The following is part of Cornell
Contemporary China Initiative Lecture Series
under the Cornell East Asia Program.
The arguments and viewpoints of
this talk belong solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
We are very pleased this week to have
Professor Eli Friedman who is the associate professor
of International and Comparative
Labor in our own School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell.
He's the author of a book titled "Insurgency Trap: Labor
Politics in Postsocialist China."
And an editor of the book "China on Strike: Narratives of Worker's Resistance."
The most recent of his many essays is
about CCP migrant labor policy
as a form of just-in-time urbanization.
It's really excellent. I recommend it.
He's also an important public intellectual having written
for "The Nation," "Jacobin," "The Financial Times," and a dozen
other high circulation outlets. He's a recipient of the
MacIntyre Award for
Exemplary Teaching at Cornell in the School of Labor Relations
and you can study with him right here if you haven't started to
do so, which I suspect you will.
The CCCI is really a great forum.
I've got to enjoy it
as a listener for the last several years.
And it's really a pleasure to be here
now as a presenter.
Before getting into the material I also
wanna give a shoutout to
the Institute for Social Sciences here at Cornell,
which has really played
a decisive role in supporting my research,
where I'm part of a research group on
Chinese cities right now
which is headed by Jeremy Wallace,
faculty member in the government department.
And, as you might guess
based on my position in the ILR school,
I'm a labor scholar.
Going back to 2011 when I first showed up here
I never would have imagined that I'd be writing
a book about urbanization.
But here I am. Cornell has been
a really wonderful place
both to be a China scholar and to study
cities and urbanization.
So I encourage you all
to take advantage of the sorts of resources.
So today I'm gonna be presenting material from a book that I'm
in the process of writing
titled "The Urbanization of People."
This is a project that looks at how the
urban state in China manages
flows of people amidst what has been
referred to as the largest
migration in human history,
currently numbering more than a quarter of
a billion people who are moving
largely from rural areas to cities.
I'm gonna present some of the
key arguments from the book as well as some of
the conceptual innovations that I develop
and some of the information on government policy.
I have also a lot of data,
in fact the majority of my data is ethnographic and interview
data, on people's lived experiences,
on how state policy
and changes in the structure of the economy are
experienced within
migrant communities in urban China,
as well as various sorts of
coping mechanisms in forms of social resistance.
Unfortunately all of that really interesting
qualitative data is gonna be
left out of this talk just
because of time constraints.
Okay so let's begin in
the summer of 2011 in the city of Beijing.
A couple of weeks before
the school semester is going to begin,
the city launches an attack on migrant schools.
And they demolish a couple dozen schools for the
children of migrant workers,
leaving tens of thousands of people without a place
to go to school shortly before
the semester is going to start.
And then they leave parents
scrambling trying to find somewhere to put
their children into school or sending them back
to their hometowns in rural areas.
Before proceeding, I've already used
a term that I need to define, and that
is the migrant school.
So what is a migrant school?
Migrant schools are institutions
in urban areas in China that serve people who have
been excluded from the public school system
by virtue of their hukou, or their
household registration system.
I'm gonna talk a lot more about that and the processes
of exclusion. These schools are
largely or completely privatized and
totally dependent on the tuition
of their students that they serve,
exclusively or almost exclusively non-local students,
people who come from outside of the city.
As you can see in this photo from one of
the schools that I studied in Beijing,
they are badly under-resourced
and that's because they are totally privatized
but they serve a market
that does not have very much money
so tuition is low and therefore they don't have
resources to provide students with quality education.
So when I talk about migrant schools
this is what I'm referring to.
In my earlier research on labor conflicts,
which was mostly based in Guangdong Province,
I'd heard a lot about difficulties that parents,
migrant parents, have in terms of
getting access to education for their children.
But the school demolitions that
I was reading about from the comfort of my office here
in Ives Hall seemed really dramatic.
And it seemed like, as someone who's
interested in the politics of migration,
seems like something I needed to pay attention to.
So that winter I went to Beijing and I
began poking around and doing some preliminary research.
And over the subsequent years I've
been doing research in
a sporadic way, going there in summers and winters
in looking into this. And over the next several years
what I found was that
the municipal government, in Beijing
but in other places as well,
was using myriad shifts in
bureaucratic arrangements to slowly deprive migrants,
migrant children, of access to education,
be it either the formal public schooling
or the informal and private versions of schooling
as is the case with these migrants schools.
Curiously, it's at precisely the same time,
around 2012-2013 and especially 2014,
when the central government begins
advancing this slogan
the urbanization of people,
which is where I get the title of my book.
And for the first time in
the history of the People's Republic
they begin talking about actively wanting
more people in cities.
