WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2014 | | Business A7

The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and Newspapers In Education present Week 4 ExploringAsia: Asian Cities —Growthand Change

Ad Number: Insertion Number: Size: Color Type: MIGRATION AND denied access to urban services and other opportunities because the great majority URBANIZATION IN CHINA of them are not allowed to change their By Dr.Kam Wing Chan hukou from rural to urban. Department of Geography,University of Washington

Editor’snote: This article is the fourh of five featuring pieces Rural migrants work and live in the city but by Dr.Anand Yang, Dr.Anu Taranth, Dr.H.Hazel Hahn are not part of the urban class—not now and Dr.Nathaniel Trumbull. and not in the future, no matter how many years and how hard they have worked in In the last three decades, China has undergone the city.Together with their families, they rapid and massive urbanization. Today,more than form amammoth “floating population,” 700 million people live in cities and towns, more in the range of about 220 million and still than triple the nearly 200 million in 1980 (see growing. The fact that they are purposely graph.) While this epic rural-urban shift has many Migrant Workers in Guangdong held down as amassive permanent of the trappings of urbanization, as observed underclass is precisely why China has ahuge elsewhere in the world, the Chinese case is much and almost inexhaustible pool of super- more complex. exploitable labor.Perhaps that explains why China is the world’slargest—and most “competitive”— Underlying China’sglittering modern urban facade manufacturing powerhouse! and prosperity is one crucial dynamic that is unique in modern times and yet largely ignored in the China’srapid urban population growth, as popular literature: its institutionalized two-tier, represented by the thin line in the accompanying rural-urban divide. This outcome of Mao-era social graph, is familiar to many.But that single-line engineering continues to this day.This division not 05/21/2014 depiction leaves out an important point: the only manifests itself in economic and social terms, majority of migrants to the city do not have urban as in many Third World countries in the throes of rights. Alarmingly,the gap between the total urban transition, but also in tightly enforced clear population living in cities and those who possess legal terms, mainly through asystem of hereditary urban rights (the thick line) has widened as the residency rights called the hukou,orhousehold country moves forward. If this trend continues, the registration. colossal underclass will definitely spell trouble for the country in the years to come. The hukou system differentiates the population into two classes: an urban class whose members The media has often portrayed rapid urbanization have access to basic social welfare programs and in China as leading to alarger middle class full citizenship, and an underclass of peasants and greater consumption rates. That narrative, with neither of these privileges. In Mao’sera, however,seems problematic given China’scurrent peasants were forbidden to go into the cities and configuration of economic and legal inequities. confined to tilling the soil to grow food for urban There are many myths behind the perception and workers. When China opened up in the late 1970s, sustainability of China’srecent economic rise. peasants were allowed to enter the cities to work Urbanization remains one of the biggest. in low-paying factory and service jobs, many of which involve dirty and dangerous work. At the same time, however,peasants were and still are

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