Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China's Floating Population
304
Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China's Floating Population
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Overview
With rapid commercialization, a booming urban economy, and the relaxation of state migration policies, over 100 million peasants, known as China’s “floating population,” have streamed into large cities seeking employment and a better life. This massive flow of rural migrants directly challenges Chinese socialist modes of state control.
This book traces the profound transformations of space, power relations, and social networks within a mobile population that has broken through the constraints of the government’s household registration system. The author explores this important social change through a detailed ethnographic account of the construction, destruction, and eventual reconstruction of the largest migrant community in Beijing. She focuses on the informal privatization of space and power in this community through analyzing the ways migrant leaders build their power base by controlling housing and market spaces and mobilizing social networks.
The author argues that to gain a deeper understanding of recent Chinese social and political transformations, one must examine not only to what extent state power still dominates everyday social life, but also how the aims and methods of late socialist governance change under new social and economic conditions. In revealing the complexities and uncertainties of the shifting power and social relations in post-Mao China, this book challenges the common notion that sees recent changes as an inevitable move toward liberal capitalism and democracy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804779340 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2002 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Strangers in the City
Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China's Floating Population
By Li Zhang
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7934-0
CHAPTER 1
The Floating Population as Subjects
Rural-to-urban labor migration is by no means unique to Chinese society but is found in most parts of the world. Yet the conception of Chinese migrants in the post-Mao era as a floating population and the specific cultural and political meanings attached to this new kind of subject are distinct to China. How does the late-socialist state attempt to transform millions of rural migrants into a third kind of subject (neither rural nor urban) in a period of unprecedented spatial mobility? What discursive and nondiscursive practices do state agents use to achieve their subjectification? How do rural migrants respond to and subvert new modes of state domination?
This chapter explores these questions by focusing on everyday state practices that deprive the migrants of the same rights to the city that permanent urban residents have. I argue that the floating population is made possible through multiple strategies both inside and outside the state apparatus: the reworking of the household registration (hukou) system; cultural processes of naming, categorization, and media representation; and the invention and implementation of new regulations that govern everyday migrant life. Contrary to the predictions of some Western analysts and journalists that the hukou system will soon be abolished, the post-Mao regime does not intend to do away with this system; rather, the hukou system has been reformed and made more flexible to serve the new need to reregulate peasants on the move.
The first half of this chapter traces how the category "floating population" was created and analyzes its cultural meanings and three techniques used by the dominant discourse to shape migrant subjects. It then discusses a number of nondiscursive forms of regulation specifically targeted at the floating population. But turning migrants into "internal aliens" (or noncitizens) in the cities is not a one-way process completely controlled by the state. As social agents with their own intentions, desires, and ideological histories, Chinese migrants do not simply take up or internalize the subject position offered to them by the state (see Giddens 1979). The second part of the chapter thus examines how, based on their increased economic capital and consumption power, some migrants have come to reshape the meanings of the available social categories while struggling to develop their own sense of self and social belonging beyond officially defined urban citizenship. Chinese migrants are able to subvert the meanings of the available categories (such as "floater") "not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system that has no choice but to accept" (De Certeau 1984: xiii). In sum, the dual process of "being-made and self-making" (Ong 1996) is the focus of my inquiry into migrant subject formation.
Naming and Categorizing Mobile People
In his investigation of the cultural and political invention of the Chinese peasantry (nongmin), Cohen (1993) argues that modern intellectual and political elites transformed China's rural population into the peasantry, a culturally distinct and alien "other" that the new socialist society aimed to liberate. By denaturalizing the taken-for-granted category "peasantry," Cohen further analyzes the political and social consequences of this practice in the reconstruction of the modern Chinese political economy. In a similar spirit, I argue that the floating population is a socially constructed category and that it is important to analyze how it was invented at a particular moment in recent Chinese history. So far, few studies of Chinese migrations have examined the history of the floating population and its thick layers of cultural and political meaning. By stressing the socially constructed nature of this category, I do not intend to suggest that it has no real social basis. Rather, I hope to illuminate how mobile people are conceived of as floaters and that the meanings attached to this category are an integral part of social and political struggles with real consequences.
Two important theoretical points have informed my analysis. First, categorizing and naming are inseparable from social power. "The labor of categorization, of making things explicit and classifying them" (Bourdieu 1991: 236) is a crucial mechanism for defining the meaning and order of the social world. Therefore, as many scholars have demonstrated, naming and categorizing do not simply describe, reflect, or represent social order, but also shape and reshape power relations among different groups (see, e.g., Borneman 1992; Foucault 1972; Koselleck 1985; Zito and Barlow 1994).
