Liu - Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China

The transition from the era of Mao to that of Deng is marked by a change in ideological slogan from egalitarianism to the legitimization of pursuit of profit. This shift has involved pro-market reforms, resource mobilization (including capital flow, labour mobility and land transfer), and the devolution of power to regions, as well as the entrepreneurialism of city governance (Harvey : 19) has pointed out more precisely that:

The changing role of welfare distribution in reformist China which has produced diverse residential communities has attracted much attention among social scientists. The existing studies have stressed the role of specific institutional legacies (the danwei and hukou systems of Maos era) in controlling access to housing in the transitional cities (Huang and Clark ). But few have examined how the inequitable access to affordable housing has impacted the settling down of affected low-income groups, in particular, the migrant workers who have long been negatively affected by the redevelopment of dilapidated low-rental housing (in city areas and the suburbs) and the ever-inflationary rent. In contemplating the residential mobility of migrant workers in Chinas primary cities, the book must firstly review the urban housing allocation system, city image building pursuits, and the hukou -based residency and migration controls which have impacted the socio-spatial mobility of low-income migrant workers, the target of the investigation of this book. The low-income groups mentioned in the book refer to families within the lowest 20 % income band in the city. In Chinas social welfare system, the poorest urban population refers to those living below the poverty line, as defined by the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the Peoples Republic of China. The low-income migrant workers, however, are not on welfare benefits as they lack a local hukou status.

Over the last two decades, Chinas market reforms have seen profit-led neoliberal forces introduced into its urban spatial movements. In both the inner city and peri-urban villages, demolitions and rebuilding are the common events contributing to the enhanced sectoral and spatial mobility of capital and people. In reformist China, the commercialization of land and housing has activated a drastic spatial mobility and marginalization of low-income residents including migrant workers (see Hsing ).

Wu (). In the face of an investment plan aimed at enhancing urban land values, residents including migrant tenants have no choice but to move to a cheaper plot that they can afford. It is this market-led movement, which sets off the motion of residential mobility in different ways, which forms the focal point of this book.

The issues of mobility and re-housing, which give way to capital invasion, are essentially a means of socio-spatial reshuffling. The fact is that given unfettered occupational and geographical mobility, the best people help society get the most out of the best locations, as Logan and Molotch (: 48) have observed. As a result of adopting entrepreneurialism in city governance since the pro-market reforms began, there is an increasing commonality in the development-induced involuntary mobility between Chinas transitional cities and the neoliberal cities of other countries. However, the resettlement measures are quite dependent on the specific institutional features employed at the local level. More specifically, in China, interest needs to be focused on why affected migrant workers cannot instantly get access to decent housing for resettlement, given the citys pursuit of image and the hukou -based selective entry into governmental assistance schemes, as well as the inequitable participation in an immaturely-structured housing market. The socio-spatial dynamics of migrant workers mobility would be better understood by examining the mechanism that has denied the resettlement of the migrant population and exploring why affected migrant tenants have received little assistance.