- Thank you so much for coming here,
we have a good turn out.
I am Margaret Boittin, I'm a professor here
at Osgoode Hall Law School.
And I'm very pleased to welcome Kevin O'Brien.
He's the Bedford Professor of Political Science
at UC Berkeley.
He focuses on Chinese politics
and law and today he's gonna be presenting a paper
that he's worked on with Alexia Chan at Hamilton
called Phantom Services:
Deflecting Migrant Workers in China.
- Well it's a pleasure to be back in Toronto,
I haven't been here in a few years.
The last time I was here was for a conference,
and the time before that a little bit like this time,
I was checking in on one of my former graduate students.
Margaret was one of my students at Berkeley.
Last time I was here I was here to see Bill Hurst,
who was at University of Toronto then,
and when doing a talk there.
I hope the students don't think I'm stalking them
around the world and they can move on.
Well, it's a real pleasure to be here,
and today I'm gonna be talking about
migrant workers in China.
As many of you would know, since the early 1980s
higher wages have lured over 270 million people
to China's cities.
The biggest internal migration in world history.
But after these migrants get jobs,
as you might expect, other needs emerge one by one.
They come for the jobs, but they have other needs as well.
Newcomers who aren't assigned a room
in a company dormitory have to quickly find a place to live.
And workers need medical care for when they get sick.
Migrants who lose their positions
can't count on unemployment benefits.
Parents with children of course need the children
to be able to go to school.
So as migrants put down roots in a city and the years go by
they tend to expect more,
and the demand for public services grows.
Now when faced with the pressure to offer migrant benefits
city governments have three main options.
Provide them services, deny them services,
or what in this paper we call deflect them.
The first choice, to provide them services,
brings migrants into a city's social welfare system,
at least to some degree.
So for example, Shanghai in 2010 announced
that it would give free education to all migrant children
while Chongqing and Xiamen
now let recent arrivals apply for low income housing.
Still, migrant workers access to social services
in general remains quite spotty in most places
and depends very much on where they live.
Now a second approach to providing services
is entirely different, just refuse to give them services.
This strategy typically relies on
the household registration, the hukou regulations,
to keep migrants out of the public good system.
So in Beijing for instance migrant children
who don't have local registrations
are often blocked from attending public schools.
Most cities require high school students
to return to their parent's hometowns
to take the college entrance exam
and very few municipalities grant people
with rural household registrations eligibility
for medical insurance programs or for welfare assistance.
So these types of discrimination systematically
exclude migrants, keep them distinct from urban residents,
and turn them into what scholars have called
second class citizens.
Now beyond these two options there is a third way
to dole out public services that neither includes
nor excludes migrants, but deflects them.
This approach is found in most cities to some extent
but hasn't been studied that much.
Cities that do this selectively provide benefits
to some migrants but not others,
so that they're not fully excluded,
but find it hard to receive access
to the services that they're owed.
Rather than barring migrants by regulation
the authorities set eligibility requirements
that at first glance appear to give
migrants access to services,
but when all is said and done actually don't.
So Dongguan and Shanghai for example
allow outsiders to change their hukou from rural to urban
but very few migrants qualify
under a complicated points system
that I'll be talking about later.
Besides making it tough to meet requirements,
many cities like Beijing and Chengdu ask for documents
that most migrants are hard-pressed to get
in order to provide their eligibility for a service.
Or city authorities may force a migrant to return home
for medical care by refusing to accept
their rural insurance in municipal hospitals.
This paper by the way resonates much better
in the United States than in places like Canada
where you have universal services.
Everybody says, okay I know these kind of stories.
But there we are.
In this talk today I'll be highlighting ways
that city leaders in China prevent migrants
from receiving public services
short of outright banning them.
So I'm gonna find ways they don't get them
but yet don't ban them.
It's based on more than 130 interviews by my coauthor,
Alexia Chan, with officials, doctors,
teachers, and migrant workers in seven cities.
We supplement these interviews with information gathered
from national surveys, policy documents,
government pamphlets and onsite observation.
Of the many services that migrants get or don't get,
I'm gonna just be focusing on two, healthcare and education.
Both are obviously crucial to China's long term growth,
and are of course important to migrant workers themselves.
Now city officials have a lot of discretion
over which migrants receive services
and what procedures they have to go through to get them.
Although the central government sometimes lays out broad
guidelines about how to incorporate outsiders
in the public welfare system,
Beijing's day to day involvement in service provision
is actually quite limited.
In the end local governments
are in charge of formulating, funding,
and providing services for migrants and their children.
Because migrants are managed locally
and support from above is minimal
what that basically means is cities get to choose
who to incorporate and who to leave out.
And on what terms they are to be incorporated.
Now taking advantage of this freedom, migrant workers,
or municipal authorities have developed many ways
to deflect requests for services.
At the city or the district level,
this is quite low in China,
officials may make it difficult for migrants
to send their children to school
or participate in insurance schemes
by requiring minimum periods of employment and residency.
So for example in late 2012 Beijing's city government
announced that migrant children
would be able to take the vocational school entrance exam
if they met certain eligibility criteria.
