Between Pleasure and Precarity

In her essay ‘Does China Have a Feminist Movement from the Left?’, Dong Yige (2019) argues that Chinese feminists have connected economic and gender equality in both analysis and activism. But can the same be said of LGBTQ+ activism, many of whose participants also identify as feminists? In other words, does China have an LGBTQ+ movement that also foregrounds economic justice? I brought these questions, along with my experiences of labour organising in China, into my ethnographic research on garment factory workers’ cruising practices in Liaozhou, a pseudonym for a city of more than ten million people in the Pearl River Delta Region in Southern China. These workers temporarily migrate from rural areas in other parts of China to work in the city, which is a production hub for the global garment and textile industry. They live in urban villages, with two, which I will call Li Village and Chen Village, the focus of the research. After work, they participate in ‘cruising’, a pleasure-seeking activity, in semi-public places (such as parks) where mostly self-identified gay (同志 tongzhi) men and cross-dressers engage in casual sex and other intimate acts. However, their pleasure-seeking activities extend beyond cruising to include communitarian gatherings in rented apartments, restaurants, and karaoke bars.

As my ethnography unfolded, I quickly realised that I needed to ask different questions than those I had initially intended. My interlocutors seemed to be unfamiliar with terms such as ‘feminism’ (女权主义), ‘LGBTQ+’, ‘queer’ (酷儿), ‘trans’ (跨儿), ‘nonbinary’ (非二元), ‘Marxism’ (马克思主义), or ‘social movements’ (社会运动), which have been used by activists in Liaozhou, whether they are middle-class or working-class. There appears to be a disconnect between how various activists and organisers talk about gender and sexuality and how my interlocutors conceptualise and experience them.

In this essay, I show how structural precarity—produced by exploitative labour conditions, the hukou (household registration) system, and cisheteronormative social pressures—shapes workers’ perspectives on cruising, community, and identity. I argue that understanding queer life in contemporary China requires us to centre class as a spatially organised structure that differentiates between urban and rural hukou status, between coastal areas and megacities and inland provinces, and between city centres and urban villages. While some urban LGBTQ+ individuals—especially educated, middle-class gay men in tier one or tier two cities—have gained visibility in China, their narratives often overshadow stories like those from my interlocutors who navigate sexual and gender nonconformity as migrant workers, siblings, parents, or breadwinners. In the following pages, I share the stories of three workers across generations: Sister Bai, aged in their twenties; Kevin, in his late thirties; and Mr Liang, in his fifties. Each illustrates the complexities of living as gender and sexually nonconforming individuals while navigating precarious livelihoods. Yet, all highlight cruising as a practice of community-making that makes their life more bearable and pleasurable. I conclude by reflecting on the potential for an ‘LGBTQ+ social movement from the left’ grounded in these cruising spaces as sites not simply of sexual politics but also of labour politics.

I want to clarify my use of terms and describe the cruising sites. First, the hukou system, instituted in the 1950s, is a mechanism that manages mobility by tying people to their origins: either rural or urban (Cheng and Selden 1994). In post-reform China, it has created a two-tier system of urban hukou holders, who have full access to public services in cities, and rural hukou holders, who have limited access to urban services. Second, I use ‘gender and sexually nonconforming’ to refer to my interlocutors, as there is no single term they use for themselves. Third, workers often refer to cruising sites as ‘base points’ (据点), a shorthand commonly used among them. For this essay, I use ‘cruising’ as it is a more widely recognised term in English and understandable to most readers. Liaozhou has a long history of cruising, with sites dated back at least to the early 1950s. Since I began my research in 2022, many of these spaces have been abandoned or their use has significantly diminished. The ‘older’ sites are typically frequented by working-class urban residents, rather than migrant workers from outside Liaozhou, who tend to live in urban villages on the city’s outskirts. This does not mean gender and sexually nonconforming migrant workers do not build social connections; they simply do so in different ways and in different spaces (Ye 2021; Gong and Liu 2022; Luo et al. 2023).

Sister Bai

When I first met 26-year-old Sister Bai in Li Village, they took me on a long walk along the riverbank, explaining to me the etiquette of the cruising site. Wearing a crop top and large earrings, they joked: ‘I can wiggle my waist more than a snake’ (我的腰比蛇还能扭). A regular at the site, Sister Bai visits every few days, mostly to socialise with friends.

