Rural Reindustrialization, Innovation Policy and the Identity Change of Labour Migrants in the Pearl River Delta

This research tries to explore how rural reindustrialization taking place in the Pearl River delta region reinforced by the innovation policy has generated the change of identity for the labour migrants. Innovation facilitation has been one of the most prominent state strategy since 2012. The Chinese government has enacted various policies to encourage makers (chuang ke) to engage innovation rather than merely being workers or white-collar employees. Entrepreneurship has been greatly promoted among young labours.  At the same time, the establishment of innovation system in the rural Pearl River delta region has generated dramatic rural reindustrialization characterized as the inflows of high-end industries invested from returning Chinese overseas (hai gui) and private capital. The local governments of Guangdong, under the economic pressure from industrial transformation and advancement, are homogenous in attract high-tech enterprises and high-end skilled workers. In this research, by reviewing policies in local labour markets of the Pearl River delta and by interviewing labour migrants and high-end workers in Dongguan and Shenzhen, Guangdong, we found that labour policy as one of most of significant characteristics of innovation strategies can be viewed as an institutional change. The enactment of innovation strategy, to a large degree, has generated a new wave of rural industrialization focusing particularly on industrial transformation and advancement. The inflows of young labour migrants working on high-tech enterprises, and the encouragement of makers in the Pearl River delta, has reinforced the change of their identity in the Pearl River delta. This identity on basis of economic dimension is separated from its original identity in terms of their institutional settings. Thus, a form of contested identity is shaping among labour migrants in the Pearl River delta region.