This is where I stray into law and society kind of issues
and this is why I thought this was a good paper
to present here.
But the criteria they established
obligating parents to have full-time...
The criteria they established obligated parents
to have had full-time jobs for three years
and to have contributed to Beijing's social insurance
for three consecutive years, while students had to have
completed three years of middle school in Beijing.
For higher level vocational schools parents were required
to have full-time jobs for six years in Beijing,
and to have contributed to social insurance
for six consecutive years.
And their children had to have completed
three years of high school in Beijing.
But migrants tend to move around a lot.
They go back their home village for a time,
sometimes they relocate from city to city.
And for people who are this mobile,
requiring them to stay in one city
for a number of years in a row
has basically the same as effect as excluding them
from urban benefits.
Now besides setting minimum periods of employment
and residence that few migrants can meet,
another eligibility requirement
involves the household registration system.
The hukou system, even as reforms take place,
can be used to tie migrants up in bureaucratic knots
and keep services just out of reach.
Places like Chongqing, Shanghai, and Guangdong
have introduced point systems for getting residence permits.
So as one example, in 2010, Guangdong province
replaced temporary permits with residence permits
that would supposedly make it easier
for non-locals to get services.
But which in reality didn't.
This was because point totals
are based on things like skill, education,
social security contributions, and criminal records.
High school degrees count for 20 points,
university degrees 80 points,
and criminal records lead to a deduction.
Applicants need 60 points to qualify
to apply for urban household registration.
And the threshold is higher
if you want to live in a very desirable city like Guangzhou.
One father reportedly went so far as to give blood
three times one summer to try to accumulate enough points
for him and his son to apply for a Guangzhou hukou.
Now many migrants can earn some points,
but few get enough
to actually change their household registration.
Now these point systems make it appear
that inclusion is possible
in that clear rules exist to access services,
but continue to exclude most migrants.
And migrants know this.
Interviewees that Alexia spoke to in Guangdong province
were openly scornful about these residence permit reforms.
A factory manager who employed 160 migrants in Dongguan
explained the residence permit and hukou reforms
don't mean anything,
it's still too hard to change your hukou.
You need to have permanent employment and to buy a house.
And most of his employees at this factory
scoffed at the mention of hukou reform.
They had heard about it, but they said it'd be impossible
to rack up enough points.
One of them even told Alexia unless you have a PhD
like you do, there's no chance I'm ever gonna get them.
So everybody in this room could qualify,
but not the typical migrant worker.
They said they could only afford to live in cheap rentals
like shared rooms and basement apartments.
They had no hope of being able to buy a home.
And permanent employment also stood in the way
of getting points.
Many of the workers at the factory like migrants elsewhere
switch jobs every few years for better working conditions
or higher wages.
Most of the people they knew in the construction industry
also change jobs often
because their employment typically only lasts
as long as it takes to build one building.
So you build one building then you move on,
and you've officially changed jobs.
So point systems create subtle kinds of de facto exclusion.
They also favor some migrants over others.
In particular the poor and less educated lose out
because they have few ways to earn points.
In Shanghai for example they announced
a new point system in 2013.
Non-Shanghai residents were allowed to apply
for a residence permit after being a temporary resident
for seven years and amassing 120 points.
As I was suggesting a minute ago,
a masters degree is worth 100 points,
a doctoral degree counts for 110.
But most migrant workers of course
don't have this kind of level of education.
Another way to get points is to undertake
a financial venture that very few migrants can afford.
If you invest in a Shanghai company
that pays at least 100,000 renminbi per year in taxes
or has 10 or more employees, you can get points.
That actually may sound more like Canada
from what I've heard about it.
Although Shanghai has made it more feasible on paper
for outsiders to qualify for a residence permit
the point system in practice makes it no easier
for most migrants to get services.
So another way to deflect migrants beyond creating
these near impossible eligibility requirements
involves requiring hard to secure paperwork.
Even when migrants get enough points
they often can't track down the documentation they need
to prove they're entitled to a service.
City governments generally require five documents,
they're called wu chung, for migrants to be eligible
to enroll in public school or get health insurance.
You need a household registration booklet,
proof of hometown residency, a temporary residence permit,
proof of local address, and proof of employment.
Some cities like Chengdu,
which actually is quite good for migrants,
want up to seven documents.
Now from the vantage point of migrants
at least three of these documents are very hard to get.
The temporary residence permit, the proof of local address,
and the evidence of employment.
Not everybody has a temporary residence permit
because it means registering with the public security bureau
and some people don't want to do that.
Getting proof of local address
is also hard, as the shortage of affordable housing grows,
migrants often share temporary housing
and they often aren't offered leases
with their names on them that they can use
as a proof of residence.
Even if they have a temporary residence permit
and they can show they have a local address,
many migrants don't have labor contracts
that they can present as evidence of employment.
Informal and low-skilled workers are among the least likely
to be on contract.
In many small businesses and much of the underground economy
written labor contracts are rare.
So you imagine, fruit and vegetable sellers, nannies,
repairmen, these people generally don't have contracts.
So they can't give them over to the city and show
that they've been there.
