1Since 1979, the internal migration of young graduates in China has been a key phenomenon in understanding the transformation of Chinese society in all its forms, especially in megalopolises. The young generation with a higher-education diploma is a reserve force for the new middle class. The working conditions for young graduates today continue to deteriorate, particularly for young skilled migrants (Tian and Ni 2017). In this chapter, we will describe their migratory careers, both objective and subjective. We will analyze how the young skilled migrant is redefining his/her social identity in the face of an “economy of arrogance” (Favereau 2015) and restricted autonomy.

Young Migrant Graduates, Competition, and Social Aspirations

2Qi was born in a rural area of Anhui in 1990. She belongs to the 1990s “jiulinghou” generation; she was the only child. Qi’s trajectory does illustrate well that of “jiulinghou’s” young migrant graduates in China. Since 1979, the internal migration of young graduates in China has been a key phenomenon in understanding the transformation of Chinese society in all its forms, especially in the big cities (Li 2019). As we can see with Qi, young graduate migrants find employment in Chinese megacities as technicians or managers in public or privately owned Chinese companies, as well as international firms. However, most of them retain their migrant status and face insecure employment situations. They do not have an urban hukou and are exposed to social discrimination in their workplace by local authorities as a result. Young migrant graduates are constrained to struggle and find a job with a rural hukou.

3Young Chinese migrants like Qi face mounting competition for professional qualifications, which widens the structural gap between their aspirations and their ability to enter the labor market. This significant phenomenon has created collective disillusionment springing from the structural divide between the positions accessible by education level and those offered on the foreign and Chinese labor markets. For young skilled Chinese migrants, the overall distortion of the relationship between academics and employment markets results in a growing division between the nominal value of educational qualifications and their measured value in real transactions on the employment market. The gap between young migrants’ social aspirations and tangible opportunities on the labor market rouses a feeling of social disqualification and injustice. In her fourth year of college, Qi never gave up looking for a job related to her major; she thought that she could find a good job with her awards and certificates in various science and technology competitions, such as hardware engineer or a programming or product assistant, but her resume did not receive any responses. The last five years in China have been marked by increased competition, the devaluation of academic achievement, a decreased return on academic investment, and a simultaneous continual rise in the social aspirations of young people. The social differentiation inherent in the process of social stratification will become increasingly pronounced with the phenomenon of educational inflation, the maladjustment of the training system with the employment system, the impact of hukou, the discrimination in the modes of accessing employment, and the transformation of social policies.

Individuation and Migratory Careers

4Qi was born in 1990 in a rural area of ​​Anhui Province. Her mother moved to Shanghai in 1993 and worked in an electronics factory. Without an urban hukou from the city of Shanghai, Qi could not attend a public school, so she joined her uncle’s school in Qingpu. She left Shanghai to integrate in a vocational school in the province of Anhui, in her hometown. In 2009 Qi was admitted to a general university, majoring in computer network engineering. In 2012, Qi joined a computer software sales company in Nanjing, performing a job that was not really related to her university training and skills. However, she quickly obtained good results and received a good salary. In 2013, she was noticed by the management of the company, who offered her a position with the human resources department. In September 2014, her boss was transferred to Shanghai to take charge of new business development, and she went to Shanghai with him to take charge of human resources in the new project, which was more challenging than before. In 2016, Qi quit her job in company and started an MBA program in a university in Shanghai. In 2018, she started her own business with friends in Shanghai.

5Qi’s migratory career is like the biographical pathways of young migrant graduates. They are formed by biographical bifurcations, or in other words, turning points between different work experiences. For her these bifurcations result in school and professional mobilities founded on experiences of varied work content and geographical mobility in Shanghai, Chuzhou, Nanjing, and Shanghai, with opportunities for professional development. But for other young migrant graduates these pathways are structured around spatial discontinuities and do not necessarily point to professional discontinuities. For Qi this series of bifurcations is a result of the competitive nature of labor markets and gives rise to professional mobilities that may lead to social mobility. These bifurcations also demonstrate Qi’s abilities in terms of action and reflexivity about her aspirations and future: when she could no longer tolerate the basic job of changing computer chips in Nanjing’s computer company and thought that she could not learn any more new knowledge in the job, and when the internship salary could not maintain her basic lifestyle in Nanjing, she resigned and looked for another job. Bifurcations form through the intersection of professional and geographical mobility, yet their proliferation varies according to academic qualifications, employment opportunities, and social and spatial capital. Primary socializations and acquired aptitudes influence the effects of biographical discontinuity.

6In China, young Chinese migrant graduates are increasingly implicated in compressed modernity (Kyung-Sup 2010). They are born to a culture imbued with tradition, have transitioned into a modern, industrial era, and must survive in a post-modern, post-industrial era (Kyung-Sup 2017). The experience of internal migration demonstrates the simultaneous contraction of both space and time. Compacted modernity produces multimobilities in China in exacerbated accelerations and limitations which are removed in urban and rural spaces at various levels.

Spatial Capital and Social Mobility

7Migrations in China produce spatial capital which is “positive” or “negative” depending on the context of an individual’s arrival. The extent and size of social and family networks appear to play a decisive role in the production of spatial capacity along migratory routes linking labor markets. The greater the spread of a network, the more “positive” the spatial capital appears on migratory routes. Spatial capital takes on a different value according to the context of departure, economic practices, the value of goods in circulation, and the expertise, qualifications, and skills on migratory routes. For example, as seen in Qi’s migratory pathway, the spatial mobility in Nanjing contributes to increasing new available resources, and the conditions for their transfer in the W company.