This idea, the urbanization of people
is also conceptually important
for me because it's not
just about moving people to cities.
It's an implicit recognition on the part of
the state that there has been
a disjuncture in the urbanization process.
And the disjuncture that I think is really
fascinating and generative of much of urban politics
is that capital has been largely urbanized,
it's an urban-centered economy,
that people have been urbanized as workers
but people as full social beings
have not yet been urbanized.
And that's precisely what this phrase,
the urbanization of people
is implicitly acknowledging.
That human beings have been
welcomed into the city as workers
but not as people and the state now
wants to begin to do something about this.
So why is the central government now
talking about wanting more urbanization when
this goes against just about
everything that they've done
over the previous decade of the People's Republic.
They believe that advancing urbanization,
advancing the urbanization of people, will help them in
the overriding economic goal that has been
established going all the way back to 2003,
which is rebalancing the economy.
And rebalancing refers to a lot of things.
Fundamentally it refers to increasing
domestic consumption, reducing inequality,
and thereby reducing reliance on foreign export markets,
especially the United States.
And it goes without saying that the trade
conflict between the United States and China has only
intensified that desire.
It also refers to other sorts of imbalances,
regional inequalities,
ecological destruction, things like that.
But they think that the
urbanization of people is going to be critical
to advancing this issue
of increasing domestic consumption.
Which is, as you can see in this chart,
a really pressing issue.
In the reform era,
consumption as a percentage of
GDP has fallen pretty dramatically.
And if you look at China compared to other
East Asian countries
at similar levels of development,
domestic consumption counts for a much smaller share of
total GDP in China than it does in other
countries like South Korea or Taiwan
or Singapore.
So this is seen as a problem for a number of reasons.
One, because it's suggestive of
high levels of inequality.
Because most people are not able to consume too much.
But I think of
greater concern to the Chinese government,
particularly after the financial crisis in 2008,
is it suggests dependence on foreign consumers,
notably in the United States,
and also of course in Europe
and Japan and other developed countries.
So they want to push that line up.
They believe the urbanization of
people is going to advance that.
Because if you look, historically,
typically urban residents consume
more than rural residents.
This is intuitive and something we all know
and so the logic there is
if there are more people living
in cities then there's going to be more domestic consumption.
In fact by 2013-2014
when the government starts using this phrase,
the urbanization of people,
the shift from an industrialization led
model of development to
an urbanization led model of
development was already taking place.
So here if we look at the contribution to GDP
of tertiary industry as compared to industry,
tertiary industry refers basically to the service sector,
you can see as early as I believe it's 2000 that
the tertiary industry overtakes
industry in terms of its contribution to GDP.
And that that divergence only
expands over the subsequent 15 years or so.
Similarly, if we want to look at a couple of
key urban oriented industries,
construction, finance, and real estate,
we can see that their contribution to GDP
has increased significantly in the reform era
and particularly so
after 2008. A number that
is frequently cited is that in 2011
more than half of China's population became urban,
which means that more than half the population
was living in urban areas.
It's a number that is frequently cited,
but the implications of that for thinking
about development and for thinking about
urban politics are oftentimes
not carefully integrated.
Because we know that again
about a quarter of a billion people are living
outside of their places of hukou registration,
so you have this big swath of the population,
many of which are living in cities but have not
been fully urbanized.
So again, the situation that China encounters
in this period of time is that
capital has been urbanized,
people are urbanized as labor
but not as full social beings.
In other words, their incorporation into
cities is highly segmented.
So in 2014 the central government comes out with what's
referred to as the National New Urbanization Plan,
which establishes a set of guidelines for advancing
urbanization policy from 2014 until the year 2020.
So we're in the middle of that now.
And then a few months later
they unveil this residency reform program
that some people say,
is this the end of hukou.
Again this is the first time the central government
is actively encouraging people to move
to cities in the history of
the People's Republic. For a long time they've been trying to
deincentivize people
to move to cities, particularly after 1958.
The media both in China and internationally begins talking
about this increased openness
to these migrants coming in from rural areas
until it seemed like something
was really changing.
The problem is it did not comport at
all with what I was seeing on the ground in Beijing.
I was in Beijing and seeing all of these efforts that
the city government was taking
to expel people from the city.
So what was going on here? The issue is this.
The central government wanted
certain kinds of people in certain kinds of cities.
And they make this quite explicit.
It says quite clearly in the
National Urbanization Plan that cities that
have an urban population of
more than 5 million are to
strictly control their population.
And the smaller the city,
the fewer the restrictions there
should be on urbanizing people.
So this then leads me to the questions
that I really want to address.
And these questions are
who gets into which cities and why,
and what happens to those people living in the
cities where they aren't supposed to be,
the people who were going against
the spirit of the plan.
