Abstract
This review essay reads Xiaodong Lin’s (2013) and Sarah Gosper’s (2025) studies of rural-origin men in urban China to explain why mobility often raises income without securing masculine recognition. Lin shows how migrant men pursue recognition through modernity-framed practices of work and filial provision, while Gosper demonstrates that marriageability has emerged as a tighter and more exclusionary site of masculine certification amid labour precarity. Together, the books reveal a shift from modernity-based judgments of manhood to intimate and marital criteria that increasingly mediate recognition. Conceptualising recognition as a socially negotiated verdict, the essay proposes cross-field capital convertibility as a lens for understanding why mobility-generated resources carry uneven value across family, work, and intimate arenas.
Mobility is often treated as a route to adult masculinity: leave home, earn, and return with status (Donaldson 1993). For rural-origin men in urban China, that storyline frequently fails (Lin 2013; Gosper 2025) Furthermore, it is worthy to explore the phenomenon that income and skills may rise alongside with mobility, yet masculine recognition does not follow in family, work, or intimate partnership in urban China. Recognition is treated here not as an inner sense of achievement, but as a social verdict granted by others, negotiated in interaction, and sometimes withdrawn (Lamont 2012).
Placing the books in comparison clarifies how Lin and Gosper illuminate this problem from distinct angles. In 2013, Based on interviews with 28 rural migrant men in Shantou, China, Lin shows rural men judged through a modernity frame in which urban standards define the “modern man,” - although some rural men achieved economic stability through social mobility, rural origin becomes a stigma difficult to shed. In this scenario, resources at hand can be transformed into value through networks of relationships. For example, transferring wages to family members can be transformed into filial piety and a sense of masculine recognition within the family.
In 2025, Gosper’s ethnography follows unmarried rural-origin men in Xi’an, China, including delivery-sector workers and tertiary-educated white-collar men. Gosper foregrounds marriageability as a tighter bottleneck, where masculine recognition is not only tested through packages of stability such as housing and job security under precarious labour conditions. If Lin captures a moment when some conversions still stabilise manhood, Gosper begins from a later conjuncture where work and mobility do not settle adult standing because marriageability becomes the more demanding site of certification.
Although Lin (2013) contributes to strategies for men to resist the stigma of “rural men”, offering a new perspective on improving social mobility, but the mobility of rural men has not improved substantially (Chan, & Buckingham, 2008), and masculine recognition is still dominated by the economic concept of “men are responsible for external affairs and women for internal affairs” (Ji and South, 2013). In the same vein, Gosper (2025) shows emic orientations such as “waiting for yuanfen 1 ” and “pursuing guo rizi 2 ” are analysed as workable ways of living with repeated judgments that effort and accumulation do not translate into stable partnering prospects, even when men meet moral expectations of responsible men.
In other words, over the past decade or so, the mobility of rural men and the obstacles to male identity have not disappeared. Instead, they have shifted from the previous recognition of “modernity” to permeating the recognition of “marital” intimacy in a new form.
This comparison speaks to three gaps. First, masculinities scholarship, including work on Chinese masculinity (Louie 2002), increasingly treats intimacy as a site where masculinity is certified. Future research could employ cross-field capital convertibility (Bourdieu 1986), to explore this simple but consequential problem: the same mobility-generated resources do not carry the same value across social arenas. The concept refers to the conditions under which wages, skills, contacts, or urban experience are recognised as legitimate markers of adult masculinity in different fields. Second, given that marriageability serves as an emerging crucial condition for contemporary rural men’s identification with masculinity, what role does it play in the (in)equality of gender relations in contemporary China during its production and reproduction? What is its role within the broader social context? Lastly, “capital” and “recognition” are often invoked without specifying the encounters where resources are validated or dismissed, reading the two books together keeps those encounters in view.
