Dominant academic discourse and governmental narratives often portray nontransferable rural housing and land assets in China as a form of unemployment insurance. This suggests that rural-to-urban migrant workers could, in periods of joblessness, revert to their farming livelihoods. This research, however, presents a counter-argument. Using in-depth interviews with indebted migrant workers in the Pearl River region, the paper unravels the growing debt obligations of these households—consisting of housing mortgages, consumer debts, and online debts—and reveal how these constitute a new form of social control. This article discloses that these financial burdens have effectively transformed migrant workers into a permanently fixed urban labour force. This assertion is backed by national survey data from 2018, showing a shocking total debt-to-income ratio of 1140.5% within the lowest 20% income bracket households, over eight times higher than households in the top 20% income bracket. Furthermore, the income from nonbank debt for these households was significantly higher, spanning from 5 to 10 times the levels seen in other income groups. The sustained high levels of household debt, aggravated by high interest rates tied to non-bank debts, have made employment and stable wage income crucial for the survival of low-income households. Moreover, mortgage liabilities, deeply interwoven with family structures, exert a pressure that propels the total labour capacity of a family from rural areas to urban environments and forces non-labour contributors to stay in areas with lower living costs, thus triggering a resurgence of family separation. This separation is not prompted by shortcomings in citizenship rights or systemic discrimination, as previously suggested in scholarly debates. Rather, it arises from the strain on livelihoods caused by escalating household debt. Given these findings, this article contends that the impact of urban unemployment on the household economy of migrant workers is significantly more severe than previously anticipated. The escalating debt among low-income families has markedly reshaped labour migration patterns within China, compelling them to remain within urban labour markets despite periods of unemployment. These observations highlight the urgent need to reassess current social policies that envision rural villages as safe havens for unemployed migrant workers. They also lay the groundwork for future research to more effectively address this pressing socio-economic issue.

China's growing global presence and expansive domestic and international policies are drawing attention, particularly from its neighboring countries witnessing China's increasing influence within their borders. This influence is largely due to China's foreign direct investments (FDI) in these countries' key industries. In 2019, China's FDI in Vietnam and Cambodia reached USD 2.28 billion and USD 3.6 billion respectively. However, Chinese firms are criticized for potentially triggering a "race to the bottom" in these developing countries. Are Chinese transnational capital constituting a new form of labour regime in their investing countries? How do local state, civil society and rural migrant workers respond to these Chinese transnational capital? This paper will employ a comparative approach to scrutinize the influence of China's transnational capital on the garment industries of Vietnam and Cambodia. It aims to discern the factors giving rise to China's varied influence mechanisms and the corresponding local responses. Specifically, it will delve into the roles and impacts of the market, state, and civil society, focusing on the effects on the working and living conditions of rural migrant workers. Initial fieldwork findings indicate that the evolving global context and geopolitical dynamics significantly influence the development of new labor regimes and standards in Vietnam and Cambodia. The new US trade restriction policies, banning China's value-added or export products, present a conundrum for the governments and garment industries of Cambodia and Vietnam. On one side, an increasing number of Chinese firms are relocating their value-added processes to Cambodia and Vietnam to circumvent US trade policies, thereby creating more job opportunities and fostering local development. Conversely, the influx of Chinese capital into these key industries compels the Cambodian and Vietnamese governments to modify their labor regulations to accommodate Chinese investors' demands to varying degrees. Our research found that despite Cambodia establishing a democratic multi-union system in the early 1990s, the influx of Chinese capital into the garment industry has rendered this system largely ineffective in safeguarding garment workers, particularly rural migrants. The compliance policy in collaboration with the ILO has also become largely symbolic. Many Cambodian rural migrant workers, especially during the pandemic, have had to take on substantial loans or use their land as collateral to support their families. In contrast, Vietnam, with less Chinese investment and more investment from US-allied countries like Japan and South Korea, along with the involvement of more international NGOs in the labor legislation process, is gradually moving towards a multi-union system. Despite Chinese investors' attempts to negotiate changes in labor policies with the Vietnamese state and official trade union, Vietnam continues to progress towards liberalizing its trade union system. During the pandemic, the Vietnamese government also implemented various relief policies to assist rural migrant workers. These comparative findings highlight the complex dynamics influencing the development of new labor regimes in China's neighboring countries within the new international political economy.

Economic globalisation and advanced technology, have created an unpredictable job environment with intense competition and frequent changes in job requirements all over the world. This has exerted a significant impact on young workers as they are now faced with a less structured and more uncertain job market. When jobs are moved from one location to another or to multiple other locations, and when the number of transnational corporations grows continuously, the willingness and capacity to move are identified as a kind of required skill or a condition for employability in a globalized economy. In response to the needs as well as opportunities offered by global capitalism, young people are called to better prepare themselves through study abroad, and the number of internationally mobile students has been booming for the past 20 years. This is particularly evident in parts of Asia where the massification of education has made university study more common, raising the stakes for aspirant middle-class students and families. Studying abroad is regarded as a kind of ‘transnational investment’ and ‘mobility asset’ that advances one’s future economic return.

This paper examines the trends of student mobilities and their relations to labour migration in Asia. It aims to reveal the complex interplay between the requirements of mobility, or even ‘hypermobility’, among young workforces and the massification of higher education mediated through the changing structure of a globalized job market with great uncertainty. Higher education is a critical and important site to craft the ideal labour subject for the globalized neoliberal economy. When increasing number of students voluntarily mobile geographically in response to the needs of transnational capital, a new young mobile labour subjectivity in Asia is emerged. Heavily influenced by the discourse of ‘global war for talent’ and the glamorized representations of globally mobile professional elites, these mobile youth treat the transnational education as only one point in their ongoing migration trajectories. While facing the unstable, precarious, and risky working conditions in the local labour market, they constantly use new ways to adapt and compete with others for survival. In order to be successful, they bear full responsibility to seek opportunities elsewhere, be constantly in motion according to the needs of the economy. Transnational mobility for education and work is becoming an important marker and maker of transitions for Asian youth.

This paper anticipates a political project that underlines China’s infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of migrant labour in the making of the Chinese working class. This project inspired a rebirth of global Marxism that attempts to confront the failure of the first wave of socialist movements and the neo-liberal turn of global capitalism. As part of a global project in preparation for the new wave of emancipatory movements, we also locate our project in an anti-global capitalism movement and attempt to overcome the parochial and nationalistic approach of existing Chinese Marxism. Specifically, we conceive that Chinese capitalism has entered a new age of monopoly not only supported by new phases of high technology but, more importantly, by state power in constructing infrastructural bases such as building projects, new economic zones, highways and high-speed railways, digital platforms, and logistics, both internally and externally, to reproduce expanded capitalism and resulting in fierce imperial battles among global powers. This article conceptualizes this historical process not only as ‘infrastructural capitalism’ that vividly embodies the materiality of expanded capitalism, but also the infrastructural power of labour to take root. We are fundamentally concerned with the potential of infrastructural workerism that illuminates the infrastructural base of labour struggles under a new form of Chinese capitalism – the very base of capitalism in its deepening phase since the 2000s. The questions of working-class formation, reproduction and labour organising cannot be answered in the abstract but must be understood in the rapid configuration of Chinese infrastructural capitalism that construes the infrastructural power of labour.