In short, how do
Chinese megacities manage flows of people
and what are the social consequences?
What are the social consequences for the
citizenship regime and for inequality?
And just a preview of my argument,
my answer to this first question is that
Chinese megacities are pursuing
what I refer to as just-in-time urbanization.
This is a concept that I
develop by drawing an extended analogy with
the just-in-time production method that emerged
in the Toyota production system
in the post-war era in Japan.
And I'll draw this all out as we move forward.
And in answer to the question
what are the social consequences
I say what we see in China is
the emergence of an inverted welfare state in which
the logic of welfare states as they emerge in
capitalist countries in the 20th century
is perfectly inverted,
where public resources
are diverted to people who need them the least.
Which again is an inversion of
the logic of the welfare state.
As I mentioned at the outset, my book also deals with
coping strategies of migrant workers and
resistance among both parents and teachers.
And I'm not gonna be able to deal with that today but happy to
talk about some of that in Q&A.
How do I go about answering these questions?
I'm not gonna walk you through my methods too much.
I do wanna say that I'm focusing on school.
There's a lot of perspectives from
which you can study urbanization.
I think that schools are an interesting site for
understanding this problem of the urbanization of people.
Because it is a
key site of social reproduction.
And I'm gonna be talking about social reproduction.
What that term means for me
is all of the interventions that are necessary
in the maintenance and regeneration of human life at some
sort of socially determined level on a daily basis but
also on a generational basis.
So these are all of the things that are
necessary to allow
social life to continue
that occur outside of the workplace.
And key institutions of social reproduction of course
are the house and thinking about
domestic labor that's going on there, education,
health care, these are the main areas
of social reproduction.
So looking at schools allows me to ask the questions
how are people being
incorporated outside of the labor market?
And part of this stems from my first project which was
very labor market
and workplace focused and now
I want to know what's happening to
those folks when they go home at the end of the day.
Looking at the schools also allows us to
get an intergenerational processes.
So we can ask the question
will the children of migrants have
similar life chances to urban children
or might we be seeing a formation of an urban underclass?
And we can't say this conclusively.
But to some extent looking at
dynamics within the school allows us
to anticipate future social dynamics.
I conducted 250 interviews
and several months of ethnographic observation.
Most of the book and most of
my presentation today is about the city of Beijing.
But I also did research in Guangzhou and
Chengdu and working with
Christine Wen who's a PhD student here
in City and Regional Planning.
I've also done some research in Guizhou.
Okay enough on the methods.
So you have a sense of the kinds of empirical questions.
But how should we go about
conceptualizing what's happening here?
If we look at these,
the 2011 school demolitions,
this looks like a process whereby the urban state is
expelling the surplus population.
This idea of surplus population has
been an increasingly popular framework for
understanding processes of urbanization
in the Global South
where in many cities around the world we see
people moving to cities without
any promise of
gainful employment or gaining formal housing.
They're excluded to the informal economy
and living in slums.
And this kind of looks like that.
These are people that the state is saying
you're superfluous
and we're going to remove you from the city.
But let's dig into this a little bit.
I'm gonna try to keep this theory
as brief as possible.
But I do think it's important to have some
sort of conceptual framework in hand
before we return to the
specifics about what's going on in China.
So what is a surplus population?
Surplus population, or relative
surplus population, is a term
developed by Karl Marx. He wrote about this in
the first volume of Capital.
And for Marx and others more recently
surplus population is defined in
its relationship to capital, its value for capital.
So a surplus population is a group of people that are,
from the perspective of capital, irrelevant.
But they're not productive.
They play no role in capital accumulation.
And therefore they are
surplus to the needs of capital.
That's really what this term refers to.
As I said, there's been a recent revival
of interest in surplus populations.
A lot of well-known people have used
this term or this kind of
conceptualization either explicitly or implicitly,
including Mike Davis, Saskia Sassen, others.
I think there's some really major issues with this
conceptualization.
And I could go on about this
but to keep it very simple and concrete,
this just did not align with what I saw empirically.
Because when we look at those school
demolitions and the people who were
being removed from the city of Beijing,
actually a lot of them are gainfully employed.
They're making major economic contributions
to the city in various different ways.
And in fact the city could not function without them.
And we've actually seen this in
successive waves of expulsion that have happened in Beijing
in recent years that actually
oftentimes employers,
in other words capitalists,
are almost as angry about what's happening as migrants
because they were being deprived of their lifeblood.
In other words, these people are not surplus,
they're not a surplus population by virtue of their position within
the structure of the economy.
They're being rendered surplus.
There's an active role of the state in producing them as a
surplus population, which is excluded from urban space.
Has nothing to do
with their utility
from the perspective of capital
so I think that this traditional definition doesn't work.
