The Making of the Chinese Working Class: Rural Migrants in Shanghai by Li Ma This thesis/dissertation document has been electronically approved by the following individuals: Nee,Victor (Chairperson) Swedberg,Richard (Minor Member) Strang,David (Minor Member) THE MAKING OF THE CHINESE WORKING CLASS: RURAL MIGRANTS IN SHANGHAI A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Li Ma August 2010 © 2010 Li Ma THE MAKING OF THE CHINESE WORKING CLASS: RURAL MIGRANTS IN SHANGHAI Li Ma, Ph. D. Cornell University 2010 My dissertation analyzes the institutional mechanisms that cause the persistence of class and status inequalities between rural migrants and urban residents in post- socialist Shanghai. I examine how remnants of China’s socialist institutions , after the gradualist market reform, continue to stratify rural migrants and their second generation through sociopolitical processes. Making two thirds of the labor force nowadays in China, rural migrants experience social forces in China’s emerging market capitalism as well as repercussions from the socialist legacy. Drawing from historical archives and a 12-month ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, I demonstrate how rules, norms, organizations and beliefs in contemporary Chinese society make rural or urban residence identities the most salient sites of social distinction. I examine the blending and segregating processes of rural migrants’ life in the city. I also analyze how rural migrants respond to social exclusion with a variety of strategies. I argue that since rural migrants and urban residents have been classified into two different forms of citizenship that were deeply rooted in the ideological and organizational structures of Chinese socialism. Economic liberalization alone only led to limited upward social mobility of rural migrants, the new working class in China. Taking rural migrants’ experiences in urban China as an exemplar case of path dependent institutional change, I argue that changes in formal rules interact with the persistence of informal institutional elements—customs, networks, norms, and cultural beliefs—to produce persistent status hierarchies. Rural migrants respond to these structural constraints by developing distinctive coping strategies in the labor market, communal life, and education attainment. I argue that the institutional matrix of political, fiscal and economic constraints comprises the deeper causes that determine rural migrants’ purposive actions and networks to be advancing segregative more often than intergrative processes. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Li Ma received her B.A. in English Literature and Economics at Wuhan University of Technology (P.R.China) in 2002, and then her Master of Science degree in Sociology at University of Oxford in 2003. She entered into the doctoral program in sociology at Cornell University in 2004, after working as a research analyst for Horizon Research Group in Beijing. Since 2006, she has been in voluntary service as a consultant for a few NGOs serving rural migrants in China. Li Ma started her dissertation on rural migrants’ life in Chinese studies from June of 2007. iii To ZHAO Shuxiang, my beloved mother, a peasant’s daughter, a godly woman of courage and compassion iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My primary thanks are to my advisor Professor Victor Nee, who has read my draft for numerous times with detailed comments and insightful advice. His expertise in China’s market transition and institutional change, new institutionalism in economic sociology, as well as his longstanding scholarship in assimilation in the American society have backed up this project with intellectual rigor and visionary depths. Professor Richard Swedberg, in a similar fashion, has been another major source of scholarly inspirations for me during numerous discussions over this issue. His longstanding scholarship on Weber and Tocqueville has shaped my thinking of the Chinese context in a more theoretical way. I thank him for the warm emails of concerns while I was doing fieldwork in Shanghai and in the year-long writing process. I also thank my third committee member David Strang, the renowned organization scholar and political sociologist for his insightful advice on my using the social movement approach in the theoretical breakthrough of this study. I own my greatest gratitude for the three of them during the past six years of doctoral training and dissertation work. I owe many other colleagues at Cornell University heartfelt thanks for reading and discussing the ideas and structure of this project: Nicolas Eilbaum, Paul Lee, Ningxi Zhang, and many Cornellian sociologists who came to my Brown Bag presentations and offered their comments on this topic. I also appreciate inputs from many sociologists I met in the field including Zu-Chi Ou, Shanglin Li, Yingfeng Liu. I also appreciate the opportunities of exchanging ideas with many scholars including Jingbei Hu, Huaqing Ke, Weisen Li, Xueqin Zhu, Jieh-Min Wu, and Pei-Chia