Migrant workers who can round up all the needed paperwork
still often can't access services.
Some workers who sought labor contracts
when they began their jobs are never given them.
So they're not in a position to submit a copy
of their contract to confirm their employment status
or how long they've worked in a job.
Without this documentation they can't show
they've met the eligibility requirements
for urban residence or services.
After the 2008 Labor Contract Law was enacted
one feisty migrant worker in Guangzhou
took his boss to court for not complying with the law.
The court sided with the employer
and ultimately blamed the worker for not signing a contract
even though the company refused to give him one
after he asked for it when he was hired.
So it was his problem.
In addition to requiring migrants to submit paperwork
they often can't get their hands on,
the city authorities also make it difficult
for non-locals to have documents verified.
Even when migrants qualify according to all the criteria
and can round up every piece of paperwork they need,
they may still be shuffled from office to office
in a fruitless effort to get their piles of forms certified.
Unless Canadian universities are very different
than American universities, you all know about this as well.
I tell my students all the time,
you think you're treated like numbers,
faculty are treated like numbers just as well.
For instance some officials in Beijing started stepping up
enforcement of document checking rules around 2007,
at a time when the migrant population in Beijing
was growing very rapidly.
Previously the document review process had been informal
and parents could simply bring the paperwork to a school
for clearance when they registered their children
and paid their tuition and fees.
But once tighter examination of paperwork began
local officials began to step in
and send migrants on wild goose chases.
Some schools in Beijing now instruct parents
to bring their full package of documents
to the local government
for inspection and to get a certificate verifying
that the documentation is complete.
One migrant in Beijing that Alexsia talked to
who tried to follow the new procedures
was given the runaround.
"At a local government office they told me
"to take the documents straight to the school.
"By the time they cleared up the document approval
"it was too late, the school year had started
"and I was told to try to enroll my child again next year."
With both school leaders and local officials dodging parents
and sending them to another office,
migrant workers can end up in approval limbo
and never make the leap from being technically eligible
for a service, to actually enrolling in school.
Deflecting migrants after they've arrived in a city
by setting hard to meet eligibility requirements
or asking for paperwork that's hard to get
from our vantage point
has two really important consequences.
First it isolates them.
It isolates migrants, it shifts the blame
for missing services away from the government
and onto migrants themselves.
By establishing unrealistic criteria
city officials make it the responsibility
of each migrant to qualify
and apply for benefits.
New arrivals can't claim collective exclusion
and discrimination and instead have to throw themselves
into fending for themselves in case by case battles
over eligibility and documentation.
Second, when migrants fail to overcome the obstacles
to buy health insurance or get their kids in school,
we found that they often assume it's their fault
and they blame themselves
for being unable to get the services they expected.
Now migrants not only deflect,
officials not only deflect migrants within a city,
they also encourage them to just go elsewhere
and just get the services somewhere else
so they don't have to provide them.
By selectively enforcing rules, by shutting a service down
or funneling them toward cheaper and more convenient options
they divert migrants to clinics and schools in other cities
or their hometown in the countryside.
Now the first way to channel migrant requests elsewhere
involves enforcing dormant rules.
I think this touches on issues that I'm sure
you think about in a law school as well.
There are lots of rules out there
that are not being enforced at any given point in time.
When you want to deflect somebody what you do is
you dig through the pile of rules that exist
and you dredge them up and you start applying them.
Now there are lots of regulations in China
that have been on the books for a long time
but have been unenforced until city leaders,
principals, or hospital administrators decide to apply them.
So for example, limits on the number of students
allowed in a classroom have existed
for as long as interviewees could remember.
But always were ignored,
maybe some of you from China will remember this.
In the past when class size grew,
most schools happily collected the additional fees
and crowded more desks into a classroom.
That does sound like Berkeley.
We just keep putting people into the same classroom
until we run out of desks.
As more migrant students enrolled
and anti-outsider sentiment grew in the mid-2000s,
some officials dusted off these classroom size restrictions
and used them to exclude migrant children.
In Beijing in 2012 education bureaus working with principals
abruptly restricted class size to 30 students.
While in Chengdu they cut it to 45.
Even though classes had long been at 55 or 65.
An education official in Chengdu explained,
"We're strictly enforcing the limit
"of 45 students per class.
"So we now require a parent's hukou registration.
"This is enforcement of a policy that always existed
"but it wasn't carried out before
"because now there are too many migrant students."
That's pretty clear.
Now tighter compliance with class size limits
reduces the number of spots available
without being openly discriminatory,
unlike this last sentence,
which really is pretty openly discriminatory.
Restricting student numbers deflects primarily
migrant children because most schools fill their classes
with registered students before allowing in any migrants.
So the registered people in the city get in first.
Migrants have to get a number on a waiting list,
and maintain high enough test grades in the meantime.
When they move from elementary to middle school
they have to get another number
and they go to the bottom of a new list.
One NGO staff member who had been working
to integrate migrant children with registered students
explained that this avoided the awkwardness
of excluding migrants formally
by making their inability to enroll
a result of rule enforcement and classroom management
to capacity rather than outright discrimination.