8So, if space had looked like a constraint when Qi returned to her hometown, space has become a resource in Nanjing, where she has developed an upward social mobility experience. When spatial capital and social capital combine in opposing directions (one shrinks while the other grows), it can be said that spatial capital plays a “negative” role in the migration experience. On the contrary, like in Qi’s case, when social capital and spatial capital combine in the same direction, spatial capacity plays a “positive” role. That being said, if spatial capital appears “positive” with a growing social network, it can become less so when young migrants access a less-qualified position in a different city. It can therefore be positive or negative depending on the spaces to which it provides access.

9At each bifurcation, events and social structures influence an individual’s repertoire of resources, which in turn rearranges to reflect the status, places, and social identities of young migrants. However, reflexive and emotional skills are the degree to which situations of change can be predicted, influencing the modes and forms of reconfiguring resource repertoires. When bifurcations are unexpected or when there are emergencies, capabilities are developed to manage the effects of interference or identity shocks. Social and moral inequalities appear at these points, built around migratory experiences and the ratio between biographical bifurcations, social and personal resources, and reflexive skills (Roulleau-Berger 2009).

Guanxi and Entrepreneurship

10In 2016, Qi quit her job at the company and started an MBA program at a university in Shanghai. In 2018, she started her own business with friends in Shanghai. This means Qi used her guanxi to create an enterprise in Shanghai.

11It is impossible to consider professional relationships and work life in China without taking guanxi (interpersonal relationships) into account. Yang Yiyin (2012) defines two forms of guanxi: the guanxi passed down from the previous generations and a second form born out of affective relationships built on trust and obligation. Guanxi here set out a type of relationship and coordination in the workplace which abides by implicit and hidden criteria which are more or less visible, rendering professional relationships particularly complex, and above all, the need to maintain them.

12Since the end of the danwei regime, despite the diversification of the labor market, the separation between professional and interpersonal relationships defines the lives of young Chinese in the workplace today. The danwei regime was characterized by the expression of emotions and feelings and a certain level of intimacy in professional relationships. However, the systems of professional relationships in Chinese companies are established through strong competition that governs interactions between different categories of workers to improve work efficiency, and through the restriction of promotions and bonuses (Yan 2014). In the past, guanxi paved the way to interpersonal relationships and personal feelings, but now a focus on competition and performance between employees underpins working life in companies.

13Compressed modernity, the change of labor regimes, the growing importance of economic competition, and the escalation of geographic mobilities structure young migrants’ interpersonal relationships in the professional space. Today, using guanxi without the required professional skills can lead to forms of marginalisation. Young people with limited guanxi can assert their personal success and work engagement by excluding individuals with extensive guanxi. Local norms, the norms of compressed modernity, and norms linked to global capitalism are constantly overlapping in a process of economic transformation in Chinese labor markets.

Compressed Modernity and Being a “Hero” in China

14Qi, like most young Chinese migrants from the 1990s generation (jiulinghou) and 2000s generation (linglinghou), does not have siblings. As only children, they alone receive all parental investment and are the sole custodians of their families’ social, economic, and emotional capital. Due to their parents’ overinvestment, these youth have extremely high-level aspirations. Many of them believe that they are entitled to a high-level job. They believe that society owes them and quickly find themselves in situations of conflict with their hierarchical superiors. An only child will struggle to find a job in the employment market where they will receive the same level of investment as they had within their family. Being an only child can thus cause conflict in professional relationships, and consequently encourages mobility processes. The latter occurs when these young people are unable to attain their desired status as the gap between educational level and social aspirations continues to widen. They have a high level of social ambition, so they resign when confronted with a lack of recognition in the workplace, even if this means being inactive at home with their parents for a while. The status of an only child reinforces the individuation process that many young Chinese experience and leads to a broadened range of professional experiences.

15In the telephone sales company Qi achieved good results in her sales position. After being in this company for two months, by the end of 2012 her department was expanded and all Sales Champions were eligible to compete for executive positions. Qi, who had won the sales championship, had her performance in the competition noticed by the general manager and head of the human resources department of the company’s branch in Nanjing. In an environment of collective anxiety (Li 2015), young Chinese migrants fight for themselves (Roulleau-Berger and Yan 2017). They do this through a process of contradictory socialization structured around exhausting identity work and the management of double-bind situations between injunctions to “take their place” in the city and difficulties accessing spaces of strong urban legitimacy. Social and moral systems that capture “selves” result in new forms of alienation and forced servitude to the regime of compressed modernity.

16Most young jiulinghou and linglinghou interiorized the injunction to be performant in Chinese society. In compressed modernity, flexibility and mobility emerge as the principal norms of action in the construction of an enrichment economy (Boltanski and Esquerre 2017), which contributes to the advent of global capitalism divided into different branches in an anarchic way. We can therefore speak about “the arrogance of the economy” and “the economy of arrogance” (Favereau 2015), which is based on violent forms of modern management designed to stir the spirit of competition, the journey of self-discovery, and the taste for adventure in creating one’s own business, as Qi did. Young migrant graduates, who strongly aspire to develop upward social mobility, are partially aware of their social position due to the injunctions to be oneself and “to be a hero” (Roulleau-Berger 2017, 2021).

17But young migrant graduates are restricted to individual self-realisation and mandatory autonomy. For young graduates in China, the rise of autonomy and responsibility comes at the cost of an abrupt loss of protections they previously enjoyed. The individual is both more restricted and more autonomous in an economy of arrogance where “becoming a hero” ensures access to a social position and public recognition. However, young Chinese migrant graduates are increasingly implicated in a multi-compressed modernity in that they are born in a traditional culture and have transitioned into a modernising/industrialising era and have to survive in a post-modern/post-industrial era. Consequently, they must continually juggle new forms of restricted autonomy which force them to acquire strong adaptability skills, and this creates “tiredness to be oneself” (Ehrenberg 2010).