Internships are prevalent in new media industries and have become the focus of news reports and popular writings in recent years. This article addresses the gap between intern research and digital labour research. It asks: How are these interns working and living? What are the power dynamics behind interns’ experiences? To what extent can digital labour theories be applied to explore these experiences? Based on empirical research conducted at two Chinese Internet companies, this article shows that interns in Chinese Internet industries experience poor working conditions and difficult living conditions. These are caused by power dynamics within the companies, such as tensions between interns and full-time Internet workers, and power dynamics within Chinese society, such as those between Chinese universities and Internet companies involved in these internships. The article argues that such difficult conditions are caused by Internet companies and the Chinese higher education system, both of which engage in forms of coercion and alienation. Digital labour theories need to take greater account of intern labour and of interns’ experiences of precarious work in the new media industries.

This paper focuses on agency workers in China's auto industry. Some scholars foresee that this new category of workers, particularly in the auto industry, will play a leading role in global labour resistance. In this context, we conducted a questionnaire survey of 483 regular and agency workers at five major auto joint ventures in China and compared their work conditions, job satisfaction and willingness to take collective actions. Based on these findings, we argue that these companies have good reasons to keep the gap in wages and in work conditions small. This, along with management practices inherited from the Maoist system, can mitigate workers' dissatisfaction and reduce their tendency to take militant actions.

This article offers an ethnographically-based counterpoint to recent optimistic macro-approaches to the “migration-development nexus” that view international labour migrants as “agents of change,” depict migration as a win-win for the sending and receiving states, and associate migration with positive changes in the sending community, including the influx of monetary remittances and the entry of new ideas, such as gender equity and human rights (Faist 2008). Based on over sixteen months of ethnographic field research among Indonesian and Filipino migrant workers who became mothers in Hong Kong, I argue that it is important to consider examples of so-called ‘failed migration’ (not only migratory successes) in order to fully understand the costs of migration, including the gendered risks and gendered inequalities. Cases of migrant mothers vividly reveal how migratory ‘failures’ are often blamed on women's individual gendered moral shortcomings, but as I argue, their experiences, and those of all migrant workers, must be understood within specific contexts of precarious labour migration and Asian neoliberal policies of exception in Asia.