Or as one migrant parent put it,
"The school said they were full, instead of saying
"that they weren't allowing my daughter to enroll."
Enforcing previously unenforced rules
keeps migrant students out of urban classrooms
and often forces their families
to send them to private migrant schools
or schools in their parent's home village.
Now besides enforcing dormant rules,
cities sometimes withdraw services
they previously offered.
They may as been common in Beijing, shut down schools
attended by migrant children to encourage them
and their families to move away.
Often to dampen opposition to urban redevelopment projects.
In Fengtai district in Beijing,
local officials put up barriers around four migrant schools
and very cleverly posted signs saying
that demolition would begin in one year.
There were no other announcements
for the plans for the neighborhood.
Migrants didn't have the option to send their kids
to a public school 'cause there weren't any nearby.
Most migrant families in Fengtai decided it would be best
to make plans to relocate as soon as possible
before that year transpired.
They realized that if they waited and demolition began
they might lose out and be forced to move
without having found new jobs, housing or schools.
In the year after the signs were posted
many moved to other parts of Beijing,
relocated to new cities,
or returned to their home villages.
And this happened in other places too.
As China's cities expand in size,
municipalities throughout the country
are demolishing neighborhoods and evicting residents
to make way for more profitable projects
like luxury malls and residential high rise buildings.
Since at least the mid-2000s dozens of migrant schools
in Chengdu and other cities have been demolished
as neighborhoods have gone through urban renewal.
And Shanghai has been particularly adept at getting migrants
to leave redevelopment zones with little fuss.
In 2012 one migrant school in Minhang district
was scheduled to close one year
after demolition project began.
The year's warning gave residents time to prepare to depart
and to find a new place to live.
One NGO staff member could see what lay ahead.
She said, "One year from now the whole neighborhood
"will be demolished, most families have already moved out."
So you get them to move out before you demolish.
A vow to take away services and then doing it
helps preempt organized opposition.
Local leaders and development companies they cooperate with
prefer to avoid confrontation
with the people they're displacing.
I've been also writing on demolition lately,
that's another interesting topic.
Since prolonged disputes can lead protestors to dig in
and can draw the attention of the media
and can bring criticism if a long dispute goes on.
City officials hope to diffuse conflict
by encouraging migrants to move away on their own
without the forcible removal that has been so common
for the last decade or so.
Besides thwarting resistance, and by preventing
a critical mass of protesters from forming,
withdrawing services gives an air of necessity
and is often combined with the language
of an inexorable progress and moving ahead
and creating a new society.
As an education bureau official in Chengdu put it,
"A migrant school would never be demolished per se.
"Rather, if there's an issue,
"it's simply a question of land being bought
"for necessary development."
Now city leaders don't always go as far
as withdrawing services.
In healthcare provision especially,
they sometimes take advantage of the differences
between urban and rural services
to push migrants toward the countryside
or to a lower level of treatment in another city.
Urban hospitals are almost always more expensive
than rural ones, and differences in out of pocket expenses
can encourage migrants to get healthcare outside the city
where they work.
A combination of lower premiums, higher reimbursement rates,
a simpler reimbursement procedures in the countryside
and less developed cities makes going to a rural
health clinic or a smaller city a cost-effective choice.
Here's one example.
Now most migrants there could only get
10% of their expenses reimbursed.
Another issue Canadians are gonna have a hard time
fully appreciating, Americans get immediately.
Because of this a worker from rural Jiujiang
planned to wait until he returned to his hometown
to have colorectal surgery.
Although he could have received care in Hangzhou
he wouldn't think of doing it
unless it was life threatening.
Another migrant from Anhui province
who'd been admitted to the same hospital
was in great pain and urgently needed surgery.
She couldn't afford the 90% share of a 5000 renminbi bill
and she didn't want to take time off from work
to return to her home village.
When the patient suggested she might have the procedure
at a cheaper, less reputable facility,
the doctor said she'd likely have to spend more time later
and more money later to get corrective work done.
In the end the woman left the hospital
without scheduling the surgery
and just hoped her condition would get better.
And a meager 10% reimbursement rate isn't as bad as it gets.
Some migrants with reinsurance find it impossible
to use their insurance.
This isn't because they're formally excluded
but they might as well be.
Municipal officials don't try always to set up agreements
with rural healthcare providers and rural insurance programs
that will enable people to get reimbursed
for medical care they receive in the city.
If you don't have these agreements
and you would need them with lots of places
all over the country where all the migrants came from,
you'd have a hard time using urban hospital receipts
to get payment from rural insurance providers.
Now pushing migrants to use services elsewhere
obviously affects their quality of life.
But it also has political consequences.
Deflecting migrants isolates them, again,
like I said in the first part of the talk
and depoliticizes their claims.
Enforcing dormant regulations undercuts
the claims for exclusion and the claims of prejudice.
Relying on existing but previously unenforced rules
makes it hard for migrants to allege discrimination
since the rules exist and they do,
the rules do predate their claims.
Urban sprawl and higher healthcare costs in cities
disguise the origins of why it's necessary to go home
to get medical care or find a school.
