Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State and the Logic of the Market, 1999

Abstract

Appearing to urbanites as aimless and ominous as errant waters, China's sojourning peasant transients in the cities are outsiders, out of place. In late twentieth-century urban China, markets and the migrants they bore together challenged the city hukou, a most fundamental political institution, one that really amounted to an emblem of citizenship. Not only in their working lives but also in their daily lives – their housing, medical care, education, and welfare services – many rural migrants in the cities through the mid-1990s had to make do without the trappings of formal, state-bestowed citizenship. But it was the Zhejiang Village that was by far the most massive and articulated; it was also the place that was best researched. For of the 9.4 percent of migrants professing to belong to some kind of organization in 1994, 33.9 percent were businesspeople.