I'm gonna have to keep it very succinct here
but I think that
Michel Foucault's concept and
theorization of biopolitics actually helps me rescue
this notion of surplus population.
So, biopower.
Biopower is a form of power that Foucault
identified that he said
emerged in the 18th
and to some extent the 19th century.
It's a new form of power that is
in contrast earlier forms of power,
notably sovereign power, which you don't have to
worry about too much.
But Biopower is the power,
the way he defines it succinctly is to
make live and let die.
So it's not a form of power that's oriented
towards taking away life,
which is what sovereign power is,
as a sovereign I can go out and
I can kill you if I want to if I'm the king.
He says that biopower is oriented towards
making live and that these life-enhancing forms of
bipower are directed at a
new object, and that new object is called the population.
Population is not a concept that power has
in its imagination prior to the 18th century.
And the sorts of interventions that are
employed by biopower include things like hygiene,
health, housing,
education. These are things that are made
that allow a population to live, to flourish.
This raises the question of why do people need to live?
Why is this form of power emerging in
the 18th and the 19th century?
And Foucault, in part
because of his methodological orientation, does
not go on to answer that why question.
But if we asked Marx, he would have an answer.
Or other Marxists, they would have an answer.
And the answer would be that this is
precisely the time that capitalism is emerging.
And that capital requires what Marx
would call living labor.
For Marx labor is the source of value.
And he refers to
human beings and active forms of labor as a form of,
he refers to human beings
and labor power as living labor.
You need to join capital to labor in order to produce
value. Human beings need to be alive.
And that living labor needs to be joined to capital in the
appropriate qualities and
quantities in space and time.
They have to be brought together in order
for production to happen.
And for my purposes
negotiations over the bringing
together of the appropriate qualities and quantities of
labor and capital in space and time
is the essence of biopolitics.
Furthermore, this is not just about
making humans live at some sort of
bare life level,
they don't just need to be biologically viable,
this is the way that a lot of people
talk about biopolitics,
but I think
a more Marxian perspective would say that,
no, people actually have to be alive at
some sort of socially determined
viable level of life,
some necessary level of competency.
So it's not just that you are living,
but that you are alive and that you have
certain capacities to actively transform the world.
Now I think that this
engagement with Foucault is necessary because a
traditional Marxian
opposition between the working class
and surplus population,
this is the way that Marx makes that distinction,
the working class is exploited
but it's necessary
for capital accumulation. You need a working class.
The surplus population is irrelevant to
that whole process of capital accumulation.
So I think
that engaging with Foucault
helps us overcome some of the problems there.
And when we look particularly at cities,
the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within
urban space is relatively
autonomous from the needs of capital,
whatever those might be.
This is not just capital needs this or that
and so people get excluded or included.
That's not I think what
I see happening in Beijing at all.
So instead I'm proposing
this reconstructed population
schema which is different from both the way
Foucault and Marx think about it
but I think is a useful synthesis of the two.
And the axis of differentiation in this schema is not,
as Marx would ask, what is
their relationship to the means of production,
but within a given space for whom
is social reproduction guaranteed?
In other words, what is your relationship to
the means of social reproduction?
All those things that I've talked about,
education, health, housing, et cetera.
So for whom is it guaranteed?
Who has some sort of provisional access
and for whom is it denied?
So in this reconstructed schema
the population is that group for whom
social reproduction is relatively guaranteed,
it's never 100% guarantee for anybody,
but relatively guaranteed.
Then we have the provisional population, which is
you have revocable or precarious access
to social reproduction.
This is more or less referring to the migrant workers
who have their children in schools
but it's precarious. It can be taken away by the state.
And then finally we have the surplus population
which is those who have no access
to social reproduction.
Think back to
those school demolitions that I started with at the outset.
What's happening here is that the state is
taking people who are in
this provisional population and they are
pushing them into the surplus population.
The state did that.
Capital did not do that.
Enough of the theory.
But with this framework I think in place
I can now return to the original question that I asked,
which is how are megacities managing flows of
people? Who was urbanized and how?
In other words I'm asking
the question, now that we have this terminology in place,
who gets to be part of
that urban population with
relatively guaranteed social reproduction?
At the most general level
we already know that the central government
is interested in having
more people in cities beginning in 2014.
And they're doing this because they
see urbanization as necessary
to catalyzing the next phase of development.
Now to understand why
the central government is saying this at
precisely the same time
that migrants are being pushed out of the city,
we need to consider this particular city of
Beijing within a larger constellation
of cities in regions.
And this plan, the 2014 urbanization plan,
what it does is it delineates different functions
for different kind of cities within this urban hierarchy.
And I've identified a
fundamental logic undergirding this plan.
