Migrant domestic workers (MDWs) make up a global market of 12 million temporary migrant laborers, famous among scholars for being one of the most vulnerable populations of workers worldwide. Most often recruited from poor villages, these women work solely for one household in wealthier societies with no time off for several years at a time, largely invisible to the outside world. Despite decades of advocacy on their behalf, MDWs remain vulnerable to extensive abuse, including debt traps, overworking, and even assault. This dissertation examines the many systemic causes of abuse for these workers. I investigate how deeply held biases regarding gender, race, and poverty hold these women hostage before they even begin work. I explore a complicated market that lives on opacity and poor communication as its lifeblood. I expose how a political system, rather than taking responsibility for its citizens and workers, delegates its power to the private sector, effectively cutting off appeal to law and, in many cases, rights. Finally, I expound on the various tactics that these vulnerable women use to defend themselves and make their lives bearable — and that result in a different kind of empowerment than most scholars recognize.

There are many home nationalities and host societies for MDWs, but Indonesian MDWs in the Asia-Pacific region specifically have been poignantly described as “modern-day slaves.” To date, however, most scholars have focused on Filipinas, who in past studies have proven to be better educated and more politically aware than most other migrants. Research on other nationalities exists, but is far more limited. I find this gap in the literature untenable, as the experiences of Filipinas almost certainly cannot translate wholesale to the experiences of other MDW nationalities. Indonesians, for example, remain aware of their rights less than half as often as Filipinas, have a less experienced sending state/government defending them, and endure substantially higher rates of fee overcharging, wage underpayment, and human rights violations. Yet, even as the number of Indonesian domestic workers swells worldwide, no research contrasts the disparate situations of MDW nationalities in various host states.

My dissertation asks why abuse and exploitation persist so stubbornly in this market despite decades of advocacy. To achieve a solid cross-section of the “maid trade,” I focus on two of the most popular sending countries — the Philippines and Indonesia — and two of the most well-regarded receiving societies — Taiwan and Hong Kong. My results draw on 15 months of participant observation in sending and host states; document analyses of thousands of webpages; two surveys of MDWs; and 245 in-depth interviews across domestic workers, employers, employment agencies, activists, and governments to address this critical question. I dissect the myriad social dynamics at play in MDWs’ lives, including crippling poverty, demeaning racial stereotypes, rampant misinformation, political power struggles, and inconsistent legal enforcement. For each nationality and in each host state, these social forces impact one another differently, giving Indonesians a divergent lived experience from their Filipina counterparts in each host society — most often to the detriment of the Indonesians.

I begin by showing how MDWs are bound by structures of unfreedom, living their lives under the constant threat of arbitrary interference. Cross-cultural gender norms and competition for power and resources among the more powerful actors (employers, agencies, governments, etc.) set the stage for exploitative practices from the outset. Those in power complicate the system of migration and employment for their own ends (monetary or otherwise). The resulting uncertainty and vulnerability MDWs face severely restrict their options. When they do formally complain or resist, they are likelier to suffer job loss and harassment than justice.

I then analyze three of the primary large-scale forces holding these women in their bind: economics, race/racialization, and politics. To begin, profit in the maid trade is founded on opacity and non-transparency. Agencies rely on domestic workers’ and employers’ ignorance to charge excess fees and minimize hassle for themselves — so much so that this market would be transformed without opacity. Said opacity renders most domestic workers unable to resist exploitation and abuse, and it also spreads many false stereotypes and misinformation to employers and even governments, leading them to exploit these workers even further.

The fine-grained racialization of each nationality has also slotted domestic workers into certain roles, magnifying and naturalizing the power dynamic of the employer-employee relationship. In the Asia-Pacific maid trade, each nationality is made into a race, causing international political dynamics to become embodied in the home. Given the lower economic and political standing of these two Southeast Asian countries, domestic workers are yet again expected to submit to the “superior” race of their (mostly Chinese) employers.

Lastly, governments on both sides struggle to claim true sovereignty over these women, as their work dictates that they are the full responsibility of both/neither state. Thus, officials and laws have left the enforcement of workers’ rights vague and open to change. The power to decide what happens in different cases of abuse is largely restricted to the states, which will often sacrifice these women’s rights to avoid political conflict. Arguably, state interventions by countries involved in domestic worker migration create structures and patterns that facilitate abuse, in particular by undermining consistent recourse for abuse and exploitation.

