Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (review)

The past few decades have witnessed the publication of a number of important village studies of China's peasantry as well as other works that have focused on urban development in the People's Republic of China (PRC). This book by Dorothy Solinger is perhaps the first to examine the millions of peasants who migrated to seek work and residence in China's cities. A highly sophisticated study, the book is based on "nearly 150 hours of interviews in China with city officials, with scholars and with over fifty migrants in six major cities between 1990 and 1994" (p. 14) plus extensive documentary research from 1983 to 1996. Given the extent of this research and Solinger's recognized scholarship, the extremely high quality of this study is no surprise.

The book's title highlights Solinger's main point: the PRC, from its beginnings to the present, has refused to recognize its peasantry as full and equal citizens of the state, a status long accorded to their native urban counterparts. Its purpose, in Solinger's words, is to chart "the complex clash in Chinese cities between incoming noncitizens, the markets that bore them, city residents, and the officials and changing institutions of the old Communist urban political community" (p. 1). To accomplish this goal, Solinger describes how the PRC's Marxist ideological foundations continue to shape the government's perception and markedly different treatment of the two major segments of China's population: peasant masses and urban-dwelling migrants on the one hand and native urbanites on the other. She provides a thorough and first-rate analysis of the institutional discrimination to which migrant peasants are subjected by both the urban population and government officials. She also clearly demonstrates how, despite their second-class treatment, urban peasants play a critical role in China's urban-industrial development.

Consisting of seven chapters, the book's introduction lays out Solinger's focus and argument: "[M]y focus is the linkage between two great forces: the incursion of capitalism and challenges to established citizenship. . . . [T]he crux of my argument . . . [is that] the outcomes of marketization (a transition from bureaucratic modes of allocating, distributing, and exchanging factors of production and economic goods to market-based modes) must be understood in conjunction with institutional legacies left from the former socialist system" (pp. 8-9). The chapters in support of this thesis are divided into two sections, one on "Structure" and the other on "Agency."

Chapter 2 provides a picture of how the Chinese state has dealt with the "geographic mobility of its subjects from imperial times to the present, contrasting the position—and behavior—of earlier regimes with that of the People's Republic" (p. 12). Comparing the early and post-Mao periods, it describes how, even with "the end of socialism" in the 1980s and through the late 1990s, peasants and peasant migrants to the cities have been treated as an underclass. Solinger's historical review of the situation of the Chinese peasantry in the PRC carefully shows the way in which the "new, much heightened state-managed migration under Communist Party rule created a structural framework that turned peasants into subjects, non-citizens—people with no right to participate—should they venture into town" (p. 27). The divide created by the state between "city and country that was novel in Chinese history . . . [was intended] to lock onto the land a potential underclass, ready to be exploited to fulfill the new state's cherished project of industrialization" (p. 27).

Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how bureaucracies managed migrant populations in cities, converting "urban-dwelling peasants into industrial drudges" (p. 56). The analysis shows that, despite the reforms of the post-Mao state and the fact that migrant labor became an integral part of the PRC's accelerated marketization...