Top-Down View: Urbanization as Development

Urbanization is state led and state supported in China. The process of urbanizing people (and land) is seen as a means to further economic development and modernization. Central pronouncements declare a more balanced approach to urbanization that would alleviate some of the past problems and address inequity. The attention has matched other campaigns to reduce socioeconomic disparity, but concrete measures have lagged behind the words. Discussions of inequality in China often converge on two points: remarkable progress in poverty alleviation and the ever stubborn rural-urban divide.²⁹ Migrants, however, have not yet become fully integrated into their urban destinations. Verbal overtures about incorporating outsiders are a start, but they are not enough to improve migrant welfare without a national overhaul.

The focus on urbanization as development came from among the topmost powers in Beijing. Li Keqiang fixated on urbanization during his post as premier under Xi Jinping and made urbanization a central component of economic reform. According to Li, urbanization was the key to unlocking China’s domestic consumption and subsequently improving people’s welfare. His focus on urbanization and economic development was visible and widely touted when Xi first rose to power. In a 2012 article expounding his views on the urbanization drive, Li said, “Stepping up efforts to abolish the ‘two-tier class system’ will help rebalance urban-rural development, resolve social conflicts and unleash the untapped potential for domestic demand which will result from urbanization.”³⁰ He drew a clear line from reducing inequality between registered urban residents and migrants to untapping rural labor and unleashing latent domestic demand. The process of urbanization itself would boost the economy as well as create the basis of future market growth by making more people city residents, who would then become urban consumers.

Li also made the link between public service provision for migrants and the urbanization process. In the same article, he pointed to the need for government responsibility in helping to provide migrant workers with health care, education, and more: “The government should formulate and ensure the seamless implementation of policies and measures which encourage migrant workers to integrate into cities, while also ensuring that they are covered by, and have equal access to basic public services, including urban social security, health care, education and culture. The government should help them solve problems concerning employment, housing, health care and children’s education.”³¹ The article, however, did not specify the role of the central and local governments in formulating and implementing policies that would actually make migrant workers full-fledged citizens. Nor, for example, did it lay out a financial restructuring plan to increase transfers to municipal governments so they could pay for expanding their public goods systems. And it did not provide details on where new schools and hospitals for migrants and their children would be built, how these organizations would hire appropriate teachers and doctors to staff them, how migrants would be able to navigate any new eligibility and access requirements set by bureaucracies, and other logistics behind any meaningful incorporation.

The notion of urbanization as development seems to have fallen out of the national spotlight. While it is difficult to discern whether what publicly appeared to be a slow fade was the product of a completed policy goal or explicit reprioritization, it has diminished in relative rhetorical importance to other policy initiatives. At a speech seven years later, at the 2019 Summer Davos meeting, Li still emphasized the idea of putting people at the center of development priorities. But there was less weight placed on urbanization and incorporating migrants. He made broad mentions of improving people’s well-being overall, saying, “The Chinese government will continue to put people first in pursuing development, explore innovative means to enhance people’s well-being, and provide more quality public goods and services to better share the fruits of reform and development among our people.”³² Other economic priorities have taken center stage as the Chinese government fears a substantial slowdown in growth. That has left migrants empty-handed in terms of the significant integration that had been promoted at the start of the Xi era.

Li Keqiang was not the only vocal supporter of urbanization and improving migrant workers’ welfare. A number of central proclamations and directives have shown rhetorical support for improving migrants’ and their dependents’ access to primary education, use of social insurance in the city, affordable housing, and pensions. The National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014–20) suggests a longer commitment to ensuring that people moving from the countryside to the city would enjoy more services. The plan included the goal of converting one hundred million more rural residents’ hukou into urban registrations and improving access to hospitals and schools for those already living in urban areas.³³ China’s drive for urbanization is synonymous with modernization because advanced, industrialized countries are urbanized. According to the plan, different forms of migrant inequality, from public services to land rights, would be addressed as part of this process.