Lan. My love and thanks to my fiancé Jin Li, an economic historian at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, who shares the same fascination with me on v China’s social transformation, and the same compassion for the underprivileged. I could not have written anything if not for his love and support. Special thanks are for friends from a few NGOs serving rural migrants in China: Xiaoduo Ma, Lusheng Lin, Ling Zhao, Jonathan Hirsch, Jianing Zhang, and Corinne Hua. My fieldwork and follow-up field trips were funded by two travel grants and a Lam Family Award from the East Asia Program at Cornell University, a research grant from the Center for the Study of Economy and Society, and a research grant from the Center for the Study of Inequality at Cornell University. My dissertation writing-up is funded by the Starr Fellowship from the East Asia Program at Cornell University and a teaching assistantship from Cornell University. Last but not least, my thanks and prayers to all the anonymous informants who shared their life stories with me. This piece of work is a tribute to them. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Dedication iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vii List of Figures viii List of Tables ix Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Shadow of the Old Regime 31 Chapter 3: Behind the China Price 71 Chapter 4: In Search of A Community 130 Chapter 5: Inheriting the Distinction 177 Chapter 6: Conclusion 212 Appendices 237 References 247 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1-1. Weberian Conceptualization of Social Closure Formation 14 Figure 1-2. Cluster Snowball Sampling Processes 26 Figure 3-1. Regional Diners Run by Rural Migrants, Shanghai 89 Figure 3-2. A Self-Make Marketplace in the Pond, Shanghai 90 Figure 4-1. Warning Sign in An Urban Residential Area 131 Figure 4-2. An Old penghuqu in Shanghai 138 Figure 4-3. The Pond on Google Earth Map, Shanghai 140 Figure 4-4. Layout of the Pond, Shanghai 140 Figure 4-5. Main Entrance to the Pond 145 Figure 4-6. A Vegetable Shop in the Pond 151 Figure 4-7. A Video Rental Shop in the Pond 151 Figure 4-8. Street Committee’s Announcement Board 152 Figure 4-9. Room Arrangements of the Zhang’s 155 Figure 4-10. The Pond Migrant School before Closedown (2003) 157 Figure 4-11. Liang’s Teashop Business Layout 160 Figure 4-12. Limited Social Space in the Pond for Children 163 Figure 4-13. Model of Community Networks Mobilization 174 Figure 6-1. Interplay of Marketization, Urbanization and Informalization 226 Processes and the Perpetuation of Inequality Figure 6-2. McAdam’s Political Process Model (1987) 229 Figure 6-3. NIES Model: the Perpetuation of Rural-Urban Distinction in 232 Post-Socialist China viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1-1. Comparison of Wage Increases between Rural Migrants and 18 Urban Workers Table 1-2. Summary Statistics of Rural Migrant Respondents (N=114) 27 Table 4-1. Comparison of Education Levels: the Pond vs Shanghai 143 Table 4-2. Household Incomes of Rural Migrants at the Pond 143 Table 5-1. Descriptive Statistics of A Four-School Survey in 2008 (N=281) 197 Table 5-2. Descriptive Statistics of Individual, Family, and Neighborhood 198 Background Variables Table 5-3. GLM Model Coefficients for Math Score Determinants (N=281) 199 Table 6-1. Fiscal Trend for Government, by Level 215 Table 6-2. Distribution of Budgetary Expenditures by Level of Government 216 Table 6-3. Deinstitutionalization of Systems of Differential Citizenship 229 ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The annual homecoming during the Lunar New Year, the most celebrated festival in China, has become bittersweet for most Chinese. Since 2006, the flow of railway passengers, as estimated by the Ministry of Railways, has exceeded 100 million commuters during the three weeks of what is called the “spring rush” ( chunyun ). The number increases each year due to rising rural-to-urban migration and return migrations for family reunions. Every year around this time, the wave of two-way flux puts the nation’s centrally controlled railway system to the test of shipping home millions of migrants (Financial Times , Jan 7, 2008).1 The state media label them as “waìdìrén ” (other-landers), “ mángliú ” (blind floaters), “ liúdòng rénko ŭ” (the floating population), and “ míng ōng ” (peasant-workers). They are depicted as coming in faceless “tides” ( chao ), with connotations of uncontrollable and disturbing forces. Their motives for coming into the cities have been generalized into one claim—to make money. The Lunar New Year has become a moment for the average Chinese citizen to realize the presence of this large “floating population,” as it is officially labeled, for a number of other reasons besides the everyday experiences of overcrowding on long- distance train rides. It is a time when wage arrears and exploitations of rural migrants receive wider attention through the state media, sometimes with reports of top leaders helping them to claim back their overdue wages.