These three facets of the maid trade make for a perfect trifecta of oppression and vulnerability. In my research, I found that the MDWs were acutely aware of the extent to which the system is rigged against them. Consequently, many of these women knew that the classical ideals of resistance and “empowerment” could not apply to them. Instead, they sought a different kind of empowerment all their own — a defensive empowerment, one that endured less-than-ideal conditions specifically so as to not draw the ire of people and forces that could make their lives even more miserable. While counter-intuitive to many academic audiences, these women had the foresight to know that in their position of relative powerlessness, the surest chance for success was to not try to fight. Rather than trying to claim more control from institutions that were more powerful, they maintained what little control they had so that these institutions would interfere in their lives and work as little as possible.

By linking the vast literatures on immigration and state power with an empirical, comparative case study, my research intervenes in long-standing academic debates on the role of states in the lives of migrant workers. In dissecting the intersectionality of how the large-scale forces in the maid trade become real and tangible, I adjudicate between prior research that has either stressed domestic workers’ individual agency, or the macro-structures oppressing them. The key to understanding the persistence of exploitation and abuse, I argue, is finding where the large-scale institutional systems manifest in the day-to-day lives of domestic workers, employers, and even authority figures.

This dissertation is divided into three papers that approach the topic of ethnic inequality in China in different ways. The first paper has two main goals: first, at the empirical level, it examines trends in household income inequality between ethnic groups in China from 1989-2009. Second, at the theoretical level, this study examines the importance of ethnicity relative to other socio-economic indicators and control variables in accounting for household income inequality over time. Using data from eight waves of the China Health and Nutrition Survey, this study finds growing ethnic differences at the aggregate level between Han and non-Han Chinese. The growing difference between ethnic groups at the aggregate level is the result of two main trends: 1) increasing returns to higher education levels, certain occupational categories, and geographic regions in China; and 2) a larger proportion of Han in the categories that have experienced the greatest increases in economic returns. However, once controlling for additional variables, the analysis finds a declining significance of ethnicity as a predictor of income at the household level over time.

The second paper draws upon 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with a group of Uyghur Chinese Muslim entrepreneurs to examine the relevance of the concept of structural violence for understanding ethnic domination and inequality in Chinese society. Critics of structural violence have argued the concept lacks analytical precision, does not offer a clear account of change over time, and downplays the role of agency on the part of challengers. This article offers a new analytical approach to understanding structural violence. First, utilizing insights from the "multi-institutional politics" approach, this article documents changing conditions of structural violence, strategies of resistance to police pressures, and changing Uyghur identity over time. Second, the results of my fieldwork outline two mechanisms that explain how structural violence changes over time. Third, this research challenges conventional wisdom on the relationship between structural violence and agency by demonstrating how Uyghur entrepreneurs exercised greater agency under increasingly harsh climates of structural violence.

The third paper examines educational stratification in China. Previous studies of educational stratification in China have highlighted regional differences in educational attainment between residents in urban and rural areas, the historical gender gap in educational attainment, and the increasing importance of education in shaping occupational outcomes in an era of marketization. First, this paper examines the relative importance of social origins and political background in shaping educational attainment in different historical periods of educational expansion and decline; second, it reexamines the applicability of the Maximally Maintained Inequality (MMI) hypothesis to the case of China; and third, it examines differences in educational outcomes between the Han majority and non-Han ethnic minorities. The results indicate a growing importance of parental origins, relative to political background, in educational attainment; limited support for the MMI hypothesis; and a Han advantage in making certain educational transitions.

This dissertation analyzes the political economy of the real estate sector in China since its post-1978 creation. During Mao's socialist era, the nation had no real estate sector. Only with economic reforms in 1978 and the production of commodity housing in the 1980's did a real estate sector come into being. This study asks two questions in particular: How did the major metropolitan centers on the eastern seaboards of China manage to accomplish monumental amounts of infrastructural and urban development in the short span of thirty years? Second, what was the role of the state--at the central level and at the local level--that enabled the construction of this industry, capital accumulation and development?

The analytical construct of the developmental state is used as a useful starting point. As is widely known, critical resources in the form of land, large project opportunities, financing options and permits in Chinese real estate are in local state control. The presence of the state looms large in Chinese real estate. To finesse how this construct fits and does not fit the situation in Chinese real estate provides analytical leverage.

Although the high levels of central and local state involvement in the real estate sector is undisputed, I argue instead that one of the core characteristics of the developmental state - i.e., an institutionally cohesive bureaucracy - was widely missing whether at the local level or at the central level. This was true despite the accepted wisdom that an effective and independent bureaucracy is critical for industrial transformation, let alone its creation.

