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

国内人口流动是当今中国最重要的政治和社会问题之一。近2亿人构成了中国所谓的“流动人口”，他们不仅是一股强大的社会力量，也是中国城市发展的基本经济基石。与此同时，官方的国家政策--户口制度--规定了个人可以在哪里合法居住和工作。该项目将与上海复旦大学的国内移民学者张立博士合作，研究户口制度如何能够调节和管理正在重塑中国城市中心和农村的大量流动劳动力。由于美国的重要性-中国的关系以及我们自己国家的大量劳动力流动的经验，这个项目有可能为学术和政策提供关于劳动力控制和发展的信息。为了更好地理解这一现象，本项目将通过定性调查方法产生新的经验数据，考察上海移民、非移民和移民当局的看法。然后将通过为理解国际移徙而制定的理论框架对这些数据进行分析。由于户口制度和国际移民控制之间有许多相似之处（遗传性、基于地点的归属分配以及对移民的某些权利和特权的限制），通过这一框架对户口制度的分析有望揭示有趣的趋同点，这些趋同点将为城市公民战略、中国境内的移民和整个国际移民的进一步理论化提供信息。NSF EAPSI奖是与中国科技部合作资助的。

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.