All of these together generate feelings of powerlessness
and uncertainty about where to turn.
It feels, often feels, interviewees said,
like no one deprived them of anything, it just happened.
When faced with class size limits, development pressures,
and low reimbursement rates it's hard for migrants to know
which institution is responsible.
Is it the school, the hospital,
one of the government departments involved?
Which level of government is responsible,
is it the district, the municipality, the province
or the center?
Or even which person.
Is it the principal, the hospital cashier,
or an official from the Bureau of Education
or from the Department of Public Security?
If naming, blaming, and claiming is part of what
you're doing it's hard to know who to blame.
And that undermines your claim.
Without clear targets, collective protest,
or even collective consciousness, is hard to muster.
Now city officials use phantom services to depoliticize
and disempower people who might be engaged in protest.
They also deflect migrants for many other reasons.
The simplest one is cost, and I don't mean to downplay this
'cause it's an obvious one,
but it's just not the focus of this paper,
but it's of course important.
And in 2013 the Chinese Academy of Social Science
estimated it would cost $106 billion
every year to ensure that rural migrants
enjoyed the same healthcare, housing and school benefits
as urban residents.
It's of course very challenging for city officials
to foot this bill largely on their own
when the central government only accounts for about 8%
of spending on public services.
6% on education, and 1% on health.
But if services are too costly
why not just refuse to provide them?
And this is where it gets interesting I think.
Several initiatives in the 2010s,
including the National Urbanization Plan
have made it clear that the central government
wants cities to improve benefits for migrants.
In July 2014 the State Council announced the goal
of eliminating the difference between rural and urban hukou
and accommodating 100 million new city residents by 2020.
Central officials then and since have recognized
the need to improve services for migrants
and they've frequently focused on the importance
of a people centered approach to urbanization.
To this point though they've provided very few details
about how any of these goals are gonna be achieved.
And so this leaves city leaders in a tough spot
and I'm not trying to turn them into villains at all here,
'cause they're expected to extend services
but they have very limited resources and little guidance
about how to do so.
Now while central officials
are encouraging more urbanization
they don't want crowded first tier cities
to become much bigger.
Instead their goal is to push migrants
toward small and medium size cities.
Now most of you in Canada or even the United States,
you can't even appreciate what I'm talking about
when I say a small of medium sized city.
There are dozens of small cities in China
that are over a million people,
that people like Margaret and I have never heard of.
So we're talking about a million or two million people
rather than five or 10 or 20 million people.
That's where they want people to go.
This means that hukou liberalization is taking place
mainly in cities with fewer than five million people.
But most new jobs are created in the larger cities,
bigger than five million.
And those are the cities where migrants
generally want to go.
Now the clash between the central government's
urbanization strategy
and migrants' preference for bigger cities,
puts leaders in places like Shanghai and Beijing
in a very tough spot.
The new migrants appear daily
and the center urges them to give more benefits,
and this is what encourages China's larger cities to
deflect migrants rather than just deny them straight out.
'Cause they are getting pressure from above.
You can't just not give them to them,
it's better to come up with some ploy
that makes it look like we're giving it to them
but doesn't actually cost us anything to do it.
So top leaders in first tier cities often feel hamstrung.
They agree it's wise to control overpopulation
but on the other hand, until more jobs, higher wages,
and better quality services lead migrants
to move to smaller cities, they know that migrants
are gonna keep coming to the biggest cities,
and they're gonna keep expecting services.
So hukou reforms and an urbanization plan
that focuses mainly on third and fourth tier cities
don't offer much for major cities who face migrants
who demand benefits and want to live in Shanghai or Chengdu.
They don't want to live in Benxi or Datong
or other places that there may be jobs
and services may be available.
Beijing's a good example of this mismatch
and the reasons why deflecting migrants is so appealing
in China's megacities.
In December 2015, Beijing released regulations
on permanent residence requirements
that said hukou applicants should have a Beijing permit,
be less than 45 years old, have paid social insurance
for at least seven consecutive years.
They also set up a point system a lot like the one
in Shanghai and Guangzhou's, which I talked about earlier,
and which is probably gonna have the same effect.
Although some migrants may clear all the hurdles,
and there are more upper class migrants now
working in areas like being a
real estate broker, most of them will not.
Most migrants will continue to be effectively excluded
from services despite reforms
that suggest the central government wants to integrate them.
Deflecting migrants I'm arguing,
makes sense both practically and financially,
and it allows officials in first tier cities
to make it appear that they're addressing a problem,
without actually doing so.
So what's the take home of this presentation?
Well as China urbanizes,
more migrants need and expect public services.
Most cities deflect them instead of meeting them
or denying them outright.
Within cities, the authorities establish
nearly impossible eligibility requirements
or require paperwork that outsiders struggle to obtain.
Municipal leaders also nudge migrants
to seek healthcare or education elsewhere
by enforcing dormant rules, shutting a service down,
or encouraging them to pursue
cheaper options somewhere else.
City leaders deflect migrants
for both political and practical reasons.
Limiting access isolates and disempowers migrants
and is cheaper than offering benefits.
