New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. xiv, 337 pp. (Tables, graphs, maps, B&W photos.) US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780231205092.
Cities have long been at the centre of China’s economic development strategies. While Mao Zedong railed against the urban bias of his ideological rivals and sent down millions of city dwellers to “learn from the peasants” in the countryside, the early decades of the People’s Republic saw the creation of policies like the hukou household registration system that privileged urban residents for economic opportunities and social services. In official statistics, the country’s urbanization rate has risen to over 65 percent today, from less than 20 percent at the time of Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, but in many ways the urban-rural gap has only widened. The national urbanization plans of the Xi Jinping era focus on sustaining economic growth by promoting a higher quality of urban producer and consumer. Even as President Xi proclaims that “the urbanization of people is core” to this strategy, rural migrants whose labour is essential to the prosperity of growing cities find that hukou restrictions and rampant discrimination keep them from crossing the urban-rural divide.
Eli Friedman’s study gives a ground-level view of the challenges rural migrant families face, based mostly on his fieldwork in and around schools for migrant children in Beijing in the early 2010s. Friedman situates his findings in context within China—acknowledging that Beijing, as the capital city, is not an entirely typical case—and in conversation with the broader literature on what some have called “planetary urbanization.” While stressing that Chinese cities are “deeply linked to global circuits of capital and commodities,” this study aims to account for “the more specific problem of how power works to coordinate distributions of labor and capital in time and space” (231). But most compellingly, The Urbanization of People surfaces the voices of rural migrant families caught between economic imperatives and shifting state priorities, repeatedly humiliated by city officials who, as one father puts it, “don’t see us as human” (221).
Friedman’s introductory chapters lay out his conceptual frameworks and key terms, drawing on Marx and Foucault, Taiichi Ohno (known for developing Toyota’s “just-in-time” production chains), and Chinese government policies and statistics, among other sources. These frameworks prepare readers for Friedman’s arguments about the emergence of a sociospatial class hierarchy in China, whereby the function of migrants in the economy is akin to a racialized subclass that can be tapped as cities’ labour needs dictate, but, stamped by their rural origins, they can never gain the rights and privileges of urban-born citizens in the largest and most developed cities. Friedman labels this an inverted welfare state: “Cities such as Beijing that have the most restrictive citizenship regime are also the places with the best services, whereas those places that have relaxed or eliminated hukou barriers provide far inferior services” (17).
Subsequent chapters examine the consequences of this system from the vantage point of schools for rural migrant children, where Friedman reports on school conditions (“concentrated deprivation”), migrant parents’ motivations and dilemmas as they are repeatedly “rendered surplus” in the urban economy, and the teachers at these largely unlicensed schools who perform the “affective labour” of caring for students in an unstable environment (85, 105, 208). A recurring theme is the imposition of state power that exacerbates the precarity of the families Friedman meets. The imperative of urban development demands the demolition of schools occupying land allocated to other purposes. Privately operated schools, even if they are licensed, are repeatedly faced with orders to relocate or close altogether. Protests from parents, or even from employers dependent on the parents’ labour, have had only modest success as schools are spatially peripheralized to the far edges of Beijing, and “parents must then consider a range of unpalatable options, including searching for new work, moving homes, or sending their child to boarding school or to their home village” (177).
While national policy calls for more migrant children to have access to urban public schools based on their place of residence, varying local bureaucratic hurdles (and the expectation of bribes) serve to prevent migrant families from obtaining residence permits. Friedman’s Beijing case studies benefit here from his comparisons with other Chinese cities; drawing on interviews by Christine Wen in Guiyang, he finds a provincial capital where it is easier to obtain a residence permit (at least for property owners), but where schools are allocated only a small fraction of the resources seen in Beijing (225–231). This illustrates the reach of the inverted welfare state in reinforcing the sociospatial hierarchy, reserving access to the top-tier cities to a “high quality” workforce while keeping a ready supply of labour on the periphery for just-in-time deployment.
Despite the inherent tensions highlighted by Friedman, the Chinese government continues to valourize urbanization while increasing its capacity to regulate the movement of its citizenry qua workforce. As The Urbanization of People went to press in 2022, the Chinese State Council affirmed a new urbanization implementation plan that emphasized granting urban residency to rural migrants—but mostly in county seats around major cities or in areas with substantial population outflows, not in metropolises like Beijing. Intensified controls on movement implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic are now another tool for local officials to deploy against unwanted migrants. Meanwhile, the young students Friedman encountered in Beijing a decade ago will be entering the workforce with the odds still stacked against their acceptance in a city that nonetheless needs their labour to function in the global economy.
Mark Henderson
Mills College at Northeastern University, Oakland