How to evaluate Chinese rural migrant workers’ consumption? A critical review of current perspectives and a signpost for new evaluations

Purpose This paper is written as a research note. Its purpose is not limited to providing a systematic review but also to offer conceptual clarification and theoretical directions for future research. Design/methodology/approach This paper is organized into four parts. The first identifies the major critical evaluations of Chinese rural migrant workers’ (CRMWs) consumption and discusses their weaknesses. Collectively, they dominated the debate beginning in the 2000s. The second part identifies four major sympathetic evaluations of CRMWs’ consumption and discusses their weaknesses. The third part explains how this debate can be advanced by broadening and updating the field’s theoretical frames. The fourth part illustrates how such broadening and updating can be carried out by discussing CRMWs’ creation of the shamate fashion style. Findings This paper finds that current evaluations of CRMWs’ consumption are informative yet flawed. Their weaknesses are mainly because of their insufficiently broad and updated theoretical frameworks, which in turn led to an unbalanced debate that marginalizes potential positive evaluations of CRMWs’ consumption. Originality/value This review is a pioneering study that problematizes these theoretical problems and supplies some original solutions to them.