, they are friends … In China,
law enforcement agencies are lenient to those with whom should be strict, and excessively strict
to those they should be exonerating … What can you say, we are only a bunch of poor ordinary
people.

Our respondents, including Wang, were upset with what they saw as evidence of bla-
tant power imbalances between individual drivers, taxi companies and local transport
bureaus. First, they complained that taxi companies were monopolies that charged drivers
exorbitant amounts of money in the name of deposits and monthly rental fees. When busi-
ness was good, taxi drivers had to pay middlemen unofficial ‘tea money’ to procure a
contract. The tea money could amount to 20 times the deposit and was pocketed by the
middlemen. In essence, the tea money was a form of bribery and drivers thought that it
existed because of taxi company monopoly. When business was bad, for instance, hit by
major economic downturns, taxi companies did not voluntarily adjust the monthly rental
fees. Second, taxi drivers disputed the means of taxi company control. As Wang explained:

We taxi drivers are on the road 12 hours every day … We would understand it if the company
bans a driver from doing business after some serious violation of traffic rules or taxi codes, but
why ban us from doing business for minor violations such as stepping on lines? … If the taxi
company receives a complaint from a customer, it asks drivers to return to the company to
Choi 501

submit a report, but could this be done after we finish work? Now you ask us to report to the
company during our working hours, this is unfair and affects our business … Before we only
needed to attend training sessions organized by the company once a month, now we need to
attend such trainings twice a month. Does the company compensate our time lost attending
these training sessions?

Wang’s complaints were echoed by other respondents who said that they had been
vocal about these problems to their taxi companies, but apparently they felt that their
voices had fallen on deaf ears. When they organized strikes to petition local governments
to improve their working conditions, they were labelled as ‘troublemakers’ (naoshi zhe)
and arrested by their local governments. Drivers felt that they were stuck in an unfair
situation. While the local governments could increase the number of taxi licences if
demand for taxi services increased, drivers could not opt out of the trade if business was
bad because they had signed five-year contracts with their taxi companies. A taxi com-
pany had the power to fire a driver and terminate his contract as it saw fit, but drivers did
not have any channel to petition against unfair company policies and treatment. The taxi
industry was particularly sensitive to macro-economic downturns, or deteriorating busi-
ness environments caused by periodic state crackdown of the sex industry in coastal
cities such as Dongguan, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. When business was bad, many driv-
ers thought of quitting, and yet they also conceded that this was not an option because if
they opted out before their contracts expired, they lost the 50,000 yuan deposit to the taxi
company.
Drivers attributed the root cause of their problem to state policies that favoured the
rich and the privileged at the expense of ordinary and powerless people. As Xing, a
41-year-old taxi driver, criticized:

We are a low income group, but we pay a hell of a lot more tax than many rich people. The
government launches many new policies, and each policy hurts the poor but does not hurt the
rich … Each policy hits ordinary labourers like us, it does not harm the white collars, the golden
collars and the silver collars.

Living and coping with diminished power and control

at work
Driving a taxi is dangerous work. Drivers reported that they were vulnerable to payment
refusal, robbery, physical assaults and homicides perpetrated by customers, or people
pretending to be customers. Statistics in the USA show that among all occupations, taxi
drivers are the third most vulnerable to violent assault, followed by police and security
guards (Gambetta and Hamill, 2005). Data on violent assaults against taxi drivers and the
homicide rates of taxi drivers are not available in China, but the interviews conducted
with taxi drivers in this research showed that these types of risk are omnipresent in their
working lives. Taxi drivers thus needed to devise strategies to avoid, deter, screen and
probe attackers, and limit the damage in case of attack. Despite being in a dangerous
industry, danger was not what bothered drivers the most. Customer abuse and road bul-
lies were. As Zhan, a 27-year-old taxi driver from rural Guangdong, explained:
502 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

This is especially humiliating (shouqi) work … We are bullied. Whether we are right or wrong,
we are always wrong … You cannot speak too loudly and you cannot speak too softly … If you
speak too softly the customer yells at you that they cannot hear you … People in this city know
that we are from the village. They think that they are superior to us. They just look so unfriendly.