It's also politically appealing at a time
when the central government's calling for greater benefits
for nonlocals and urging people to move to small cities,
but city leaders have to deal with migrants
who continue to appear in large numbers
in the biggest, most desirable cities,
which is where all of this research was done.
There was no research done in the smaller cities.
Now migrants of course aren't alone in being reflected,
other people seeking services may also be diverted
by a tangle of rules and complications
that channel them into negotiating on the state's turf.
And that's part of what's going here,
you're being pushed onto the state's turf
to negotiate in their offices
with their rules, and you at a structural disadvantage.
For example, rural leaders have used guidelines
about which homeowners can receive low income assistance
to disqualify evictees
and reduce opposition to land expropriation.
Nor are schools the only service that could be taken away
to encourage people to move elsewhere.
Officials in some cities have cut off water,
gas, and electricity to push people
who are resisting demolition orders to move out.
I have one student who just finished a dissertation
on something she's calling blunt force regulation,
where to deal with pollution regulations what they do is
they go in and they turn off electricity in a factory
and turn off the water, and if that doesn't work
she's got wonderful pictures of them
just blowing factories up.
That is definitely a way to get things gone.
In today's China, deflecting is a handy tool
in the social control toolkit.
And that is justified by a steady flow of pronouncements
about development, modernization, and progress,
and makes it even more appealing to local leaders
than providing a service,
or taking the more politically risky step
of refusing to offer service.
Now the long term effectiveness of providing
phantom services remains to be seen.
It certainly works in the short term.
And maybe that's all people are thinking about
when they're doing this at the municipal level.
It works in the short term in preventing a migrant
from getting health care, education, housing,
a pension, or low income assistance.
But if deflecting becomes a norm a local adaptation
will have become much more than a stop gap.
After years or even decades of waiting
for a thoroughgoing transformation of the hukou system,
some migrants are losing their patience.
They, or at least migrant activists,
are overcoming the depoliticization
and the individualization
that lie at the heart of deflecting,
and are making their frustration known.
Instead of helping preempt protest,
there's some evidence that diverting migrants
is inspiring mobilization.
Protest is increasing the most in areas where
the migrant population has grown rapidly,
and labor protests have been growing in number
at a very rapid rate, and many of them involve migrants.
And they are intensifying at the economy slows
and workers aren't getting the benefits they're owed.
So our final point is that deflecting
is not really addressing the needs
of China's urban workforce.
Nor is it clearly serving social stability.
It definitely saves cities money,
but it may only be pushing other problems down the road
and making their ultimate resolution more difficult.
Okay, I'll stop there.
(audience applauding)
- So for questions, we'll pass the microphone around.
- [Man] It's a wonderful presentation.
I just wanted to ask about the economic consequences of
keeping the migrants from staying in the larger cities.
Cheap labor was why they came in good part.
If you force them to leave who replaces them
to do the work that they had been doing.
They were doing things in Beijing and Shanghai.
If they're forced to leave because their children
can't get educated or they don't get medical care,
who's gonna come in to replace them
or is it gonna be the city population itself
have to step down to do the lower income jobs
that they were doing?
- Some of it is people coming behind them.
There's another set of migrants who are hoping
that the future is better for them
even though other people are leaving.
The other things is that China is really
moving up the value chain.
And it's hard to believe but there is a labor
shortage in some places, but generally at higher levels.
So some of these lower level jobs are not as needed
as they were in the past,
so the migrants are not taking them over,
they're being done by people who are residents of the city.
But it is a good question.
I don't know how many people have actually left.
They sometimes move to other cities,
they sometimes move to another city.
At this point in time the population of the largest cities
is close to flat, it's not increasing as much.
This is not a Latin American kind of story
where there are shantytowns growing up on the cities.
And at least in theory, if we know this,
certainly the migrants know this
and some of them are leaving, some have gone home.
There were a lot of questions
after the 2008 financial crisis, were people gonna go home.
Some went home but they almost all came back.
As far as we can tell most of them are still
toughing it out, they are frustrated,
they often feel defeated by the process.
Fewer than you would expect have moved to smaller cities
even though that's the pressure put upon them
by the central government, and that's what
they're being induced to do by local governments.
- [Man] So they still have jobs.
- They still have the jobs,
I mean they still have the jobs.
The city still needs them but they don't have the services
and they're demands are not going away.
So that's where the protest comes in at the end,
they're still frustrated that the jobs are still there,
and people move very quickly, migrants from year to,
some of them are in jobs for just months at a time
and move on to another one.
And wages have been increasing quite generously,
some years 10 and 15%, but services end of the puzzle
has been a harder one to address.
And I should mention this is not a paper about variation.
This is a lumping paper,
where we're just trying to identify a phenomenon.
In Alexsia's dissertation, she divides these cities up
among themselves and also looks at others
and looks at variation.
Which is obviously a very important question.
And there are some interesting findings there,
like Chengdu, is particularly good at dealing
with migrant workers compared to a place like Shanghai.
So it's not simply wealth, that if you're a richer place
you can deal with migrants better,
Chengdu is poorer than Shanghai,
but they've set up better systems to deal with migrants.
