China Perspectives 2014/2 | 2014 Contested Urban Spaces Managing Migrant Contestation Land appropriation, intermediate agency, and regulated space in Shenzhen Edmund W. Cheng Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/6432 DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.6432 ISSN: 1996-4617 Publisher Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine Printed version Date of publication: 1 June 2014 Number of pages: 27-35 ISSN: 2070-3449 Electronic reference Edmund W. Cheng, « Managing Migrant Contestation », China Perspectives [Online], 2014/2 | 2014, Online since 01 January 2017, connection on 28 October 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ chinaperspectives/6432 ; DOI : 10.4000/chinaperspectives.6432 © All rights reserved Special feature China perspectives Managing Migrant Contestation Land appropriation, intermediate agency, and regulated space in Shenzhen EDMUND W. CHENG ABSTRACT: This study considers the conditions under which China’s massive internal migration and urbanisation have resulted in re - latively governed, less contentious, and yet fragile migrant enclaves. Shenzhen, the hub for rural-urban migration and a pioneer of market reform, is chosen to illustrate the dynamics of spatial contestation in China’s sunbelt. This paper first correlates the socialist land appropriation mechanisms to the making of the factory dormitory and urban village as dominant forms of migrant accommodation. It then explains how and why overt contention has been managed by certain intermediate agencies in the urban villages that have not only provided public goods but also regulated social order. It ends with an evaluation of the fragility of urban villages, which tend to facilitate urban redevelopment at the expense of migrants’ living space. The interplay between socialist institutions and market forces has thus ensured that migrant enclaves are regulated and integrated into the formal city. KEYWORDS: China, land rights, local politics, migrant enclaves, public goods, urban contestation. Introduction which institutions contingently shape behaviours. It applies process tracing to reveal the interplay between socialist land system and grassroots agency hina’s post-socialist urban transformation is unprecedented. In 1978, in the making of governed migrant enclaves. The hukou system, another so - China had 158 cities, an urbanisation level of 17.9%, and a total of cialist institution, is well documented as a source of social control and spa - C172 million people living in urban areas. By 2012, these figures had tial regularity in China’s cities. (8) While this paper uses the arrangements in risen to 658, 52.6%, and 712 million respectively. Within 35 years, China’s the factory dormitory to illustrate a similar pattern of spatial division, it urbanisation surpassed the 50% benchmark, indicating the addition of mainly concerns the role of intermediate agencies in regulating urban vil - around 540 million people to its urban population. (1) In 2012, the total num - lages. The regulated space is considered a product of embeddedness and ber of the floating population reached 236 million, meaning that rural mi - uncertainty, in which the influences of socialist institutions are as important grants who did not have an urban household registration ( hukou ) were the as market forces. primary source of the urban population increase. This paper begins by examining how the factory dormitory and urban vil - Millions of rural migrants who were granted geographic mobility for travel lage have become the major forms of migrant accommodation in Shenzhen. and work but denied socioeconomic entitlements provided by work units It discusses how a socialist legacy has reproduced factory dormitories, (danwei ), compounds, and subsidised housing in host cities, were forced to thereby creating a buffer zone to host and regulate new migrants who were seek accommodations on their own. (2) This severe transformation created migrant enclaves known as chengzhongcun (城中村 ), literally villages amidst 1. UN-habitat, State of Chinese Cities 2010/2011 , New York, Earthscan, 2010, p. 131; National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), China Statistical Yearbook 2012 , Beijing, China Statistics Press, 2012. the city or urban villages, within booming Chinese cities. 2. National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), Report on China’s Migrant Population Ma and Xiang first identified peasant enclaves as a “new urban mosaic Development , Beijing, China Population Press, 2013, p. 1. that did not exist in Maoist China” and correlated their formation with the 3. Laurence J.C. Ma and Biao Xiang, “Native Place, Migration and the Emergence of Peasant Enclaves resurgence of kinship and its social networks. (3) Subsequent studies have in Beijing,” The China Quarterly , Vol. 155, 1998, p. 546. 