This paper explores individualisation among never-married, skilled Chinese migrant women in Singapore. Individualisation in China emphasises family as a functional unit subject to state governance, perpetuating gender inequalities and constraining women’s pursuit of personal aspirations (e.g. remaining single or prioritising careers). Emigration therefore emerges as a strategy allowing well-educated women to advance professional ambitions in the global labour market and escape normative expectations. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Singapore from 2023 to 2025, including life story interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with 36 never-married Chinese skilled-labour migrant women, I find that transnational migration catalyzes individualisation by distancing women from normative pressures in both origin and destination countries and exposing them to alternative lifestyles. This migration-driven individualisation enables participants to transcend the binary of embracing or rejecting gender traditions by: (1) reconceptualising marriage and motherhood beyond the patrilineal framework, (2) exploring alternative life paths such as lifelong singlehood or single motherhood, and (3) transforming intergenerational relationships by challenging patriarchal authority and strengthening mother-daughter bonds. These individual-level transformations hold potential for broader structural changes, as they dismantle the public-private sphere dichotomy and celebrate feminine power and self-sufficiency rooted in female solidarity.

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This paper uses the perspective of “state-led neoliberal modernization” to explore the collusion of the state and the market in the construction of scientific motherhood and its effect on rural nannies in China. It claims that the state and the market work together to shape rural nannies’ modern subjectivity in the neoliberal economy through the commercial training programme of scientific motherhood. Based on a case study in Shanghai, this paper argues that the training for scientific motherhood attempts to transform rural women into modern care workers through two mechanisms: reconstructing recognition and mobilizing emotion. Rather than passively receiving the training, nannies use their agency to adjust the knowledge and practice of scientific motherhood to suit their complicated working situation. Their strategies include deploying scientific knowledge flexibly and instrumentally, practising self-restraint in limited intimacy, and paying attention to their own familial investment.

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The feminization of care migration in transnational contexts has received a great deal of attention. Scholars, however, have been slow to investigate a similar trend in intranational contexts. This article expands existing research on global care chains by examining the gendered emotional labor of migrant domestic workers pertaining to China’s intranational care chains. While the former often foregrounds “racial or ethnic discounting,” the latter is characterized by “citizenly discounting” whereby migrant domestic workers are subject to an overarching system of alienation, subordination, and exploitation owning to their second-class rural hùkŏu (household registration) status. Drawing on a participant-observation study of nannies, this article highlights how the intersection of gender and rural-urban citizenship is the key to grasping China’s migrant domestic workers’ experiences of extensive alienation at the nexus of work, family, and wider society. By delving into a particular set of political, economic, and cultural forces in the Chinese context, the article makes a distinctive contribution to a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of the interface of gender, emotional labor, and care migration.

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This qualitative research expands previous conceptualization and theorizing of the separation and interaction between the public and private spheres in post-reform urban China to rural migrant women working in urban middle-class women’s private family. Collecting data from a domestic service company and eleven rural nannies in Shanghai, we develop a theoretical framework of separated yet overlapped two spheres for rural women in the urban care service sector. We found that, for these rural nannies, the separation of the two spheres is elongated compared to urban working women. Geographically, their urban work place is far away from their village home. The scientific and intensive care they provided for the urban babies challenged their past mothering experiences, induced guilty toward their own children as an absent mother, and urged them to provide better care for their grandchildren in the future. Further, working in other’s family and developing bond with urban babies, the boundary between work and family became blurred and difficult to handle sometimes. We further discuss the intersectionality between gender, and other social dimensions.

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