Drivers such as Zhan argued that city folks generally considered rural-to-urban
migrant workers as having low quality (suzhi) (see also Hanser, 2005; Otis, 2011) and
held the view that taxi drivers were untrustworthy operators. Customers often suspected
that taxi drivers had overcharged them. In other incidences, the interests of taxi drivers
and customers diverged – customers wanted taxi drivers to pick them up and drop them
off at the most convenient location whereas taxi drivers wanted to finish a transaction
with the shortest time possible so that they could pick up another customer, and taxi driv-
ers needed to obey traffic rules that customers might not be aware of. The encounters
between taxi drivers and customers were brief, but laden with issues related to risk, trust
and conflict of interest. Many customers had also increasingly considered that they were
buying not just a ride, but good service. Adding to the tension was the fact that many
drivers were migrant workers who were perceived by urbanites as second class residents
of the city. As Xing, a 41-year-old taxi driver, told us:

We are migrant workers, strangers to the city. When I first started taxiing I needed to face an
unfamiliar environment, a new language and roads that are very different from rural areas and
roads that I did not know about. You see, we cannot speak the local dialect and some customers
look down on us … When I first started taxiing, I often needed to very politely ask the customers
if they knew the way … Some customers had empathy and understood that we were migrant
workers, and they were happy to navigate … But some customers yelled at me or questioned
me by saying ‘how can you be a taxi driver if you don’t even know the way?’

Xing lamented that some customers lacked the empathy to understand the difficulties
migrant workers faced making the transition into employment in cities. He told us that
when he was younger, he often thought about quitting taxiing because he was bullied
several times by unruly customers. Once three male customers refused to pay the fare,
beat him up, spat at him and damaged his vehicle. To make things worse, he discovered
that the insurance company only covered 80% of the damage; he had to cover the remain-
ing 20% out of his own pocket. He felt it was so unfair and most importantly, felt so
degraded that he thought of returning to his rural home. As he recalled the event and his
inner feelings at that time:

I was so pissed that time … they spat at me. How humiliating! … I could not swallow the
degradation … I wanted to quit and return to my rural home. I did return home, but it was
boring at home … I was a big man and I was jobless at home. My parents grumbled … and I
returned to the city again.

Drivers felt that the reform of the taxi industry had tipped the balance of power in
favour of customers, who now had channels through which to launch complaints against
them. Drivers were aggrieved at what they saw as the symbolic domination of customers
over them. They lamented the disrespect of customers who yelled at them; questioned
Choi 503

their competency as taxi drivers; spat at them; put their legs up on the back of the drivers’
seats; insisted on smoking in the car, and threw taxi fares at drivers. These abusive inci-
dents directly shook their sense of masculine dignity. In addition to conflict with custom-
ers, the respondents also reminisced about being bullied by road-users who appeared to
have powerful connections (guanxi). As Le, a 38-year-old driver in Dongguan, told us:

Some galling drivers … work for big bosses … They see us as servants … I work to support my
family and I would not quarrel with these people … even if they bully me … Sometimes they
just stop their cars on the road and block you, sometimes they honk their horn because your
vehicle is in front … We often need to give way to them but they never give way to us and when
we pass them, they yell at us … I do not have time to ‘play’ with them … They have guanxi
with the police, with cadres, they are the people of the big bosses, they are the rich people …
We are migrant workers, we do not have guanxi, our income is low and we know very little
about the law … so we just put up with the road bullies.

Le attributed his experience of being bullied by other drivers to his status as a

rural-to-urban migrant worker in an increasingly disrespected and tightly controlled
service job. Some drivers coped with conflict with customers and road bullying
through controlling their emotions (Hochschild, 2012) and adopting ‘soft’ strategies
that reflected their acceptance of their status as service workers. These workers saw
having ‘good attitudes’ as an integral part of the service taxi drivers provided to their
customers. They tried to avoid having ‘hard confrontations’ (ying zhe lai) with cus-
tomers. Some taxi drivers said that even if they were beaten up or had their car doors
kicked and damaged, or windows smashed by angry customers and road bullies, they
just persuaded themselves to swallow the abuse and adjust their attitudes to accept it
as part of their work life. Others said that they would try all means to avoid a customer
from filing a complaint. Even when they thought that they were right and the custom-
ers were wrong, they still gave discounts or simply waived the taxi fares to pacify
customers and avoid the filing of a complaint. Kwong, a 43-year-old driver from
Jiangxi province, bemoaned:

We taxi drivers are a marginalized and vulnerable group. Some customers know that you do not
have the time to be entangled in a dispute with them … if he damages my car, he is supposed
to cover its repair, right? But he refuses to pay … I do not have the time to pursue him … They
know our situation … we are just taxi drivers. We do not have the time to seek justice … so we
just swallow it.