So this is a paper that's just trying to identify
a phenomenon that we call phantom services.
There would be variation from city to city
even among the megacities and her dissertation
soon to be book should be dealing with those questions.
But you're right, they still have jobs, so the jobs
haven't really gone away.
And the fact that there is a labor shortage
if anything is helping them,
it's hard to imagine China with a labor shortage,
but they are if you talk to economists.
But the services have not gone apace
with the wages and the job opportunities,
and that's what this paper is about.
- [Man] Thanks again for--
- [Man] Use the microphone please.
- [Man] It's on?
It's on? Yes.
Thanks for the great presentation.
Just a couple of question, one is about the method.
I noticed that the cities that have been
included in the research, most of them,
I mean the majority are big cities,
but there is just, I mean, a city that doesn't fit,
Dongguan, I think that has nothing to do in terms of size
and importance with the others.
So I was wondering why it is included,
if there is a particular reason that I mean,
makes it special and worth including.
And the second question is about the
implied criteria that, I mean, or a hidden criteria
used by local administration to
deflect immigrant.
Is originalism one of these, you think?
So I think that they look differently at the place where,
the origin of the migrants,
so they tend to protect more people
from the same region, same area,
or this has nothing to do with their decision
to help or not to help or to help less.
- Oh that's interesting.
Dongguan I know was added as a matter of convenience
in that Alexsia had some connections there
so she could do work in Dongguan.
Dongguan is also important 'cause it is the heart of
the traditional labor, the migrant laborer experience.
Particularly in lower skilled sorts of jobs.
So that's one reason she wanted to look
in particular at Dongguan.
The rest of the cities are almost all of them,
I think all of them are provincial capitals,
and there are special characteristics you want to look at
when you think about a provincial capital.
That a provincial capital is treated differently
than other sorts of cities,
not least because you're also so close
to the provincial government and you can end up
on the provincial government's doorstep
if something goes wrong.
That's a special pressure municipal workers face.
I haven't, I just worked with her on this one paper.
In our talking and reading her dissertation
I haven't heard about native place ties
and if there are important differences in native place.
Some migrant workers in cities have moved up in the world.
There are some people with (speaking foreign language)
connections to people in certain places.
I know in Chengdu there are very clear paths
that people go from Chengdu to the countryside
and large groups of people come.
I know some factories are dominated by people
from one area or for another area,
but at least talking to her,
and I haven't seen the later part of the,
the later version of the dissertation
the last two or three years,
if there are systematic treatments,
differences in treatment based on where people came from.
There's a lot of rural to rural migration in China now.
Migration is not only going to these big cities
and one of the important things about variation
is she's looking at a very particular migration path,
which is to the biggest, most prominent cities in one area.
With probably the exception of Dongguan.
And I could imagine a wrinkle like that
could matter a lot in that in this place
people from Hunan would be treated better,
and in another place these people from elsewhere
would be treated better.
- [Man] So linguistically.
- Linguistically, and depending on whose factory it was
and who set it up and how they found labor to begin with.
A lot of times a factory is set up with a person
who then does tap into his or her home network
to draw the first batch of workers to the factory.
It would be interesting to know if original
native place origin, or how long you've been in the factory,
or those kind of issues--
- [Man] What trumps what.
- Makes a difference and whether this deflecting strategy
can disappear, or not be used.
'Cause this is, you know, or used selectively
on different people at different times.
- Thanks. - Yeah.
- [Man] So two questions, one you did talk
a little bit about this towards the end,
but so you said there was a sense of helplessness
and I kept thinking about is there no sense of resentment.
And so in the end you said well there is
a little bit of that, but isn't there worry from,
I mean the numbers that you mentioned, 270 million.
I'm sure not all of them are in that situation
but still the numbers are significant.
Is there no worry of some kind of
more active demonstration, resistance and so on.
So that's one, the second question
is much more down to earth.
So what do these families do with children
who can't go to school, like for example.
So is there for example some kind of organization of
among themselves, the migrants start organizing
their own kind of
systems of
even taking care of the children or something like this.
Because otherwise I can see many children for example
just focusing on that, that seem to have nowhere to go.
And their parents obviously have to go to work so they can't
take care of them, so what's happening with that?
- Some children are sent home.
There are tens and tens of millions of children
who are sent home to the village
that their parents take care of,
they're called left behind children.
And there's a big literature in sociology, anthropology,
if you read a journal like Journal of Peasant Studies
you'll read about what that does to a society
when so many children have been sent back
to their home village and their parents are away.
- [Man] So they're raised by grandparents.
- They're raised by grandparents is a very common thing.
The migrants also set up their own schools in various places
and that has had more or less success.
They do it with their own resources outside the system,
and that occurs sometimes.
Some kids do not go to school,
which is against the compulsory education law.
On the first question, it is interesting.
I mean, my day job is studying protest and repression.
This is just a sideline industry for me with a grad student,
helping her get a project going
and seeing where a paper is in her data,
so that's how we got going on this several years ago.
It only strikes me when we go to conferences,
I was at one recently where all of the Western scholars
talking about protests in China said,
oh they got it under control.