Second, in his study of the historical-political semantics of asymmetric counterconcepts, Koselleck (1985) argues that historically formed social concepts should not be viewed in isolation; instead, we need to trace the asymmetric structural relationship between antithetical binary concepts to denote the relations of power that produced them. Building on Koselleck's insights, I maintain that to better understand how and why labor migration is conceived as a floating population in China today, one must ask: Who did the naming and who was named? Against what and at what historical moment was this category invented and on whose terms? What political and cultural ramifications does this social category entail?
Before the implementation of the 1958 household registration rule, there was a short period of rapidly increasing rural-to-urban migration in the early 1950S (see Solinger 1999a; Davin 1999). Although the state was not entirely absent in monitoring this migration, official regulation was largely erratic, fragmented, and ineffective. As a result, many peasants had moved into the urban industrial sectors by 1954. In those days, migrants were not treated as a distinct group of subjects who needed to be put under special control and legal regulation. Neutral terms, such as yimin (migrants) or ximin (migrating or relocating people), were used to refer to relocated peasants. Other slightly different, nonjudgmental terms regarding migration, such as qianxi (relocate), renkou yidong (population movement), and renkou liudong (population mobility), were also used.
By the mid-1950s, voluntary labor migration to the cities came to be seen as an urgent national problem. According to Selden (1979), about twenty million peasants rushed into the cities from 1949 to 1957, and these rural migrants could not be fully absorbed by urban industry, thus exacerbating the problem of urban unemployment (Walder 1984). Further, some officials believed that industrialization required the rural population to remain on farmlands so that they could continue to produce food for those working in industry (Zhang Qingwu 1988). As a result, the state passed new regulation measures to block the "blind flow" (mangliu) of peasants into cities to avoid the pathological growth of oversized metropolises experienced by other developing countries. Restricting people's spatial mobility was also regarded by bureaucrats as a reliable way to maintain socialist stability.
It was through the reinforcement of the 1958 Household Registration Stipulations that Chinese peasants were turned into what Potter (1983) calls "birth-ascribed" rural hukou (household registration) holders. By requiring every Chinese citizen to register at birth with the local authorities as either an urban or a rural hukou holder of a particular fixed place, this system divides the entire Chinese population into two different kinds of subjects with asymmetric power. Rural hukou holders are prohibited from migrating into the cities and are not entitled to receive state-subsidized housing, food, education, medical care, and employment; these are reserved for urban hukou holders only. Cut off from urban employment, guaranteed food supplies, subsidized housing, and other benefits of the city, peasants were anchored in the countryside for decades with virtually no spatial mobility. In the following two decades, nonstate-directed population movements were largely eliminated from China's social landscape.
Rural and urban residents were subsequently placed under different forms of state control. and social surveillance. In the countryside, state control was made possible through a far-reaching grassroots cadre network (see Oi 1989; Shue 1988). In the cities (understood to include various levels of administrative and economic "central places" [Skinner 1997a]), pervasive state control over urban citizens was made possible through work units and neighborhood committees (see Walder 1986; Whyte and Parish 1984; Lu and Perry 1997).
During the 1960s and 1970s, however, a very different kind of state-directed, politically motivated population movement took place. To promote economic and technological development in the frontier areas, many skilled urban workers and professionals were relocated by the state to underdeveloped border provinces or minority autonomous regions like Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Yunnan, and Heilongjiang (see Shen and Tong 1992). Millions of urban youth and intellectuals were also sent down to the countryside to be "reeducated" by poor and lower-middle-class peasants (see Bernstein 1977). During the heyday of the Cultural Revolution, millions of floating Red Guards, mostly urban youth, traveled from place to place and eventually gathered in Tiananmen Square to be personally received by Chairman Mao (see Meisner 1977; Yan 1993). But such large-scale displacements of urban people and spatial mobility were not seen as population movements; instead, they were conceived of as political events, described in highly politicized terms such as zhibian (supporting the border areas by professionals), shang shan xiaxiang (the sending of urban youth up to the mountains and down to the countryside), and dachuanlian (establishing revolutionary ties among Red Guards). Those who were involved in these movements were not regarded as distinct social groups to be subjugated to special regulations as the floating population is today.