The Chinese Dream is another example of central concern and signaling. The amorphous and wide-reaching slogan carries grand notions of national rejuvenation but offers little in the way of specifics. Part of it seeks to address the effects of uneven development during the economic reform period. In a report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2017, Xi said, “What we now face is the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life.”³⁴ An optimistic interpretation would include in this group of people China’s hundreds of millions of internal migrants. Projects focused on specific aspects of quality of life, such as the “Common Prosperity” campaign and Healthy China 2030, add more hope.³⁵ (See Martin King Whyte’s chapter in this volume for more on inequality under Xi.) Taken together, such directives show that the Xi government appears invested in devoting attention to this large group of marginalized people in China, at least according to these announcements and plans.

Other national projects seek to direct the pace and location of urbanization. While urbanization would continue even without state intervention because China is a developing country, the Xi government is intent on speeding it up. The aim is to control the geographic concentration of movement, mostly to small and medium-size cities and to a lesser extent to urban mega-regions outside metropolises’ existing central business districts. The state is devoted to leading and supporting the urbanization process insofar that it takes a certain form. A government publication called the “Key Tasks of New-Type Urbanization Construction in 2019” recommends that cities with a permanent population between one and three million people should lift residency requirements that prevent migrant workers from accessing urban social services.³⁶ These small and medium cities usually cannot offer the economic opportunity and co-migrant networks that are available in coastal cities, which have long been popular destinations for the “floating population.” A mismatch between central state goals, local authorities’ priorities and constraints, and migrant preferences ends up undermining the overarching idealistic project of deepening urbanization in a less than organic way. Li Keqiang, too, described his own plan for migrant incorporation: “Qualification requirements should be relaxed for those rural migrant workers with stable jobs and housing to become permanent urban residents of mid-sized and small cities.”³⁷ These qualifications concerning employment stability, housing permanence, and residency status are subtle and build on a number of policies and practices that had been in place before a Xi effect could have begun.

More Continuity than Change: Pliable Citizenship in Practice

One way to evaluate the Xi Jinping effect is to assess the degree of continuity and change between administrations. It can help establish whether there is a distinct shift from changing paramount leaders and, if so, its extent. To be clear, continuity or little change does not necessarily mean that the later leader is ineffectual or that this leader is not minding the issue. If policies are sufficient or functioning, then the leader may choose to maintain them as they are. That too is a decision, though one that is less discernibly the effect of an individual. Intent, as is often the case, is difficult to measure but need not be considered to observe the outcomes of migrant inequality. This chapter focuses on the perspective on the ground of migrant workers engaged in navigating municipal and district rules on social services and the local officials and street-level service providers responsible for these public goods. Both the Hu and Xi administrations’ central directives included inclusive and expansionary rhetoric. A closer look at how they are translated into municipal policies shows that city newcomers’ access to public goods is actually highly differentiated and becoming more so.

The devolution of authority and responsibility for migrants’ integration into cities is a major source of inequality. The central directives mentioned notwithstanding, the formulation and the implementation of specific policies to bring outsiders into the local urban public health, education, housing, and pension systems fall to municipalities. Local officials are responsible for designing schemes that dictate who does and does not qualify for benefits. For those who do qualify, they must then ensure that they have adequate access and can actually use the entitlements given to them. Officials therefore exercise discretion and devise systems such as points schemes to determine eligibility for permanent residency status. These complicated systems award points to applicants for qualifications such as having a university degree. They make it appear as if inclusion is possible and procedures do exist, but they continue to exclude most migrants. Beijing, for example, granted hukou only to 6,019 people who had the most points out of 124,000 applicants.³⁸ Few gain full citizenship.

Many city officials feel hamstrung because of crosscutting pressures. The combination of central concern and local responsibility often leads to an unfunded mandate, referred to by Chinese as “The center treats, local governments pay” (Zhongyang qingke, dangdi maidan).³⁹ Because migrants are managed locally and support from above is minimal, cities get to choose whom to incorporate and on what terms. Fully incorporating migrants would require significant resources. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated it would cost approximately ¥650 billion (or US$106 billion) a year to ensure that rural migrants have the same health care, education, and housing benefits that their urban resident counterparts have.⁴⁰ But cities cannot forego the labor of migrants. They also need them to support the local economy by ferrying takeout lunch orders to the business crowd, cleaning major city streets, building new residential construction, and more. And principals and hospital administrators must respond when migrants show up in their schools and health-care facilities looking to enroll their children or use their social insurance to receive medical treatment.

