Review of Chuang, Julia. 2020. Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market. Oakland: University of California Press. (original) (raw)
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This paper challenges and complements the view, widely held in sociological labor studies, that incomplete proletarianization weakens labor’s bargaining power in the city by allowing capital to externalize the costs of labor reproduction to the countryside. The authors argue instead that the preservation of migrant workers’ links to the rural economy plus rural development measures can, under certain circumstances, empower labor by increasing their marketplace bargaining power. Beginning with the puzzle of migrant labor shortages in China, and based on national data and a case study, the authors show that access to land and pro-rural state policies in the first decade of the twenty-first century together stimulated rural development in hinterland China and created more employment opportunities in agricultural and local nonfarm sectors. As a consequence, rural (migrant) laborers in China were able to rely on rural employment and choose not to participate in labor migration, thus contributing to the labor shortage and pressing employers in the city to increase wage rates and improve working and living conditions.
Migrant Laborers in China and Their Contributions to Rural Development
Journal of Cultural and Religious Studies, 2017
This paper will look at the importance that the migrant labors in China are doing today. The main question posed in this paper is "how migrant labors in China are contributing to rural development?". Furthermore, the paper will answer the following sub-questions: (1) Is migration an important factor in the development of rural areas? (2) Can migration bridge the poverty gap between urban and rural areas? The objectives of this paper are the following: (1) to identify the migrant labors contributions in China's rural development; (2) to look into the importance of migration for the rural Chinese; and (3) to know and analyze the problems that migrant workers in China are facing in relation to their migratory work. Furthermore, this paper posits that migrant labors in China are contributing to rural development through their remittances, their investments, and the new knowledge and techniques that they acquired in the urban areas which they share in their home areas. In addition to that, this research looks at the migrant labors' remittances, their investments, and the new knowledge and techniques that they acquired in their home areas as their contributions to rural development.
The urbanisation of rural migrants and the making of urban villages in contemporary China
In the past decades, urban villages proliferate in major cities of China. These marginalised places not only are home to many local villagers, but also host millions of rural migrants. This paper provides an ethnographic account of the spatial and social production of Chinese urban villages. It discusses urban village residents' detailed tactics in developing/participating in the informal housing market, service market and labour market. By so doing, it emphasises people's agency in making their own living spaces and further challenges the marginalisation paradigm that either victimises or disparages urban village residents. It shows peasants, who are commonly assumed to be the antithesis of modernisation and urbanisation, are major actors and urbanise their living spaces. This paper also elaborates on the types of governing strategies at the village and municipal levels. It points out that the contradictions and loopholes in state power have left space for the formation of informal markets and contribute to the making of urban villages in contemporary China.
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Made in China: A Quarterly on Chinese Labour, Civil Society, and Rights (Issue 4/2018)
In December 2018, the Chinese authorities commemorated the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up. These four decades of unprecedented economic growth and transformation have been rooted in a fundamental socioeconomic restructuring. Contemporary China has changed from a largely agrarian society predominantly inhabited by peasants, to a rapidly urbanising one, characterised by a floating populace moving back and forth between rural and urban spaces, which are in a continuous state of flux. Going hand in hand with China’s ascent into modernity is the subordination of rural areas and people. While rural China has historically been a site of extraction and exploitation, in the post-reform period this has intensified, and rurality itself has become a problem. This issue of Made in China focuses on the labour that these attempts to restructure and reformulate rural China have entailed, and the ways in which they have transformed rural lives and communities.
Rural politics in contemporary China
Journal of Peasant Studies, 2013
Much news about today's China focuses on the urban. A milestone was reached in 2011, when the proportion of the PRC's 1.34 billion citizens living in cities reached 50%, the result of a remarkably rapid "great urban transformation" (Hsing 2010) that began in the 1980s. By 2025, China is projected to have 221 cities with over one million inhabitants. Still, with hundreds of millions moving to urban areas, hundreds of millions more will continue to live in the countryside and work in agriculture. The fact that more people in China make their home in cities than villages marks a historic shift. At the same time, it is the product of long-standing dynamics through which the urban and rural are mutually constituted by processes, politics, and ideologies that link, transgress, and span both (Murdoch and Lowe 2003; Davis 2004; McCarthy 2005). Even as China becomes more urban, the politics of its countryside will continue to be central to the PRC and around the world. This special issue addresses China's rural politics, broadly construed as the powerinflected processes and struggles that shape access to and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies, and discourses that shape those processes and struggles. Though scholarship on agrarian politics in China has taken off over the past three decades, the literature has tended to appear in area studies journals, or disciplinary outlets in which questions central to a single field are placed front and center. Our intention here is different. In commissioning a set of review essays on themes in critical agrarian-environmental studies, we sought to bring what China experts have uncovered into conversation with the China's rise has been fueled by more than 250 million migrant workers, members of the "floating population" (liudong renkou), whose labor in export processing zones, cities, and better-off villages has turned China into "the world's factory." The "household registration" (hukou) system, which has tied citizens to their place of birth since the 1950s, was relaxed in 1984 to allow peasants to move to urban areas. As the township and village enterprises that spurred economic growth and absorbed rural labor after "opening up and reform" (gaige kaifang) went bankrupt or were privatized in the late 1980s, the flow of migrant laborers increased. To this day, however, the hukou system denies "peasant workers" (nongmin gong) state services, such as access to education, health care and housing, which are reserved for urban citizens. 2 In addition, migrants continue to be looked down upon by urban residents, blamed for crimes, paid salaries late or not at all, and discriminated against (Solinger 1999; Yan 2003; Zhang 2002; Ngai 2005). As migration exploded in the 1990s, and the countryside was emptied of working age men and women, so too did a national ideology that valorized the urban and denigrated the rural, positing cities as the primary site of political, cultural, and economic worth (Bulag 2002, Cartier 2002, 2003, Ma 2005, Yeh 2013a). Cities became metonyms for development, and urbanization became a top goal of China's modernization strategy. Along with this, city dwellers were deemed to be of higher quality, or suzhi, than rural residents (O'Brien and Li 1993-94; Bakken 2000; Anagnost 2004; Murphy 2004; Kipnis 2006). This privileging of the urban and disparaging of the rural led to what has been called the "spectralization" (Yan 2003) of agriculture and the countryside, as villages became ghostly reminders of the past, a wasteland inhabited only by the 2 Note, however, that this varies by city, with some municipal governments (for example, Shanghai and Chengdu) providing more services than others (for example, Beijing). Thanks to Alexsia Chan, and her forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, for this point.