After the late 1970s, the situation changed dramatically, as mass labor migration rose on a scale unprecedented in modern China. A number of factors motivated millions of Chinese peasants to leave the countryside. First, agricultural reforms initiated by former leader Deng Xiaoping greatly improved the efficiency of farming, generating nearly 200 million surplus rural farm laborers. Second, a rapidly growing urban economy and the penetration of foreign and overseas Chinese capital demanded large numbers of cheap laborers. Third, the collapse of the state-monopolized "urban public goods regime" (a term borrowed from Solinger 1995b) made it possible for migrants to obtain basic resources and services through market exchange in the cities. Fourth, the gradual relaxation of migration policy allowed rural migrants to live and work in the cities on a temporary basis.
As peasant workers began to reappear in the cities in the early 1980s, they were generally seen by the urban public as temporarily displaced outsiders (waidiren) who would soon return to their rural origins. Rural transients as a whole were not treated as a structurally and culturally distinct group and thus were not put under a different form of systematic official control. But as more and more peasants poured into towns and cities, putting great stress on urban infrastructure and resources, they came to be regarded as a social problem despite their enormous economic contributions. Further, spatially detached from their home villages, rural migrants could no longer be directly reached by the rural authority in their places of origin. But at the same time, migrants, considered outsiders by city officials, were not effectively brought under the urban control system. Without a clear structural position in the society, migrants appeared detached from the existing social system and became a people of prolonged liminality — belonging neither to the rural nor to the urban society. From the government's point of view, these mobile people needed to be sent back where they came from or transformed into a new kind of subject through reregulation.
The state's initial response to the reemerging migration was to block and repress it. In 1981 the State Council issued a ruling intended to stop the flow of peasants into cities. A few years later, two important documents were issued: "State Council Notification on the Question of Peasants Entering Towns" in 1984 and "Provisional Regulations on the Management of the Population Living Temporarily in the Cities" in 1985, both of which took a relatively permissive stance on peasant movement into cities. This new state policy, however, was not immediately translated into local practice; conservative blocking (du) practices continued to be the dominant mode of governmentality in managing the migrant population at the local level. Most local officials regarded migrants as subjects of the governments in their native places, arguing that it was not their duty to regulate these outsiders even if they were temporarily residing in the city. No rules or laws were available to guide the practice of government officials in this domain. Local urban governments simply tried to keep migrants outside their own jurisdictions. As a result, migrants, then considered illegal, were randomly driven from place to place within the cities. Petty migrant entrepreneurs had to conceal their commercial activities from officials. News reports on migrants' activities were suppressed because many officials feared that publicly acknowledging the existence of mass migration would only encourage an influx of more peasants.
But official attempts to block migration did not stop millions of peasants from entering cities. As economic reform progressed, the growing urban economy needed migrant labor to fulfill low-end, dirty, dangerous jobs and to develop the service sector. Denying the presence of migrants in cities would only make it more difficult to extend government control over them. Thus, in order to bring "out-of-place" migrants back under state control, Chinese authorities began to change their strategy for managing the migrant population. A critical shift that began in several cities in the late 1980s was clearly reflected in social commentary:
Clearly, expelling [pai] does not work, and blocking [du] does not work either. The key is to pay special attention to regulating [guan] so as to establish an effective social control network, formulate proper rules and laws, and eventually make the floating population part of an efficient way of ordering our society. (Chen Youquan 1988: 24)
A paragraph from the "must-know rules" (xuzhi) listed in more recent training materials distributed by the Beijing government to the floating population summarizes this new strategy:
The fundamental goal of making regulatory rules is not to clean up, drive away, or disperse migrant workers as before, but to guide, control, and regulate them under the new condition of a socialist market economy — that is, to transform a disorderly kind of floating into an orderly kind of floating. (Beijing West-District Government 1996)
The reregulation of migrants accompanied a proliferation of discourse on the floating population in official documents, government censuses, newspaper reports, scholarly research, the broadcast media, and popular literature. Such "scientific" knowledge about the floaters has persisted since 1985 and has shaped the popular imagination of city dwellers about rural migrants. It also became the basis for the state's new migration policies and rules, which deemphasized suppression but highlighted the importance of local reregulation.
The Production of Discourse About the Floating Population
The first intense discussion of the floating population took place between 1987 and 1988 and the topic remains one of the most heated official and urban public discourse at this writing fifteen years later. The primary focus is on two sets of interrelated issues: (1) the demographic background, economic activities, mobility, speed of growth, and spatial distribution of the floating population; and (2) the social impact of this migration and possible strategies regulating the migrant population more effectively. Almost all official and scholarly publications are obsessed with the question of how to improve the government's regulation of rural migrants.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Strangers in the City by Li Zhang. Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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