Decentralization leaves room for local governments to enact pliable citizenship. Pliable citizenship involves migrant workers’ social rights being dependent on place, time, and characteristics of the individual. Their ability to qualify for, access, and use urban social services can vary based on where they live and work and their hometown or province. Being qualified does not guarantee access or use either. One year they may have a harder time enrolling their children in the local public school than the next year. They may also have more entitlements if they moved from another city instead of a village, have a formal job with a signed labor contract, work at a state-owned enterprise, or can prove long-term residency with a lease or by buying a house. One migrant’s actualized citizenship may differ from another outsider’s, which is a different contrast than that between a native urban resident and a registered rural counterpart. While urban authorities do have some leeway and could potentially open up their cities more, they face other pragmatic constraints.

Urban authorities, therefore, sometimes provide “phantom services” in lieu of full incorporation.⁴¹ Many municipalities deflect demands for benefits instead of meeting them or denying them outright. City leaders often establish near-impossible eligibility requirements and require paperwork that outsiders struggle to obtain. Municipal authorities also nudge migrants to seek health care or education elsewhere by enforcing dormant rules, shutting down schools and clinics, and encouraging migrants to seek out cheaper options in another city or in the countryside. Urban officials deflect migrants for practical and political reasons. Limiting access is both cost-effective and done in a way that isolates and disempowers migrants and makes it harder for them to protest collectively. Phantom services change the locus of contention, aid “social management” (shehui guanli), and expose new axes of inequality.

Pliable citizenship predates the Xi era. Several years before he came to power, for example, Shanghai announced it would provide free education to all school-age migrant children. The outcome has been mixed, but the action of making the formal statement itself is noteworthy. Other cities are developing their own sets of policies and rules around public education and other types of benefits. More systematic national overhauls seem to be far off. Claims that incremental changes will eventually amount to full integration into cities are unsubstantiated so far. Xi has not recentralized fiscal responsibility and policymaking in this realm, and he has not done much to advance the incorporation of rural migrants in cities. Any changes since 2012 have happened at the edges. It would be difficult to describe this as incremental progress because the steps taken do not appear to build on each other toward a larger goal of dismantling the institutions behind migrant inequity.

The patchwork of local policies works because of the lack of centralized coordination, not in spite of it. Decentralization in migrant benefits persists beyond the Hu administration because it continues to be in Beijing’s interest. The state benefits whether it was intentionally designed this way from the top or not and regardless of whether China has the state capacity to completely overhaul the public goods system. Given the consolidation of power that follows other central policy goals, the combination of verbal commitments from the top but without resources and details to support them suggests that the current system works as is.

Devolved responsibility started before Xi, but his government has done little to advance the full incorporation of migrants. Xi’s authority and efficacy are not necessarily less relevant or potent. Rather, officials have allowed an effective system (or, more accurately, a set of multiple subnational systems) to continue functioning while it is good enough. That a leader would allow a system to keep plodding along does not necessarily imply that decisions were not made about the processes in place. Insofar as this system of labor pool management suiting broader policy goals, this is unsurprising. It becomes more relevant as the Chinese economy undergoes structural adjustments, which should lead to necessary industrial upgrading but which will nonetheless involve some growing pains as the growth rate slows from the height of approximately 10 percent. But that system does not work toward primarily improving migrant welfare.