4. John Friedmann, China’s Urban Transition, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2005, pp. recognised the function of urban villages in enabling rural migrants to reside, 70-74; Yan Song, Yves Zenou, and Chengri Ding, “Let’s Not Throw the Baby out with the Bath work, and survive in cities during a period of rapid urban transformation. (4) Water: The Role of Urban Villages in Housing Rural Migrants in China,” Urban Studies , Vol. 45, However, urban studies have tended to emphasise how urban villages en - No. 2, 2008, pp. 313-330. 5. George C. S. Lin, Developing China: Land, Politics and Social Conditions , London, Routledge, 2009; counter planning regimes in negotiating property rights, effective land use, Wu Fulong, Zhang Fangzhu, and Chris Webster, “Informality and the Development and Demolition and spatial regularity. (5) Sociological analyses have aimed to examine the of Urban Villages in the Chinese Peri-Urban Area,” Urban Studies , Vol. 50, No. 10, 2013, pp. 1919- changes in social exclusion, income inequality, and the urban fringe along 1935; 6. John R. Logan, “Urban China in Comparative Perspective,” in John R. Logan (ed) Urban China in (6) the global chain of production, and anthropological accounts have at - Transition, Oxford, Blackwell, 2008, pp. 1-24; Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban tempted to reveal the communal networks and power relations in specific China: Peasant Migrants, the State and the Logic of the Market, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999, pp. 248-62. enclaves or among particular migrant groups. (7) 7. Biao Xiang, Transcending Boundaries: Zheijangcun: The Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing , Leiden, Building on this body of literature, the historical institutional perspective Brill, 2005; Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks featured here aims to explain the dynamics by which China has managed within China’s Floating Population , Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2001. 8. Tiejun Cheng and Mark Selden, “The Origins and Social Consequences of China’s Hukou System,” and regulated the spatial contestation of rural migrants. This approach em - The China Quarterly , Vol. 139, 1994, pp. 644-668; Feiling Wang, Organising Through Division and bodies a historical orientation to study changes and attends to the ways in Exclusion: China’s Hukou System , Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2005. N o. 2014/2 • china perspectives peer-reviewed article 27 Special feature urbs. This area included 239 administrative villages spread across 1,553 km 2 of land at the outskirts ( guanwai 关外 ). (11) Map 1 illustrates the boundary of the administrative divisions. Nearly all of the factory dormitories were located in the spacious outskirts, whereas urban villages were found in both divisions. Our fieldwork was conducted between March 2012 and September 2013, involving interviews, participant observation, and documentary research. The findings were primarily drawn from observations made in two urban villages in the city centre, with one urban village on the outskirts serving as a control. These villages were selected to depict a representative trajectory of spatial contestations in China’s sunbelt. Each of the villages has been governed by a joint-stock company that was privatised from a village col - lective. All of them have transformed into heterogeneous communities over the course of rural-urban migration and urban sprawl, illustrating dynamic contestations between the native villagers and different groups of rural mi - Map 1 – Administrative divisions of Shenzhen, 1978-2010 grants. They are also large villages of comparable size whose demands for © Edmund W. Cheng public goods are immediate and huge. The primary differences between them are that the two villages in the city centre are much wealthier than often financially unprepared for residing in the city. It also explains how the the village in the outskirts, and that they are located in three different dis - collective land ownership system has created affordable housing in urban tricts. This controlled study allows us to assess the influences of demo - villages to accommodate migrant entrepreneurs and workers. It then reveals graphic, economic, and institutional factors. the role of joint-stock companies in migrant enclaves. Serving as local These sites were also chosen because of personal connections with the bosses, these companies provided public goods, regulated social order, and inhabitants. Through our initial contacts, we were introduced to several local aligned with municipal authorities. These intermediate agencies not only bosses, clan leaders, and migrant workers who extended our reach in the prevented China’s