A Good Life Postponed: Working in the Countryside, Retiring in the City in Contemporary China

This chapter explores how steel workers contend with hopes and aspirations of the good life in the context of policy reforms on the level of the industry, state, and enterprise. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Anhui Province, China, to explore how rural mine workers plan for and imagine the future. The reforms of the socialist work-unit (danwei) and gradual de-industrialisation of an iron ore mine in the 1990s shifted viable futures for worker families to the city. To access urban life for their families and themselves, workers commit to working in the rural mine until retirement, separated from their children who migrate to the city. Mine workers’ conception of a good life is influenced by the socialist good life of the past and by the anticipation of a future in the city. In preparation workers invest significantly into their retirement plans, imagining the reunification with their families and community without considering the generational differences in aspiration for a good life.