After finishing high school at the age of 19, they left their hometown in Hunan Province with help from a distant uncle:

When I first came to Liaozhou, I was not like this, if you know what I mean. But once I started living by myself, I can do a lot more. When the uncle was around, I was not as femme [母] because I do not know if he would out me or tell others to not hire me. But since he is in Fuzhou now, I have been hanging out with my sisters.

Sister Bai often shared this story to show how they had embraced their feminine identity. Among Gen Z peers, there seems to be greater acceptance of gender nonconformity. Their ‘sisters’ are also feminine gay men and workers who call themselves cross-dressers. Each evening, they gather to chat. For Sister Bai, this space is a refuge from the cisheteronormative pressures of work, the urban village, and family life.

While I was doing my fieldwork, Sister Bai worked in a jeans factory, earning 6 yuan per piece. While they appreciated the flexibility to work when and where they chose, the job offered no social security, housing fund, or insurance. Sister Bai also avoided contributing to state programs such as pensions or public health care, preferring to keep their earnings than give them to the government. Still, Sister Bai enjoyed earning and spending money on their own terms. However, they also had to negotiate their life choices and gender expressions on a daily basis. They not only eschewed makeup and feminine clothing at work but also acted ‘cis and straight’ whenever they returned home to Hunan, where their parents were migrant workers in Changsha, the provincial capital. When they facetimed on WeChat, Sister Bai always acted ‘normal’, which was a strategic decision:

I cannot wreck my relationship with my family. When I am old and cannot work, I am going to go back to my hometown. I can’t get hukou here, so my family members can take care of each other. I have a sister who also works in Fuzhou. I do not know if I can ever tell her or my parents what kind of person I am. But for now, I am glad the place [the cruising site] exists. I will figure out one step at a time.

Sister Bai’s narrative reveals a class–space–cisheteronormative matrix that shapes the lives of gender and sexually nonconforming workers like them. First, cisheteronormativity permeates their everyday life, from work to living in Li Village. The kinship tie that helped them settle in Liaozhou (that is, their uncle) simultaneously constrains them from embodying their gender nonconforming self. Scholars have extensively described the ‘native place network’ or ‘kinship network’ that has fostered employment for migrant workers in China since the reform era (Zhang and Xie 2013; Lee 1997; Gaetano 2015). Yet, Sister Bai’s experiences are contradictory: on one hand, they rely on some of these networks for survival; on the other, they must hide their ‘true self’, fearing the loss of the support they need.

Second, although ‘piece work’ in garment factories appears flexible, it allows employers to avoid responsibilities such as contributing to employees’ social security and housing funds. This might have contributed to Sister Bai’s decision to ‘act normal’ with their family, hoping to rely on blood kinship for future care. Their rationale echoes what feminist sociologists describe as the ‘familialisation of care’ under neoliberalism, where nuclear or multigenerational families take on responsibilities from the provision of which the state has withdrawn (Jiang and Yang 2023; Mathieu 2016; Asato 2009). For Sister Bai, spending on clothes, food, and enjoyment, rather than contributing to social insurance, feels like a worthwhile way to live. If they cannot work in the future, family, not state support, is imagined as their safety net.

Sister Bai’s navigation of family also reflects the structural barriers of the hukou system, which prevents rural migrants like them from obtaining residency in Liaozhou without meeting strict point-based criteria related to education, employment, and age:

I am not going to be in Liaozhou forever; it is not for me. I knew it when I first moved here. But what can I do? I am not like those city tongzhi who have settled in Liaozhou, with university degrees and money to spend. I think that is why we [workers] only come to the cruising site but not the bars in the city. Even if there are a lot of people with flaky personalities and ugly faces, I feel we are not judging each other, we are just people with a need for a chat, jokes, and some sex.

When I asked Sister Bai whether they would feel judged for going to a gay bar, for example, they shrugged and responded: ‘I do not need to pay to have fun here, why would I go somewhere else?’

This quote stays with me as it highlights how class divisions interlock with the rural–urban divide. That is, for Sister Bai, a classed experience is also a spatial one. It separates the urban villages from the city centre and rural migrants from urban residents. These divisions also shape the emerging visibility of LGBTQ+ communities in commercial venues and on platforms such as Douyin and Bilibili. Despite belonging to a younger generation often seen as more tolerant and self-assured, Sister Bai continues to navigate cisheteronormative family, precarious labour conditions, and a sense of exclusion from Liaozhou while finding ways to live a bearable life. But Sister Bai is one of the few more visibly ‘queer’ and ‘outgoing’ informants of mine, others of whom are married with kids. I will now turn to Kevin and Mr Liang to get a sense of their life circumstances.

