ABSTRACT
Through the autobiographical narratives of contemporary Chinese female peasant workers, this article
studies how Chinese migrant workers are disidentified by the identifying hukou system and thus
become bodies of non-identity drifting in cities. Driven by the urban desire generated by national
discourses on modernization, peasants de-identify themselves by abandoning their officially-recognized
rural identity, only to see that they are disidentified by the authority that rejects their urban citizenship,
requiring them to give up their urban desire. The double dispossession leaves them no way to identify
themselves. To deradicalize the non-identity, post-socialist ideologies invent a middle-class dream,
reshaping migrant workers into a “working-class” misidentified with a class image beyond its financial
reach as well as social function. It thus disunites the working class by throwing migrant workers into a
constant search for identities.
Keywords: hukou migrant workers disidentifying identification non-identity