Retrenchment and reversal are underway in some places. A few of the largest cities are attempting to cap the number of people living in those metropolitan areas and are seeking to disincentivize further population growth. The Beijing Municipal Master Plan (2016–35), officially approved by the Party Central Committee and the State Council, set a goal of capping the city’s population at twenty-three million by 2020.⁴² Shanghai followed, with a cap of twenty-five million people by 2035. These goals seem incompatible to many given the existing population in both cities, with vulnerable migrants likely to bear the brunt of any population management policies to come. Migrant integration therefore remains uneven, especially as these cities and others in similar positions appear to inch away from full incorporation.

Whether hukou and public service provision reforms are gradual (as most officials say) or stalled, the effect is the same. The drawn-out process framed as incremental changes benefits the state. Pliable citizenship is a by-product of gradual reform, regardless of whether the abolishment of the household registration system or the complete integration of migrants is on the horizon. A government report compiled in 2019 by the National Health Commission’s Migrant Population Service Center, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the China Population and Development Research Center, and Renmin University’s Population and Research Center found that less than 4 percent of migrants in fifty cities (including Qingdao and Chengdu) were able to obtain permanent residence status in their adopted city.⁴³ Xiao Zihua, director of the National Health Commission’s Migrant Population Service Center, said, “The larger the city, the more difficult it is for migrants to integrate.… Migrants most want to integrate into big cities and mega-cities, but our urbanization strategy is at odds with that as we encourage them to move to small and medium cities.”⁴⁴ Both the numbers and this official’s statement confirm that migrants face obstacles similar to those encountered during Xi’s early administration. Most outsiders continue to run up against high institutional barriers, while a select few enjoy a slim possibility of integration. Furthermore, the mismatch between the state’s urbanization strategy and migrant workers’ preferences lingers.

Bottom-Up View: Migrant Workers’ Lived Experience

Migrants’ own point of view shows how pliable citizenship works on the ground. Their lived experience reveals the ways in which a general Xi effect is overstated on the specific issue of migrant inequality. Migrants’ responses in interviews conducted in the years before and after Xi Jinping came to power are remarkably similar. Qualitative descriptions of their attempts to qualify for, access, and use public services in coastal and inland cities indicate that pliable citizenship has been in practice since the period spanning the 2010s. They, too, heard about the urbanization drive and the central directives encouraging integration and better access to urban public goods. But they learned through their own experiences and those of their family, friends, and co-migrants as they encountered new bureaucratic roadblocks that only a selective group of migrants reaped newfound benefits. Disenchantment and a sense of powerlessness quickly followed their initial feeling of hope.

Almost all migrants describe a messy hodgepodge of various municipal and district systems. Every city has its own set of standards, so understanding the rules in one place is of little use once migrants move to another destination when following a new construction or manufacturing job lead. Or a school official tells them the school is full and instructs them to get in line for the following year.⁴⁵ Within a city, each district may make its own determinations about who is worthy of which benefits. Migrant children whose parents try to enroll them in public schools in the central business district often face higher barriers than if they were in a “migrant village” on the outskirts of the city, where competition for spots in high-quality schools is less fierce.⁴⁶

Many migrants report wasted time and feelings of frustration. After they figure out what “five documents” (wuzheng) they need to prove eligibility, then they go about collecting them. Typically, these include a household registration booklet, proof of hometown permanent residency, a temporary residence permit, proof of local address, and proof of employment. Not all of these certifications are easily accessible, and some might be in their hometown or do not exist at all. Those who manage to gather everything must then bring their paperwork to be certified. Here, too, migrants get stuck between supposedly being eligible and being able to prove it officially. A small shop owner working in Guangzhou said, “They ask for this certificate and that certificate: proof of housing, social insurance cards, and labor contracts. It’s almost impossible.”⁴⁷ The few who are successful once may need to start all over the next year when their child graduates from primary school to middle school or if the family moves to another city or district. After trying, many give up and opt to send their children to live with their grandparents in their home village or to stay in boarding schools on the periphery just outside the city.⁴⁸ Part of what makes pliable citizenship work is that it is hard for outsiders to get a bird’s-eye view of migrant inequality. Migrant workers know their own experiences and the shared stories of people in their networks. However, they are often in similar circumstances and are running into the same phantom services that never appear. Over time they learn to expect less and less from the promised incorporation they hear is coming.

