Read more
Eli Friedman reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. He provides a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.
List of contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Conceptualizing the Politics of Urbanization: The Just-in-Time Response
2. Urban Developmentalism and the Inverted Welfare State
3. The Migrant School: Concentrated Deprivation
4. Rendered Surplus: Parents Navigate “Population Control via Education”
5. Population Management’s “Hard Edge”: School Closures and Demolitions
6. Reproductive Shock Absorbers: Teachers in Migrant Schools
Conclusion: Global Extensions
Methodological Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Eli Friedman is associate professor and chair of international and comparative labor at Cornell University’s ILR School. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (2014) and coeditor of the English edition of China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance (2016).
Summary
Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship.
The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services.
Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.
Additional text
In this magnificently researched and troubling study of China's urbanization process, Friedman situates migrants—teachers, children, parents, education activists—at the center of a tale of exploitative, unequal development, in which rural migrants are simultaneously highly valued and yet treated as outsiders, easily disposed of. A phenomenal piece of work in every way.