However, not all drivers were willing to silently put up with what they saw as abuse
from customers or other road-users. Choi, a 43-year-old driver from rural Guangdong,
told the author his stories of using violence to get equal with abusive customers:

The fight happened when I was still a novice driver. I was delivering four men and all of them
looked and smelled drunk. I initially did not want to take them, but two of them said that it was
a short ride and if I refused to take them, they would damage my car. I did not think too much
and took them in. When they arrived, they just randomly threw some coins at me and left … I
thought I delivered you, why didn’t you pay me … I did not care that they were four men and I
504 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

was just one … Not only that they refused to pay, their attitude was horrible throwing the
money at my face … So I just fought them, one against four.

Although Choi explained that he engaged in the fight because he was young and new
to the trade, and was not ready to tolerate customer abuse, he also confessed that ‘80%
of taxi drivers have had fights with customers or road bullies, although they would not
tell you’. In fact, the above incident was not Choi’s only experience of direct physical
confrontation with customers, he shared another such incident:

It happened just after the Spring Festival. It was a one-way road. I told the customer that I could
not enter but he insisted … I told him that the taxi fare would be around 30 yuan, and if I
violated the traffic rule I would need to pay a fine of 100 yuan … When he got off he started to
shout at me. The fare was 43 yuan but he only threw 20 yuan on the ground. I could not just
pick up the money from the ground … I asked him to pay. He held a 100 yuan note in his hand
but he just would not give it to me. I told him that I would call the police … I provided my
labour and I demanded my reward … He had money but he just refused to pay me … he kept
pushing me … so we started to fight … He thought that I would not dare beat him up … We
fought for a long time … I punched him real hard … When we finished fighting, he just left …
I felt much better after beating him up, my heart just felt so much more relieved … When the
police arrived, I told them we finished the fight and that was it … You see, I just felt so much
better after the fight … I did not really care whether I had gotten the fare back, after all I had
beaten him up already.

For Choi, what really irritated him was the customer’s lack of respect and his inten-
tion to humiliate him – by throwing the money on the ground, and by holding a 100 yuan
note but refusing to pay him. For Choi, the fight was not for the purpose of reclaiming
the money, but was a way to express his anger, to ‘get even’ with his abuser, to seek jus-
tice and to regain his sense of dignity. In both fights that Choi shared with us, violence
was primarily an expression of injured pride rather than an attempt to recover his money.
In the first fight, Choi reiterated that he did not consider his own safety when he fought
against four men. In the second fight, Choi noted that his wife would not approve of his
behaviour and he dared not tell her about the fight. And yet, he repeatedly said that he felt
more content after the fights. For Choi, the use of physical violence to obtain justice and
‘get even’ with his abusers helped him restore a sense of respectable manhood and made
him ‘feel much better about himself’ as a man. Of course women also use physical vio-
lence to resolve conflict; the point being highlighted here is not that only men use physi-
cal violence as a strategy of conflict resolution, but that these male taxi drivers saw
violence use as a natural and ‘manly’ way to regain their dignity.

Conclusion
Li, a 29-year-old driver, argued that ‘men who cannot drive and do not know the com-
puter cannot be called men … driving at least counts as a skill’. Taxi drivers in our study
entered the trade thinking that it was an appropriate occupation for a man because it was
dominated by men, required what were considered technical skills and seemed to offer
opportunities to become one’s own boss, to run one’s own business, to have autonomy
Choi 505

