Changing China: Migration, Communities and Governance in Cities

Li Si-Ming, Shenjing He, Kam Wing Chan, Li Si-Ming, Shenjing He, Kam Wing Chan

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315536675
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Thema: Globalizzazione

China's unprecedented urbanization is underpinned by not only massive rural-urban migration but also a household registration system embedded in a territorial hierarchy that produces lingering urban-rural duality. The mid-1990s onwards witnessed increasing reliance on land revenues by municipal governments, causing repeated redrawing of city boundaries to incorporate surrounding countryside. The identification of real estate as a growth anchor further fueled urban expansion. Sprawling commodity housing estates proliferate on urban-rural fringes, juxtaposed with historical villages undergoing intense densification. The traditional urban core and work-unit compounds also undergo wholesale redevelopment. Alongside large influx of migrants, major reshuffling of population has taken place inside metropolitan areas. Chinese cities today are more differentiated than ever, with new communities superimposing and superseding older ones. The rise of the urban middle class, in particular, has facilitated the formation of homeowners' associations, and poses major challenges to hitherto state dominated local governance.

The present volume tries to more deeply unravel and delineate the intertwining forms and processes outlined above from a variety of angles: circulatory, mobility and precariousness; urbanization, diversity and segregation; and community and local governance. Contributors include scholars of Chinese cities from mainland China, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and the United States. This volume was previously published as a special issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics.

Migration, communities and governance in Chinese cities: unfolding new forms and processes

Si-ming Li^a, Kam Wing Chan^b and Shenjing He^c

^aHong Kong Baptist University; ^bUniversity of Washington; ^cUniversity of Hong Kong

Epochal migration and mobility

China’s unprecedented urbanization is unique in world development history, not only because of its rapidity and the sheer scale of rural-urban migration, but also because of its special institutions of handling rural and urban populations. The hukou system, in particular, delineates every individual in the country according to means of subsistence – agricultural (rural) versus non-agricultural (primarily urban) – and place of official residence, and helps erect highly impermeable “invisible walls” not only between town and country but also within major cities (Chan 1994; 2010). Starting from a base of below 20 per cent when the reform began in the late 1970s, China’s level of urbanization surpassed the 50 per cent mark in 2011 for the first time in history, the latest figure being 54.8 per cent in 2014 (State Council 2015). However, this rate remains well below those of the United States and other economically advanced countries; moreover, “urbanization” in China is also far from complete in that out of the total urban population of 750 million in 2014, about 250 million do not hold the hukou in their current place of domicile (State Council 2015). In fact, the percentage of non-hukou residents in urban places has been increasing incessantly – and alarmingly – throughout the reform period, from a couple of per cents to about one-third of the urban population nowadays (Chan 2014).

These non-hukou urban residents are denied access to a wide range of public or social services, such as schooling, healthcare and social housing. The denial of local hukou status also traps rural migrants to the lower end of the urban labour market. The great majority of them can only find work in construction sites and factories performing original equipment manufacturing requiring little skills, or in low-end service jobs in restaurants, massage parlours, and warehouses and other transport activities. Quite a few have to make their living through scavenging. Clearly, all these jobs lack even the basic security. In short, the lack of citizenship rights in major urban areas renders rural migrants in a state of disenfranchisement, marginalization, precariousness and predicaments (Wong et al. 2007). Irrespective of the huge difference in income levels and prospects for advancement between the glittering host metropolis and home village, studies have revealed that only a relatively few migrants indicate an intention to establish permanent residence in the host city (Du and Li 2012). The lack of interest could well be an outcome of the immense legal and other obstacles they face in the hostile urban environment. Circular and repeated migration is common, if not the norm; so are “split families”, with often wives and/or children being left behind in the home village. These arrangements are far from ideal, and often at high costs to the family and children’s education (Chan 2015).

The deeply ingrained urban-rural duality is further underpinned by a territorial administrative hierarchy that channels financial and other resources to leading metropolises, and contributes to landed properties based urban expansion that has fundamentally transformed former compact cities to sprawling metropolitan areas spanning hundreds of kilometres across (Lin 2007). Severe and often violent contestations surrounding land acquisitions on ever-receding urban-rural fringes feature prominently on news media (Hsing 2010). Devolution of government decision-making power under marketization has given rise to a rather peculiar local state “developmentalism” (Oi 1995; Zhu 1999; Pei 2006). Yet, the 1994 tax-sharing reform has re-concentrated fiscal resources at the centre in Beijing. Land leasing and related revenues have become the single-most important financial means for municipal governments to achieve their economic goals. Instead of providing a more-levelled playing field, the heavy use of market tools, including the commodification of urban land and housing and the gradual dismantling of work-unit compounds as residential communities, has aggravated socio-spatial inequalities within and beyond major cities (He and Wu 2009).