And I wrote it out just to
underline why I think it's important.
And I think that the underlying logic is that
the plan is oriented towards affecting
correspondence between individual endowments of
human capital and that person's location
within the urban hierarchy.
So to put it another way,
we have elite cities, places like Beijing,
Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, that are
supposed to be reserved for elite talents.
And that is the
language of the state, elite talents.
On the other hand we have a low-end population,
which again is a state term.
And the low-end population is supposed to be
shunted to low-end places,
to small cities and to rural areas. Megacities,
these tier 1 cities, need to optimize the population,
again this is a state term,
optimize the population, in order
to enhance their capacity for economic upgrading.
So this is bringing in
people who will allow them to move to
these higher value-added forms
of production that they're
trying to pursue right now.
Included in this optimization of the population,
this is not acknowledged anywhere in the plan,
but critically is for these cities,
they're trying to deal with the problem of a
rapidly aging population.
There's been a lot of noise recently about how
China doesn't have enough people,
which is sort of ironic.
Anyone who's been paying attention to China from
the 1970s until last year,
the government has just said we have too many people,
too many people, China's overrun.
Any sort of social problem can be
explained with reference to
the fact that China's too many people.
Last year they said
oh oops we don't have enough people.
And so they're really freaking out about that.
And this problem of aging and
China's potential declining population
is felt most pressingly in
the largest cities, for a whole series of reasons.
But they're telling people to have
more children now in Beijing and Shanghai,
again at the same time that they're kicking migrants out.
And it turns out that Beijing and Shanghai residents
don't wanna have more children for
all kinds of reasons but
significantly because it's very expensive.
So you have this aging population in
the cities and they need to bring in that living labor,
that source of vitality in
essence, to serve as an engine for the economy
such that this aging population,
and remember cities are on the hook for
pension payments and for health care payments
and so as those people get older
they need an active workforce
in order to sustain that aging population.
And so the optimization of
the population is also oriented
towards addressing that problem.
So I'd like to point out here that
the urbanization strategy that
the central government is pursuing
is not just about exclusion.
They still need workers.
And this is a pretty different perspective
from the way that Chinese cities are
often talked about when you read about
forms of exclusion and the hukou,
the focus is really on the way people are excluded.
And exclusion of course is a big part
of that and I've already referenced that.
But what the urbanization plan in
general is about
is bringing certain kinds of
people in and expelling others in a
dynamic manner in response to
the perceived or real developmental needs of the city.
I use schooling as a lens on
the broader
process of urbanization that's happening.
And so the key empirical question for me is
how do migrants get access to education?
And as I've already said I think
that education is critical for
understanding the intergenerational processes.
So how to migrants get access to education?
It's particularly hard in Beijing these days.
And now I'm going to
answer that question.
And in doing so I'm beginning to delineate
the architecture of what I'm
calling the inverted welfare state.
So imagine you're a migrant parent.
You don't have Beijing hukou but you were living in hukou.
You want to get your child
into school there. What do you do?
The first step is to ask
will you be able to get Beijing hukou or not.
And hukou, if you have it,
guarantees you access to public schools.
Doesn't say anything about
the quality and there's
variation and diversity
within the public schools for sure.
But if you have Beijing hukou
the state is obligated to provide public education.
How can you go about getting hukou?
In recent years
Beijing and other large cities
in China have developed what they call
point-based hukou admissions,
or point-based citizenship I'm calling it here.
These are relatively new.
They were first piloted in Guangdong and have now,
the central government has been encouraging
all large cities to
adopt some version of a point-based scheme,
and Beijing has done so recently.
The schemes are relatively new.
But really what the point-based hukou admission policies
do is it's a
systematization of an already deeply ingrained
political logic that cities have been using to
sort the population for a very long time.
So I'm gonna walk you through
how one goes about
accumulating points such that you can get local hukou.
The most important metric that
cities are using is labor market value.
So again these have been promoted
by the central government.
And so this basic labor market orientation is clearly
reflected in the
2014 opinion issued by the State Council
which states that cities should, and I'm
quoting, "emphasize resolving hukou,"
resolving hukou means giving
them hukou, "for
people who have been in the city for a long time,
have strong employability, and can adapt to
urban industrial transformation and
upgrading, and the competitive urban environment."
If we look specifically at
Beijing's point-based hukou plan,
there's a couple of primary considerations
that they set at the outset.
And one of those primary considerations is quote,
"ensuring the human resources to improve the
central functions of the capital city," end quote.
How concretely do you go about accumulating points.
The first absolute categorical
necessity for every one of
these plans is that you have a labor contract.
The second way that you accumulate points,
and this is true for all cities, is education.
Now they have different ways of counting this.