and control over working conditions and to be able to earn an income sufficient to sup-
port one’s family. Instead, the drivers that were interviewed complained that the chang-
ing of the regulation of the taxi industry by the Chinese state took away their power over
customers, and subjected them to unfair control by taxi companies. They also lamented
their stagnating pay and the ever-increasing pressure to keep up with rocketing living
costs in cities and rising standards of manhood. The masculinity of taxi drivers in this
research was therefore hit twice by the reform of the taxi industry. First, their masculinity
was hit because they constructed their manhood around a job that supposedly offered
space for them to experience more freedom compared with factory employment, and
exercised more control and power over customers compared with other entry-level ser-
vice employment. Instead, under the new regulations, they were increasingly required by
taxi companies to do emotional and aesthetic labour, and the new regulation tipped the
balance of power in favour of customers. Second, these taxi drivers believed in what they
called ‘reasonable operation’ (heli jingying) and a fair exchange of labour with monetary
reward to support their families, thus meeting the provider norm. And yet, after working
12 hours a day, seven days a week, having endured family separation and social isolation,
they struggled to support their families and live up to the expectation that men should
provide adequately for their families. This caused deep stress, both financially and psy-
chologically. These men saw themselves as failed men, unsuccessful fathers and sons
who could not even support their ageing parents.
As this article shows, taxi drivers attributed their increasing job precarity (loss of
control over working conditions and insufficient pay) to several factors: state policies
that advantage taxi companies; market monopoly that is caused by capital and state col-
lusion and corruption; and government rules that prioritize customer rights over the wel-
fare of taxi drivers, the majority of whom are rural-to-urban migrant workers. Taxi
drivers attributed their increasing vulnerability to customer abuse and road bullying to
two factors: structural inequalities such as the domination of ordinary people by the
newly rich and rural–urban split in terms of which migrant workers are viewed as second
class citizens; and an authoritarian government that prohibits citizens from voicing their
grievances through collective action. More importantly, the precarity of rural-to-urban
migrant taxi drivers in post-reform China is directly linked to the strategy of the Chinese
state to create a cheap and docile labour force through the stratification of its population
into unequal categories, such as the treatment of its rural citizens as second class subjects
of urban China. This in turn helps to create a mass of vulnerable and controllable workers
for domestic and foreign capital, and concomitantly strengthens the legitimacy of the
state under the name of modernization and development.
Taxi drivers’ precarity and their desire to reclaim their autonomy over their employ-
ment are reflected in the lyrics of their rap anthem (Chen, 2015):

Thirty years of the driver’s life see how many dreams?

Hands on the wheel, foot on the gas, just to provide for one’s family.
Drivers work day and night to move mountains.
No matter how bitter, or how tired, it’s tough to follow the dream.
506 Work, Employment and Society 32(3)

Same life, same fate,

Through such adversity we struggle.
Same vicissitudes, same calamity,
Against future difficulties, we will strive together.
Hand in hand we will walk forward defending our rights,
And let the world know we are all drivers.

In March 2016, the ‘Measures for the Administration of Urban Taxis’ were repealed.
It is uncertain whether this is likely to reduce the precariousness taxi drivers currently
face. Meanwhile, some taxi drivers have organized to reclaim their autonomy and power.
They declared independence from taxi companies and set up their own worker-led start-
up (Chen, 2015). It is also uncertain to what extent the Chinese government would allow
the collective mobilization of taxi drivers to continue. Precarity as a concept has gained
recognition, not solely due to its analytical usefulness, but as a political concept that
opens up discussion and alternative views of resistance in post-industrial countries
(Schierup and Jørgensen, 2016). However, due to difficulties of conducting interviews
with striking workers, the author did not collect data on the strikes of taxi drivers, and
consequently is unable to analyse the effects of precarious employment on their political
mobilization and participation. This is an important topic for future research for both
analysis of work and class formation in China specifically; of precarity as a condition of
employment; and as a vantage point from which to view political consciousness and
action.

Acknowledgements
I thank the Editor of the Journal, the guest editors of the Special Issue and the three anonymous
reviewers for their excellent and critical comments on the article. I also thank the research team for
conducting the fieldwork with me and the taxi drivers for using their precious time to participate
in this research.

Funding
This research was supported by a Hong Kong Research Grant Council General Research Fund
(GRF2120409), CUHK442512.

ORCID
Susanne YP Choi https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3879-2915

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Susanne YP Choi is professor at the department of sociology, the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Her book Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China was published by
University of California Press. Her current projects examine the interrelationship between migra-
tion and masculinity in the service sector and sexual migration and family dynamics in China.

Date submitted March 2017

Date accepted December 2017