When Ghosts Appear: Migrant Workers, Fears of Haunting, and Moral Negotiation in a Chinese Electronics Factory

Abstract

This article discusses the haunting of a factory in Shenzhen, China. The haunting coincided with the 2008 global financial crisis that resulted in a decline in factory orders, leaving the workers, mostly migrants from the countryside, idle. With the appearance of ghosts, the workers found a cultural language that indirectly expressed their anxiety about future undisclosed measures to restructure the factory. In the end, the factory owner was forced to come forward to deal with the ghosts by performing a customary folk ritual. Starting from this scenario, it will be shown how claiming to see ghosts constitutes a political act and reveals practices within a modern factory that engage in a “moral economy” mutuality between management and workers. Through this, people in the factory gained bargaining power built upon reciprocity and social debts and were able to articulate their concerns using a supernatural system of meaning. By way of the ghost panic, they created room for corrective action even in a difficult situation.