There's different
weights in different sorts of cities.
Shanghai gives more points for PhDs.
Guangzhou gives more points for
people with technical skills.
But the consistent logic
across them is the higher level of education you have
the more points you are going to accumulate.
And in almost every case,
unless you have some form of higher education,
it's going to be very difficult to accumulate
enough points to get local
hukou. Some cities issue lists of
specific skills that are in need at
precisely that time and it can change year to year.
So you can say, well we have a shortage of,
I'm making this up but, welders
and so we're gonna give some advantage
to people who are welders.
And then the following year things could change.
And in general
these point-based citizenship schemes are
not open to people who are over the age of 45.
With the assumption being that if you're over 45
you have fewer years of
productivity left to,
fewer years of productivity left in the city.
Some places cut off at
45 that you can't apply over 45.
Other cities will give you
point deductions for every year over 45.
So again
labor market value is the most important metric.
But another very important metric is owning property.
Most cities, including Beijing,
will allow you to accumulate points for owning property.
In every case you receive
fewer points for renting as opposed to owning.
And almost across the board
you receive no points
if you're living in informal housing or
if you're living
in employer-provided dormitories.
Contributions to the local tax base,
or local fiscal capacity more broadly,
is also a critical metric that they use.
And in most cases they measure this by looking at
contributions to the social insurance
schemes. Beijing has
a hard requirement that you need to have
contributed to social insurance schemes within
the city of Beijing for seven years prior
before you can be considered
for point-based hukou.
Other cities will give you more points
for the more yuan that you've
paid into the social insurance scheme
up to some sort of limit.
You can also accumulate points in
some cities for having paid business taxes or things like
that. But in all cases, the more money you've
paid in to the local system,
the greater the likelihood of accruing points.
And then finally, a political correctness.
This is a catch-all category that I have
for things that are not
strictly economic in nature.
This mostly refers to things that you can
get point deductions for.
So if you have any run-ins with
the law, legal violations,
convictions, things like that,
you can be excluded or you can receive point deductions.
If you're in violation of birth control policies
in some cases that excludes you altogether or
you get point deductions.
In some places if you've participated in
so-called illegal political organizations
then you will be banned from applying.
What I wanna show here,
we can run through each one of these
bullet points, and each one of these
metrics serve to exclude the most
vulnerable people, to
exclude working class people from getting
access to hukou and therefore
becoming part of the population.
If we think about
the access to the labor contract,
this seems like a simple enough thing,
a reasonable thing for cities to
require people before they become citizens.
Actually the number of
migrant workers, this is nationwide,
the number of migrant workers who have
a labor contract is 35%.
So you've just eliminated 2/3 of your
potential pool with one stroke of the
pen. The number of people with
labor contracts has declined.
It was 42% in 2009 and it's now
declined to about 35%.
And of course the more vulnerable you are,
if you're an informal worker or things like that,
you're certainly not going to have a labor contract.
It goes without saying that education,
this favors people who
are already doing relatively well.
It will almost certainly eliminate
the vast majority of rural people.
There's been a lot of discussion of
the crisis in rural education in China.
A large majority of people who are from rural areas
do not complete secondary education,
are not gonna graduate from high school.
And so their likelihood of
securing one of these point-based hukous
is extremely low.
It goes without saying that owning property thing,
that advantages rich people.
If you can buy a house in Beijing or Shanghai
you are, by almost any standard, rich.
And that discrimination
against poor people here is made
quite explicit in that
you receive fewer points for renting,
you receive no points for living in informal housing.
Lots of migrant workers are housed in
informal housing
as I think is widely known.
Contributions to local tax base,
the social insurance scheme is,
lots of migrants would like social insurance
but they don't have it because
their employer is unwilling to provide it to them or
they're in an informal setting.
If only 35% of migrants have labor contracts,
it's going to be some fraction of that
35% that actually has social insurance.
So again, you've eliminated
large swaths of the labor market
from getting access to this hukou.
In general, what we see is the greater
the access someone has to economic capital,
cultural capital, and political capital,
the greater the likelihood is
that they're going to
be able to access the nominally public
resource of education.
Everyone else is likely to be excluded.
And I should also note that
megacities including Beijing and Shanghai
have even begun to issue green cards,
what they call green cards, to so-called global talents.
And so they're trying to recruit
labor even internationally.
So some people probably in
this room could show up to Beijing and say
I have a PhD from
an Ivy League institution in the United States,
and you could have better access to
social services, including education,
than someone who comes from Hebei province
just an hour to the west or so.
Again, we see here that these hukou schemes are
not oriented simply towards excluding a population
but in bringing in certain kinds of people from
around the country and even
globally while excluding other sorts of people.
That's the first step in
terms of accessing education.