To date, reforms on the hukou system and the associated institutions of land tenure and social welfare provisions have mostly benefited the rich and the highly educated such as successful business migrants and selected university graduates. These new measures have further differentiated the urban population socially, politically and spatially, especially in Beijing, Shanghai and other so-called “first-tier” cities (Li et al. 2012). The recent call for conferring 100 million new urban hukou by 2020, which is spelled out in China’s New-type Urbanization Plan and which also stipulates a target urbanization rate of 60% by the same year and improved housing conditions for low-income groups and education for migrant children, is unlikely to fundamentally change the nature of socio-spatial differentiation in the leading metropolises where most migrants congregate, however. This is because the new policy applies primarily to small urban places. Indeed, there are still bugging worries that the new urbanization plan might simply be hijacked by local governments for their own agenda (Chan 2014).

Earlier studies on migration in China tended to focus on the spatial patterns and changing process of rural-urban migration as well as migrants’ marginalization status (Chan and Zhang 1999; Fan 2007; Shen 1999; Wang and Fan 2006; Wu 2008). Recent research has extended to analyzing migrants’ social integration, or the lack thereof, with the urban society (Wang and Fan 2012), their social networks (Liu et al. 2012; Yue et al. 2013), access to urban homeownership (Wu and Wang 2014); residential satisfaction (Tao et al. 2014), and community attachment and sense of belonging to the city (Wu 2012; Du and Li 2012). The scope has continued to broaden, covering topics such as migrant children (Fong 2006) and families (Fan et al. 2011), and inter-generational differentiation among rural migrants (Yue et al. 2010). As the number of rural migrants and their contribution to China’s urban “miracle”, or some would argue “disaster” rather, continues to increase, this social group has received more media and scholarly attention.

Heterogeneity in socioeconomic composition and migrant housing

Much has been written on “villages-in-city” or for some authors, “urban villages”, another major manifestation of China’s rural-urban duality (Chung 2014; Wang et al. 2014). Villages on city outskirts are rural entities and fall outside the purview of the urban governance system. Instead, they are administered by village committees and the supervising township governments, the two levels of rural administration constituting what are called rural collectives. As direct descents of the former People’s Communes, these collectives assume both economic and administrative functions, including ownership of land within their jurisdiction. By law, rural land cannot be transacted for urban uses. Only the municipal government has the right to requisition rural land and turn it to state-owned land for leasing under the system of paid transfer of land use rights (Xu et al. 2009). The lure of windfall leasing revenues drives municipal governments to engage in frenetic “land enclosure” exercises, resulting in rapid engulfing of suburban villages by urban development (hence the notion of villages-in-city) and serious local debt crisis (Tsui 2011).

Many villagers have built new houses on nearby land plots for their own use, and the vacated old village houses are often rented to migrants from afar but working in nearby towns or cities. Some villagers have also added floor space to generate further rental incomes, often with little regard to building safety and ventilation because construction in rural villages is not subject to municipal building and public health codes. In Guangzhou and Shenzhen, residential structures without elevators rising to nine storeys or higher erected on both sides of narrow alleys are not uncommon in “villages-in-city”. Ventilation is poor; sunlight can hardly penetrate the narrow alleys; and fire hazards are high, as fire engines cannot make their way through the alleys. Most renters in these villages are migrant labourers from rural areas afar who are neither eligible for work-unit and municipal social housing nor able to afford private (commodity) housing. Such villages have effectively become migrant enclaves, with outsiders easily out-numbering locals by a large ratio. Despite intermingling in confine space, migrant-renters and villager-landlords seldom interact. Instead, mutual mistrust prevails between the two groups (Du and Li 2010). The hastily constructed structures often lack proper maintenance and deteriorate rapidly. Many villages-in-city have disintegrated into becoming “slums”, marked by high crime rates and grossly inadequate infrastructure services.

