EAPSI: Investigating novel perspectives on internal migration control and urban citizenship in China

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Internal migration is one of the most important political and social issues in China today. The nearly 200 million individuals who make up China's so-called "floating population" of migrant laborers are not only a powerful social force, but are also a fundamental economic building block for Chinese urban development. At the same time, official state policy - the hukou system - regulates where individuals are allowed to legally live and work. In collaboration with Dr. Li Zhang, a scholar of internal migration at Fudan University in Shanghai, this project will investigate how the hukou system is able to regulate and manage the massive flows of migrant labor that are in the process of remaking China's urban centers as well as its countryside. Because of the importance of U.S.-China relations as well as our own country's experience of large flows of labor migration, this project has the potential to inform both scholarship and policy with regards to labor control and development. In order to better understand this phenomenon, this project will generate new empirical data through qualitative survey methods, examining the perceptions of migrants, non-migrants, and migration authorities in Shanghai. This data will then be analyzed through theoretical frameworks that have been developed to understand international migration. Because of the many similarities between the hukou system and international migration controls (heritability, place-based assignations of belonging, and restriction of some rights and privileges to migrants), analysis of the hukou system through this framework promises to reveal interesting points of convergence that will inform further theorizations of urban citizenship strategies, migration within China, and international migration as a whole. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology.