Julia Chuang, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Morrissey College - This talk examines the institutions that facilitated both China’s success in labor-intensive production and its current moment of construction over-capacity. At the center of this talk are China’s localized welfare state and decentralized fiscal policy, which have locked the country into a labor-intensive growth strategy. Yet this growth strategy has also created rural-urban disparities, as rural governments provide social and welfare support to a rural labor force employed almost solely in cities. In rural peripheries of many cities, these disparities have led rural governments to pursue land deals, in order to fund their welfare programs and drive up tax revenues. This has created an urbanization boom, which does not alter but merely redraws the line of rural-urban disparity elsewhere.