Same same but different: Care labour migration in China and Singapore

This paper offers a comparative analysis of domestic care workers (DCWs) in China and foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in Singapore to illustrate distinct yet interconnected forms of national regulation market representation and lived experience of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) across internal (China) and international (Singapore) migration regimes. While differing in citizenship statuses both groups occupy structurally subordinated positions within gendered racialised and classed labour regimes of domesticity. Situating our discussion in a transdisciplinary feminist political economy (FPE) perspective and drawing from critical development studies we propose a framework of mobile developmentalism to trace the parallel processes of devaluing MDWs’ care work bodies and personhoods through developmentalist ideologies embedded in legal systems, recruitment agency websites and everyday employer-worker interactions. Beyond gendered devaluation MDWs are also subject to a developmentalist mentality through the ‘human quality’ ( suzhi ) discourse in China and the civilisational framing of ‘Other Asias’ in Singapore which reveal shared logics of managing care deficits through reproducing social differences and hierarchies. Unlike citizenship-focused and nation-state-centric studies of MDWs this paper weaves together two migratory situations to illuminate non-citizenship social identities (such as urban superiority and rural inferiority) and broader translocal continuities in the devaluation of care labour. We conclude by calling for more research uncovering grounded stories of distinct yet related situations and spaces of domestic work and mobility.