As economic-cum-political entities, many rural collectives in suburban areas have been transformed to share-holding companies. While industrial township and village enterprises were the major non-agricultural undertakings in suburban villages in the 1980s and early 1990s, the main concerns of township and village authorities these days are landed-property developments (Hsing 2010). Bargaining for better land requisition compensations and distributing the proceeds to individual villagers fairly is a major responsibility of the village authority. But township and village authorities would try to generate land-based incomes more directly. For example, in Beijing and other cities, suburban township governments have introduced a type of commodity housing with xiao-chanquan (“limited property right”),¹ which is sold at prices substantially below those of housing built on properly leased land. The questionable legality of such housing notwithstanding, the number of units in this category, according to unofficial estimates, astoundingly reaches 70 million (Ren Zhiqiang 2013). Buyers of xiao-changquan housing are often migrants who cannot afford to buy in the “proper” commodity housing sector (Hsing 2010).

Aside from living in villages-in-city and xiao-changquan housing in outlying suburbs, migrants also congregate in construction sites, factory dormitories, dilapidated private housing predating the Communist takeover in 1949, and illegal basements and former underground air-raid bunkers (Wu 2004; Johnson 2015). Some have infiltrated into former work-unit compounds by renting privatized work-unit housing whose owners have moved to better city condominiums or suburban apartments. Irrespective of the enlarged spatial choice set, migrants, especially low-status migrant workers from rural areas, still face immense difficulties in establishing themselves in the city. Even migrants who are doing well and who have the money are barred from purchasing homes in the private market in many large cities as local governments attempt to cool down the overheated housing market in recent years (Global Times 2013).

China’s more than thirty years of double-digit economic growth has been accompanied by an alarmingly rapid rise in income and wealth inequalities. A small number of migrants have succeeded in moving up the socio-economic ladder. Large numbers of arrivals to Beijing, Shanghai and other metropolises are graduates from leading universities with degrees in professional fields. The popularization of the term yizu or “ant tribe”, referring to those young migrant graduates in major cities who have to live like peasant-migrants in subdivided inner-city tenements and substandard housing in villages-in-city, pinpoints to the increasing difficulty for formal hukou attainment even for migrants with a university degree (Li et al. 2012). Nonetheless, over the years quite a few migrant YUPPIES (young upwardly-mobile professionals), especially those working in state and quasi-state sectors such as universities and research institutions, have managed to get hold of the proper hukou. The futures seem bright for these migrant YUPPIES; however, they are still subject to constraints quite different from their local counterparts. As a case in point, large percentages of home purchases in both Guangzhou and Shanghai were made with parental support (Li 2010). However, evidently for young professional migrants from lagging provinces and rural areas, parental support is mostly out of the question. In Guangzhou, there is evidence that buyers of more reasonably priced apartments in far-off suburbs are mainly migrant YUPPIES who communicate in Mandarin Chinese rather than Cantonese, the local dialect. Literacy in information technology enables them to form online-offline communities to pursue communal goals (Li and Li 2014).

Heterogeneity and socio-spatial differentiation

Increased residential mobility and widening socio-economic inequality have resulted in spatial differentiation and residential segregation (Huang and Li 2014; Li 2012). The rise of gated communities and enclave urbanism is a vivid manifestation of spatial segregation and fragmentation (He 2013; Pow 2009). In Chinese cities, socio-spatial inequality and residential segregation have been commonly observed and measured at different scales, especially at the neighbourhood level (see Li and Wu 2008; He et al. 2010). Unlike the experience of North American and some European cities, issues of race and ethnicity rarely play a role in the dynamics of socio-spatial different...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Migration, communities and governance in Chinese cities: unfolding forms and processes
• 2. Instability of migrant labor supply in China: evidence from source areas for 1987–2008
• 3. Residential mobility within Guangzhou city, China, 1990–2010: local residents versus migrants
• 4. Participation and expenditure of migrants in the illegal lottery in China’s Pearl River Delta
• 5. The effects of residential patterns and Chengzhongcun housing on segregation in Shenzhen
• 6. Space to maneuver: collective strategies of indigenous villagers in the urbanizing region of northwestern China
• 7. Neighborhood conflicts in urban China: from consciousness of property rights to contentious actions
• 8. Homeowner associations and neighborhood governance in Guangzhou, China
• 9. Creating and defending concepts of home in suburban Guangzhou
• Index