Beatriz Carrillo Garcia - Small Town China: Rural Labour and Social Inclusion

While much has been written about rural migrant workers experiences in the big cities, population movements into Chinas vast network of towns and small cities has been largely neglected. This book presents a detailed case study of rural migrant workers experiences in a small town in a north China county. The author explores the processes and institutions that enable or preclude the social inclusion of rural workers into the towns socio-economic system. Inclusion and exclusion are assessed through an examination of rural workers immersion into the urban labour market and their access to welfare benefits and to social services, such as housing, education and health. The book proposes that outside the larger cities there are alternative accounts of urban social change and of the integration of rural migrant workers. It stresses the fact that the particular socio-economic structure of towns, where the state-owned share of the economy has been smaller and where consequently social and private forces have been more active, allowed for a more open inclusion of rural workers. Although shortcomings are still observed, the book suggests that Chinas transformation may not necessarily result in dysfunctional and socially polarised urban environments.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinas rural migrant workers, bottom-up urbanisation and small-town development, social policy, and more broadly on contemporary social change in China.

Beatriz Carrillo is Lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia.

Edited by David S. G. Goodman

1 The Democratisation of China

Baogang He

2 Beyond Beijing

Dali Yang

3 Chinas Enterprise Reform

Changing state/society relations after Mao

You Ji

4 Industrial Change in China

Economic restructuring and conflicting interests

Kate Hannan

5 The Entrepreneurial State in China

Real estate and commerce departments in reform era Tianjin

Jane Duckett

6 Tourism and Modernity in China

Tim Oakes

7 Cities in Post Mao China

Recipes for economic development in the reform era

Jae Ho Chung

8 Chinas Spatial Economic Development

Regional transformation in the Lower Yangzi Delta

Andrew M. Marton

9 Regional Development in China

States, globalization and inequality

Yehua Dennis Wei

10 rassroots Charisma

Four local leaders in China

Stephan Feuchtwang and Wang Mingming

11 The Chinese Legal System

Globalization and local legal culture

Pitman B. Potter

12 Transforming Rural China

How local institutions shape property rights in China

Chi-Jou Jay Chen

13 Negotiating Ethnicity in China

Citizenship as a response to the state

Chih-yu Shih

Political implications of rural industrialisation in the reform era

Ray Yep

15 Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary China

The search for national identity under reform

Yingjie Guo

16 Elite Dualism and Leadership Selection in China

Xiaowei Zang

17 Chinese Intellectuals Between State and Market

Edward Gu and Merle Goldman

18 China, Sex and Prostitution

Elaine Jeffreys

19 The Development of Chinas Stockmarket, 19842002

Equity politics and market institutions

Stephen Green

20 Chinas Rational Entrepreneurs

The development of the new private business sector

Barbara Krug

21 Chinas Scientific Elite

Cong Cao

22 Locating China

Jing Wang

23 State and Laid-Off Workers in Reform China

The silence and collective action of the retrenched

Yongshun Cai

24 Translocal China

Linkages, identities and the reimagining of space

Tim Oakes and Louisa Schein

25 International Aid and Chinas Environment

Taming the yellow dragon

Katherine Morton

26 Sex and Sexuality in China

Edited by Elaine Jeffreys

27 Chinas Reforms and International Political Economy

Edited by David Zweig and Chen Zhimin

28 Ethnicity and Urban Life in China

A comparative study of Hui Muslims and Han Chinese

Xiaowei Zang

29 Chinas Urban Space

Development under market socialism

T.G. McGee, George C.S. Lin, Mark Y.L. Wang,

Andrew M. Marton and Jiaping Wu

30 Chinas Embedded Activism

Opportunities and constraints of a social movement

Edited by Richard Louis Edmonds and Peter Ho

31 Marketization and Democracy in China

Jianjun Zhang

32 The Chinese State in Transition

Processes and contests in local China

Edited by Linda Chelan Li

Governing change, changing government

Edited by Elaine Jeffreys

34 Chinas Cotton Industry

Economic transformation and state capacity

Bjrn Alpermann

35 Serious Crime in China

Policing and politics

Susan Trevaskes

36 The Chinese States Retreat from Health

Policy and the politics of retrenchment

Jane Duckett

37 Chinas Changing Welfare Mix

Local perspectives

Edited by Beatriz Carrillo and Jane Duckett

38 Small Town China

Rural labour and social inclusion

Beatriz Carrillo

First published 2011 by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2011 Beatriz Carrillo

The right of Beatriz Carrillo to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Carrillo, Beatriz.

Small town China : rural labour and social inclusion / Beatriz Carrillo.

p. cm. (Routledge studies on China in transition ; 38)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. UrbanizationChinaShanxi Sheng. 2. Cities and townsGrowth. 3. Migration, InternalChinaShanxi Sheng. 4. Shanxi Sheng (China) Social conditions. 5. Shanxi Sheng (China)Social policy. I. Title.

HT384.C62C37 2011

307.76'20951dc22

2010044108

ISBN 978-0-415-60023-1 (hbk)

ISBN 978-0-203-81829-9 (ebk)

Preface

In 1996, on my first trip to China as an undergraduate student from Mexico and with no previous knowledge of the country, the concept of there being internal barriers to the movement of people from the countryside into the cities was an intriguing one. By 2001, when I moved to Hangzhou to study Chinese and to get ideas for a doctoral thesis topic, the literature on internal migration in China was already a vast one. The following year I would move to Taiyuan, where I had found a teaching job at Shanxi University. During the year I spent there, I got to explore Shanxi, a province that at the time had none of the sophistication of the rich coastal cities. Shanxi Province was nonetheless experiencing unprecedented economic growth, mainly through the exploitation of its coal reserves, which fed Chinas rapidly growing energy demand. Being a mainly rural based activity, coal mining and coal-related industries had also fostered rapid urbanisation in the towns and small cities close to those mines. Only a few counties in the whole province are said to have no coal reserves.