If we get through all of this,
you accumulate enough points,
you get hukou, your child can
get into public school no problem.
The second step. How do people,
the tens of millions of people who are living in
cities that are never going to get hukou
but still might want to get their child into school,
how did they go about that process?
And in general there's a very similar set of
requirements that you would see.
A very similar set of metrics
as these point-based hukou schemes.
Some places in addition
to having point-based hukou schemes
now also have point-based school admissions schemes.
So if you can't get the hukou, then you can try to
accumulate points to try to get
your child into public school.
And once again, you accumulate points
on more or less the same metrics.
Beijing does not have point-based school admissions yet.
Beijing has something that's called the five permits.
You have to produce the five permits in order to be able
to apply to get your child
into school. There's no guarantee they do.
And those five permits are a labor contract,
social insurance, rental lease, hukou,
and a totally bizarre form of permit.
You have to prove that nobody back in
your home village can look after the child.
Now this last permit is particularly vexing.
It's logically incoherent.
Of course you can't prove a negative.
But practically speaking, what it
requires is that the migrant parent go back to their hometown,
in some cases it can be very far away,
taking time off from their job in Beijing,
buying a train ticket or
bus ticket all the way back home,
going to their home village,
bribing someone to produce this
totally illogical piece of documentation,
and then taking it back to Beijing.
And then I've already talked
about the labor contract,
social insurance, et cetera,
and who that's likely to exclude.
From 2014 on
the Beijing city government, or Beijing districts, begin
establishing whole series, dozens of
basically arbitrary demands on top of that.
In some cases, including that you have paid
social insurance in the same district
that you live and in the same district that
you wanna send your child to, or
setting lengths of time
that you need to have paid into social insurance.
But the clear impetus
behind all of this is to make it
more difficult on children to get into school.
So to recap, we have two layers of the
sorting mechanisms for parents
who are trying to get their children into school.
The first question is will you get hukou?
In other words, will you become part of the population?
And if not, which most won't, can they
get provisional access to school or what I'm calling
can you become part of the provisional population?
And what we see is that the public resource of
education goes to people who need it the least
and everyone else is left to the free market.
The people who have the least resources
to purchase education are the ones
who are forced to purchase education.
Now I've been talking about this
in a basically a spatial manner.
But we need to grasp
Chinese economic geography to understand
the full implications of what I'm
calling the inverted welfare state.
Remember that the urbanization
plan from the central government
envisions a correspondence between individuals'
levels of human capital,
and their position in the sociospatial hierarchy.
That's a real problem
because the largest cities are the wealthiest cities.
So here we have GDP per capita in city size.
Not surprisingly, the larger the city,
the wealthier it is,
higher GDP per capita.
Now this is not unique to China.
What is unique to China is the capacity to prevent people
from moving into the wealthiest cities
within a particular place.
You can imagine in the United States
if you weren't allowed to move
from upstate New York to New York City
or to Los Angeles or some other wealthy place.
So that's an issue.
The other issue is that the larger the city,
the better the social services.
And so here we have education spending
per capita and city size.
And again, the larger the city,
the more they are spending on education per capita.
And you can see that Beijing
sits well above the line,
as does Shanghai, which is the dot right next to Beijing.
And given this, it's not surprising that
most migrants want to go to these extra large cities.
So here you can see migrants as
a share of the total population and city size.
Once again, the larger the city,
the larger the share of the migrant population.
So the inverted welfare state
refers to the system that allows
regional forms of inequality to reinforce
fiscal inequalities both within cities and across cities,
and that the best resources are reserved for
those who are most likely to succeed.
So if we think about those school demolitions again,
we see that there's an urban government that's
trying to prevent population growth
despite strong ongoing motivations on the part of
migrants to move to those cities
because that's where the jobs are,
that's where if you wanna make money
you're gonna go, and that's where the
best social services are.
I showed the numbers for education,
but spending on health
and pensions and housing and any sorts of things
probably follow
a very similar sort of pattern.
So how does all this
help us in conceptualizing
state strategy during the urbanization process?
I'm gonna have to keep this pretty succinct here.
But what I do is I draw an extended analogy between
China's urbanization process and just-in-time production.
And the basic argument that I'm making here
is that megacities
are attempting to treat labor the way that
just-in-time production treats auto parts.
And that they are attempting to
manage the movement of human beings
according to just-in-time principles
even if they can't actually accomplish it.
And they cannot. It's a utopia,
it's a fantasy. But it's one that
has pernicious consequences.
The idea underlying just-in-time
urbanization is to deliver
the right labor to the right place at
the right time in just the right quantities,
and essentially treating
labor as if it's any other factor of
production that can be moved around at will.