Kevin

In 2008, Kevin became a so-called pianhun tongzhi (骗婚同志, literally ‘cheat-marriage gay’) by entering a heterosexual marriage with a cisgender woman while hiding his sexuality. After the wedding, they moved to Liaozhou, rented an apartment, and found work in separate garment factories. In 2010, after the birth of their child, his wife returned to their hometown in Henan Province so her parents could help with childcare. This was when Kevin, who had known he was gay since middle school, started to look for cruising sites wherever he went. After moving to Chen Village, he started frequenting the local park by connecting with regulars of the cruising site through the gay dating app Blued. Though he expressed remorse for ‘cheating’ on his wife, he also felt proud of having supported her and their child financially during that time.

A few years later, Kevin’s wife returned to Liaozhou for work, but this time, the facade he had maintained began to unravel. She discovered his sexuality by accident and confronted him. Kevin chose to tell her the truth, feeling that continued secrecy would only complicate things further, especially as he had begun developing feelings for someone he was seeing:

It was a storm. I begged her not to tell my parents, and I promised to keep providing for our kid in Henan. Being tongzhi does not mean I do not care about her or our child. I do not think she is okay with it, but she has tried to make peace, at least. I regret getting married at 20. I did not know anything. I thought I could just be tongzhi in secret, and when she was away in Henan, it felt possible to live a double life. But I guess that was naive. We are not divorced, but we live separately now. She is on her own and I share a room … to save money. I felt guilty, so I agreed to cover the costs of raising our kid, who is under her care. On top of that, I also have to send money back to my parents. They are street vendors and do not make much. Life is hard, but I think I am freer than before.

I asked whether he would ever tell his parents. He replied:

I do not want to think about the future. I am happy with the current arrangement. Our parents do not know; we will pretend that we are still a couple when we go home for the Lunar New Year. It is good for me, and for her. If she finds someone, we will get divorced. The future is always uncertain. I do not even know if I will be here next year.

When I asked Kevin why he decided to marry, he smiled and told me:

I am sure you know this. My parents wanted me to get married before moving away for work. I did it to be a good son. Back in my hometown, everyone was doing something like that. It was just a way to take care of each other. You know, they worried about my livelihood—what if I got sick or injured? Marriage felt like some kind of guarantee. But honestly, it also felt like a kind of confinement. That was why, when I first started cruising in another village back in the 2010s, it really changed me. I saw openly gay people; some had been together for years. I think that gave me the courage to eventually come clean to my wife.

Kevin’s story suggests both how cruising transforms identity and how cisheteronormative marriage and other social values (such as filial piety) influence workers’ decisions and understanding of themselves. First, we must acknowledge cisheteronormative marriage as a patriarchal institution. Kevin benefited from his wife’s reproductive labour to bear a child and take care of him. Through his wife, he was able to fulfil his filial duty as a son: to continue the family line (Wei 2020: 29). Second, Kevin’s decision to marry reflects the cisheteronormative ‘path’ that everyone must follow. Migration, however, enabled Kevin to step away from this ‘path’ to see other possibilities, but it was only possible through the invisible reproductive labour his wife continued to perform. Third, Kevin’s role as a breadwinner forced him to reconcile the gendered expectations tied to that role with his non-normative sexuality. As he confided in me, living a double life was exhausting. While his wife was in Liaozhou, he often lied about his whereabouts, saying he was ‘just drinking beers in the park with friends’. Even after the separation, Kevin still felt the pressure to hide his sexuality from his roommate, a worker from Henan. Although the cruising site was a place where he was comfortable, he always felt the need to look over his shoulder and be vigilant.

‘It might have become a habit of mine,’ Kevin joked.

Mr Liang

Mr Liang liked to try to convince me to get married every time he saw me around the riverbank. ‘How can you not get married? How about your parents? And what would others think about them?’

Mr Liang always asked me these soul-searching questions whenever we chatted. In the beginning, I was deeply offended and felt these questions were too ‘stupid’ to respond to. But after more in-depth conversations, I came to realise the complexity of his interrogations.

