The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Education in the Chinese City

Beginning in 2014 China’s central government began pushing for more people to move to cities, as they believe that increased urbanization will be necessary in advancing a new phase of economic development. But despite cities' heavy reliance on the labor of rural migrants, major institutional obstacles remain for those wishing to settle permanently. Perhaps the most important form of social exclusion for migrant workers is in education. Using the school system as a lens on the urbanization process, I ask how local governments are managing flows of people into the city, which groups are included in which places and why, and what the socio-economic consequences of this approach are for Chinese society. My key empirical argument is that urban governments are providing access to public education precisely to those that need it least, i.e. families with already high levels of economic, cultural, and social capital. The only option for excluded migrants is to enroll their children in resource-starved private schools, which are sometimes subjected to closure and even coercive demolition. Elite cities have developed evaluative frameworks that allow them to fully incorporate those migrants judged to be of high quality, while the "low-end populations" are shunted away to smaller, less well-resourced locales with inferior public services. These conditions appear likely to reinforce existing social and spatial forms of inequality.

Presenter

Eli Friedman

Dr. Eli Friedman is associate professor and chair of International and Comparative Labor at Department of Sociology, Cornell University. His primary areas of interest are China, development, education, globalization, social movements, theory, urbanization, and work and labor.

He is the author of "Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China", published by Cornell University Press (2014).  His second book "The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Education in the Chinese City" is a study of Chinese urbanization, with a particular focus on access to education for rural to urban migrants.