So there are three key parallels between
just-in-time production and just-in-time urbanization.
The first is an orientation to the reduction of waste.
This is the central
principle of just-in-time production.
Waste under just-in-time urbanization
refers to moments when people are not
useful to the city.
And the idea, and this is relational,
that someone who was not useful yesterday
might become useful today or vice versa.
The second is an orientation to reduction of warehousing,
and this is a key technique
of course for reducing waste.
In just-in-time production
Toyota looked at what
the Fordist model of production was.
Fordist model of production, they basically
push auto parts through the supply chain
and then the final assembler has
these massive warehouses and when they wanna make a car
they go out and they take the parts
from the warehouse and then assemble it.
And Toyota saying
you're spending huge amount of money,
you're wasting a lot of space and resources maintaining
these warehouses. In just-in-time urbanization
the question is what do you do
with those laborers, with the workers
before and after they're useful.
And the idea is they wanna push
the warehousing out of the cities and into
the small cities and,
out of the large cities and into
the small cities and rural areas.
And that explains why we see these villages with
these peculiar demographic structures
of just old people and young people.
It's a warehousing function, at least from
the perspective of the megacities.
And the final point is segmentation.
Segmentation was absolutely
critical for just-in-time production.
Toyota innovated having this core relatively
strongly protected workforce surrounded by
contingent workers
that can be disbanded
with relatively little friction.
And you need this kind of flexibility
to be able to respond to
market ruins in this ongoing dynamic way.
And so in cities you have this distinction
between citizens and denizen.
Denizen is someone who can occupy the space of the city
but doesn't have the rights,
the same rights as an urban citizen.
Let's bring it all
together now with a final theoretical reconstruction,
bringing this concept of just-in-time
urbanization into conversation
with a biopolitical population schema
that I established at the outset.
And what I'm going to do here is look at
analagous positions between factory and the city.
The analogy here is between
a factory worker's position in
the productive sphere within
the factory and their access to the wage on the one hand,
and on the other hand between a
urban resident's position in
the reproductive sphere and
their access to social services.
We have here the core members.
In the case of just-in-time production
this is a permanent worker,
and in the case of the city
this is what I'm referring to as
the population.
The core member occupies
a privileged position and a relatively stable position.
We have the marginal members,
which for the Toyota production system
refers to contingent workers, and in the city refers
to the provisional population.
This is really where most of the migrants are located.
And access here is provisional.
It's contingent, it's unstable,
and it's an intermediate category to hedge against
economic or even political fluctuations,
that they can be brought in
and then expelled in this ongoing sort of way.
And then finally we have the excluded members.
These are people who are unemployed or fired in
the case of the factory, and the surplus
population in the case of the city.
There are some important differences
that I'm not really gonna get into.
But the most important difference to note
is that human beings are not auto parts.
And human subjectivity poses
a major problem for just-in-time urbanization.
Because when people move places,
they create community and create bonds
to communities and to particular spaces.
And they oftentimes demand a say
and will fight back and auto parts don't do that.
I'm gonna wrap up now.
So I've argued that the urbanization of people
is an official recognition
that capital and labor have been urbanized
but that people are not.
On the other hand, the state is saying that
more people should be urbanized
but they are supposed to be urbanized in specific places.
But just-in-time urbanization is a
utopian strategy to try to
marry appropriate qualities and quantities of
labor and capital in space and time.
It's a utopian strategy,
not meaning that it's good,
meaning that it's a fantasy,
and it is one that can't be realized,
again because human beings are different than auto parts.
The consequences of this
are what I'm referring to as the inverted welfare state,
which funnels public resources to people who need them
least. And working-class migrants
are largely left to precarious social reproduction,
school demolitions are just one
spectacular example of that precarity.
And I do wanna note that there's growing recognition of
this problem that I've identified both within the state
but certainly among people
themselves, parents and teachers.
There are forms of
mobilization among teachers
and parents against some of
the injustices of this system.
But it'll take a major
political realignment to actually address this problem
because there's going to be fierce resistance from
urban residents who themselves are under
immense economic pressure and don't
necessarily want to allow more people
into urban population, and also from urban governments,
the wealthiest of which don't wanna
share the resources with other places.
But I think that if China's going to step
back from the self-reinforcing dynamic of
widening inequality and political oligarchy,
there will need to be some sort of
important reconfigurations in
terms of the economic geography,
in terms of disbanding these state socialist institutions
of the hukou. There's probably also gonna have to be
massive wealth redistribution which
has gotten way out of hand.
Unfortunately, to leave you
on something of a pessimistic note,
I think despite being the most powerful ruler since Mao
Xi Jinping seems to not
have the appetite for these political struggles.
So I'll leave it at that and welcome your questions. Thank you.