Mr Liang left his home village in Henan Province in the mid-1980s, which makes him part of the so-called first generation of post-reform migrant workers. He has seen it all and been everywhere, but Liaozhou is where he could turn his skills into income. He once made gowns for a living—a niche market that allowed him to earn a decent salary of about RMB5,000 a month. However, at the time of my fieldwork, with the economy in decline since the Covid-19 pandemic, he was working as a security guard. This was an easy job that brought in some income and kept him away from his family. Mr Liang did not identify with any specific terms; he simply told me he ‘prefers men’.

He married at 19 and has two adult children, both migrant labourers in Shanghai. His wife, after years as a migrant worker herself, chose to stay in their hometown in Henan, tired and ready to settle into something more stable there. Mr Liang loved this arrangement, often telling me in an avuncular way:

I have everything. I have kids, who will have grandkids. I can do whatever I want and nobody knows. When I am old and unable to work, I will return to my family. It is perfect for me; you should just do something like this. You are in Canada, right, you can find a wife in China and be far away. Your parents will be happy that you are walking the normal road.

When I inquired further why he thought marriage was necessary, Mr Liang started to reveal more:

I don’t know about the situation in Canada, but as a migrant worker [in China], there is no stability. When I first came to Beijing, I was working in construction. It was hard. And then I moved to the Pearl River Dealta Region. I have moved to different cities over the years. Wherever I go, I tried not to get sick or injured. But when I was in Beijing, I think it was in 2005 or 2006, I got sick from food poisoning and went to the hospital. The bill was so high because I did not have medical insurance [医保] in Beijing. I have also seen some of my co-workers getting injured and nobody cared for them. Do you know what happened? Their family came and took them back to their hometowns. In the urban villages and in the city like Liaozhou, no-one cares for you. The only way to make a living is to hold on to your family, start one, and survive together.

Mr Liang’s rationale resonates with Sister Bai’s narrative about family. But Mr Liang, who has experienced the transient life of a migrant labourer his whole life, has come to see the world as a cutthroat, ruthless, capitalist environment. The hukou system has barred workers like him with rural registration from accessing the social benefits available to urban residents in cities like Beijing or Liaozhou. For proper medical care, Mr Liang must return to Henan. But as a worker without sick leave, he often chooses to ‘stick through it’, relying on his wife for care. These structural constraints reinforce his belief that a stable family is the only safety net in a precarious life. While patriarchal norms and cisheteronormative pressures certainly shape his world view, it is his cumulative experience as a migrant worker that gives weight to his more conservative perspectives.

When I asked Mr Liang whether he would accept a gay or lesbian child, he firmly shook his head: ‘It is against the value of family, and who would take care of them?’ His response underscores how cisheteronormativity persists as a survival strategy for migrant workers. Unlike Sister Bai or Kevin, Mr Liang’s views reflect a more rigid stance, which, though disheartening, is not entirely surprising. It seems that, for him, non-normative sexual practices might be tolerated, but non-normative sexual identities challenge the family structure he continues to uphold.

Pleasure’s Promise

Despite generational differences, these three workers’ struggles share common themes. First, the hukou system renders these workers ‘flexible’ and ‘temporary’, unable to become urban residents of Liaozhou. All three workers expressed uncertainty about their future, which complicates their ability to form lasting relationships. Second, the capitalist garment industry places the burden of social reproduction on the ‘family’, making it difficult for workers to fully express themselves around their relatives for fear of ostracisation. Both Mr Liang’s and Sister Bai’s words about ‘family’ resonate with such an analysis. Third, the division between urban villages and the city centre in Liaozhou highlights class distinctions. For Sister Bai, this means they cannot identify with the ‘urban tongzhi’ who have university degrees and stable incomes. While many lower-class urban residents in Liaozhou also experience precarious lives, Sister Bai’s observation—though possibly misguided—offers a critical perspective of the consumerist and middle-class nature of Liaozhou’s gay community.

Faced with the totality of these structural barriers, my interlocutors make their own communal space through cruising. While it remains uncertain whether this space can evolve into a site of working-class solidarity, I want to highlight its potential. Throughout my fieldwork, I have witnessed workers supporting one another in finding jobs, educating each other about HIV/AIDS prevention, and discussing which factories offer better pay and more manageable work schedules. These moments illustrate an unlikely sense of community formed through pleasure-seeking, and it is perhaps in these moments that I find hope.

Featured Image: Kevin and friends looking at high-rise apartments in the distance. Source: Ian Tian (CC)

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