Pliable citizenship also works by shifting responsibility to migrants themselves for obtaining their own services. While cities are the providers, the onus is on outsiders to prove their worthiness and follow the proper timeline to file paperwork. In addition to the formal rules, they must navigate and adhere to informal norms. Schools may require “voluntary” donations or other extra fees in order for children to secure a spot on the roster, as was the experience of a woman who left two children at home in Anhui Province while she worked as a street sweeper in Shanghai.⁴⁹ Specialists in hospitals may treat some people ahead of others because these patients can afford to give them red envelopes of cash, bottles of duty-free alcohol from the airport, and other gifts, as observed during transactions at hospitals in Beijing and elsewhere. If their paperwork is insufficient, as was the case of a roadside fruit and vegetable seller who did not have a storefront lease to show proof of employment, then they are told they should have secured a more formal, permanent position. A woman from Henan Province who sold vegetables in Beijing explained that she sold one head of bok choy for five mao (US$0.07) and earned a couple of thousand kuai per month, hardly enough to buy a house in her Beijing neighborhood, which she estimated to cost 10,000 kuai (US$1,370.00) per square meter.⁵⁰ The responsibility, and therefore the blame, is on individuals who have the least leverage.

The barriers are more than bureaucratic red tape. The practical consequences of pliable citizenship in forms such as phantom services and political atomization are not only annoyances. Excessive complexity may delay outcomes and result in inaction, but the key difference here is that the official procedures effectively keep out most migrants altogether. Few experience success or reward because most cannot accumulate enough points in points systems or provide the correct paperwork (for example, signed labor contracts or housing leases) to prove their periods of employment and residences. For city officials reluctant to welcome all newcomers and for frontline service providers strapped for resources, it is convenient to use procedural reasons for limiting access to public hospitals, public schools, low-income housing, and city pensions. Many migrants work six days per week for twelve hours or more per day. They do not have the luxury of time to constantly learn new rules and run around chasing paper trails, so many resign themselves to being empty-handed despite central calls for “human-centered” urbanization.

There are stories of success that circulate. Some cities that experienced influxes of migrants later than coastal areas seem more open. Chengdu, for example, certifies private migrant schools instead of shutting them down, as Beijing has done in the past.⁵¹ This serves migrants better since their children are already attending them, and the buildings tend to be located in more convenient neighborhoods. Urban public hospitals may arrange agreements that allow migrants to seek a percentage of reimbursement from their rural insurance.⁵² There are some stories of successfully enrolling migrant children in public schools in megacities. But when pressed, it becomes evident that it is usually a certain kind of migrant who can achieve this. Doctors, lawyers, and similarly highly educated people who have relocated from another city typically have multiple avenues of assistance. The vast majority of so-called unskilled migrant workers do not have a law school or company that can support their hukou change or their efforts to buy into urban social services. The gap between their aspirations and reality can be demoralizing. One report found that even 7.5 years after migrating to urban areas, rural Chinese migrants are on average less happy than they might have been had they not moved.⁵³ Whispers and rumors of hope have not yet materialized into widespread, deep integration across the “floating population.”

Decentralization and pliable citizenship create uncertainty for migrant workers. Being perennially deflected and excluded makes it hard to plan work and life. Certain jobs, especially informal ones such as nannying, are precarious, and workers are reluctant to bring their children along when they move if they cannot be assured they can go to school during the day while they are at work.⁵⁴ The second generation of migrant workers desire to settle down long-term in cities, and not knowing whether they can use their insurance or if they will have a pension in the city when they retire makes it hard to calculate the risks and rewards of planting roots. Difficulty accessing housing is another dimension of insecurity, as tens of thousands of migrants in Beijing experienced when they were suddenly evicted from their homes after a deadly fire in an apartment building in Daxing District in 2017. The dehumanizing bureaucratic term low-end population lays bare how the government perceives them in terms of their supposed low value-added manual labor. From this perspective, not much has changed since Xi assumed power.