Instead, within the post-reform real estate sector, central policymakers planted and activated a new set of "game rules" that structured the delivery of urgently needed urban infrastructure and residential building construction. It did so by putting in place three critical reform elements: (i) commodifying urban land use rights (LURs), which had been administratively allocated for free and in perpetuity according to central economic plans prior to the constitutional amendment of 1988; (ii) valorizing the critical importance of economic and infrastructural growth by inserting such achievements into the professional criteria for political promotions of provincial, prefectural and municipal-level leaders; and (iii) allowing the revenues from land use rights (LUR) sales to go directly into the extrabudgetary reserves of local governments at a time when budget constraints were hardening. In other words, I argue that the new political economy of land usage and real estate development put in place an entrepreneurial local state structure. The incentive structures for local state agents is directly tied to promoting economic growth; and municipal governments have a direct financial stake in generating governmental income through urban LUR sales and commercial real estate development. Concomitantly, real estate developers increasingly populated the field throughout the 1990's, attracted by increasing profits. The entrepreneurial interdependence of local government leaders and property developers who are both looking to capitalize on real estate-generated profits centrally characterize the dynamics of this field.

In the absence of full marketization of key resources such as land and capital, furthermore, which remain under local government control and influence, the real estate firms themselves work to stabilize their access to resource dependencies. Real estate firms manage, nurture, maintain and coddle their relationships with local government officials even as they try to compete in the marketplace and branch forth into larger operations. This relational "maintenance work" has been accomplished via three dominant mechanisms: (i) corruption and bribery at the individual level; (ii) quid-pro-quo behavior of building of infrastructure or public buildings and public works in return for land allocations, tax breaks and commercial opportunities; and (iii) founders' long-standing relationships with state officials who have access to profitable opportunities and/or land; or through their history as red capitalists entailing generative periods of state employment.

This entrepreneurial state model of development provides an additional developmental path distinct from either the Anglo-Saxon "market-led" form or the East Asian developmental "state-led" form of economic development. In the entrepreneurial state model, the state is, in fact, a market actor driven to pursue its own profits as though it, too, were a business agent. In the developmental state typology, state officials plan and intercede in the market indirectly via the centralized administrative apparatus, coordinating projects, investing in hard and soft infrastructure, promoting business and creating an environment conducive to economic vitality. But it is the enterprises themselves that engage in the entrepreneurial activity. Direct profit goes to the entrepreneurs rather than to the developmental state; and the state plays a more coordinative and promotional role than in the case of the entrepreneurial state. In the entrepreneurial state model, state agents vie to generate profits that accrue to them either institutionally or personally. The positive incentives flowing from economic development accrue directly to the state actors in question.

Since beginning its rapid transition to a market economy in 1978, the People's Republic of China has sought to become internationally dominant. In order to develop human capital and labor power, it has implemented a range of ideologically-driven policies that have been geared towards improving the overall mental, moral and physical "quality" (suzhi) of the population. The current criteria for assessing the individual value of citizens have resulted in new lines of stratification being drawn among children. As a result, healthy rural daughters and special needs children in particular are now considered unworthy of intensive investment and face a higher likelihood of being abandoned to state care. However, in an ironic twist of globalization, stigmatized children who were once shut away in state-run orphanages have become major recipients of western aid and child-saving interventions as China continues to "open up" to the outside world.

Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in two Chinese state orphanages that received financial and medical assistance from western non-governmental organizations, I consider the role that globalization is playing in the lives of abandoned youth. This is occurring in two main ways: by the exportation of healthy female children out of the country through transnational adoption and the importation of first-world ideologies and practices by foreigners who seek to improve care for the mostly male special needs youth who are left behind. Through interviews and participant observation with western volunteers and Chinese state caregivers, I demonstrate the ways in which defining the "best interests" of institutionalized children is a highly contested process that implicates international power dynamics and differential access to resources.

I argue that foreign-Chinese collaborations in orphanages are complex processes of negotiation, conflict and compromise that highlight the socially-constructed and contextual nature of children's social value. Moreover, these types of partnerships take place on constantly shifting political terrain, rendering them highly unstable and at times even counter-productive for those they seek to help. Ultimately, by bringing children who exist on the margins of society to the center of scholarly analysis, this research provides a new perspective on the human consequences of Chinese modernization in a globalized era.