It's just like a puppeteer.
They have the right amount of protest,
not too much, not too little, not too hot, not too cold.
The porridge is exactly the right temperature.
And we paint this picture of the Chinese state
as being this magnificent puppeteer,
and especially for information reasons,
there's learning what's going wrong in society.
That's dealing with petitions and protests very effectively,
and all of that's true.
Then I go to China and I talk to people
and they're afraid the world's falling apart.
They just want to get to the end of the day
without somebody showing up on their doorstep
complaining about something.
'Cause all protest goes to the government,
it gets there in very short order.
The latest numbers are still over 200,000 incidents,
mass incidents a year,
that's 500 a day going on around the country.
And it really strikes me that we have been
much more impressed by the Chinese state
than the people who are in the state are
with their ability to control something
that can cause them a lot of problems
and lead to all kind of distortion.
So a few years ago with petitioners
they started setting up psychiatric hospitals,
they started setting up black jails, they set up retrievers
because they set up an incentive system at the top
where they said if any petitioners from your county
get to our, get to Beijing,
horrible things are gonna happen to you,
you all are gonna lose your bonuses
and everything like that.
And that led to local governments to go and do
these crazy things like setting up psychiatric hospitals
and jails and dragging people back
and paying bounties to get people to come back.
And so I guess one of the things I really am struck by
is how we are, those of us who study protest
have bought into a very functional story
about how it's serving certain kind of purposes
and it's being controlled magnificently
by this state who knows just how much to have.
I mean, I still believe that when there's no protest
it's more dangerous than when there is.
So if you look at Poland in the 1980s
after Solidarity was shut down,
that's a dangerous situation.
So in one sense it is a sign of confidence that they allow
the amount of protest to take place that does.
On the other hand when I talk to local officials
they are scared of this all the time.
Migrant workers are one of their greatest concerns,
and they know what's going on here,
they know what's happening,
and they don't think these people feel completely helpless
and powerless and individualized and depoliticized,
they see the ones who are actively organizing for it.
And some migrant workers activists, Diana Fu,
who is right here at Toronto, has been writing about
these underground, they've taken it on the chin the most
the last three or four years,
the people who are organizing migrant workers
in one form or another.
So that suggests to me that the state knows
that what these local officials are doing
is just barely keeping things at bay right now.
And for every person that Alexsia ran into
who was depoliticized, individualized,
and blamed themself, others saw through what was going on
and know exactly what is happening
and that deflecting is just another kind of denial.
That can't last forever.
That seems like a, and that's part of why I say
it's a short term strategy,
is people certainly wake up to it at some point.
Now they may give up, they may feel like it's hopeless,
but that's different than saying they blame themselves.
- [Woman] I have maybe one commentary and one question.
You mentioned that (mumbles) of this deflecting strategy
is that the immigrant workers don't know where they can
like which authority, especially to complain for
and I found this quite interesting.
And maybe there is also like Chinese law written off it
because even like children they are,
their school is deprived by the government
but you cannot say like, I mean it is in the constitution
that education is a right for every single person
but you cannot resolve the constitution in the court
and if it is based on administrative law
then you also need to find various specific
administrative policy that are responsible for it,
which is quite, may be quite difficult
in a education question.
That's my little bit of commentary.
And I have one, another question is like
do you think that the deflecting is,
it is also happen maybe like immigration
area of, I mean like, because like the credit point system
is also kind of familiar
with how maybe Canada receives immigrants.
Like how the PR, like how they become PR
and how they calculate that.
Is there any like a national government
also have this kind of deflecting strategy
towards migrants generally.
- In China.
- [Woman] Or in other countries.
- Yeah, I don't know as much about,
I don't know as much about Canada,
but there is certainly an issue about,
and Chinese are pretty open in talking about this.
There's a term they use, su-jer to mean the quality,
and they want the quality of migrants to go be higher.
And this word su-jer has a vaguely eugenics
kind of a feeling to it that we want people
who are both economically more able,
but people of higher quality and these wy-dee-ren,
the outsiders, they're dark, they're dirty.
There's a somewhat...
There's a condescension of city people toward country people
and other sorts of things that is undoubtedly part of it.
So they're sometimes fairly open about
wanting to draw people with more education, more income,
but also people who are more like us,
middle class urban Chinese.
So there is an element to that and I think that's,
that is certainly part of it.
Your first question was about?
(muffled speaking)
Right, yeah not that's one of the more interesting things.
This is what I, in protest I've studied
something called rightful resistance where people use
policies, laws, and commitments from the state
to combat local officials that don't carry them out.
People sometimes try that.
But this paper
in particular reminds me
if you make a claim that under the compulsory education law
I have a right to school.
The principal says, okay that's all true,
but I've got a classroom, there's already 45 chairs in it,
I can't fit 20 more in it.
This is above my pay grade.
I can't resolve this problem here.
You need to go talk to somebody else
to resolve this problem.
My issue is handling this school
and I say there's only room for 45 people
and maybe there really is only room for 45 people,
and it's very easy for them to say
it's somebody else's problem to resolve.
Even if the argument is right,
even if the claim is just under the law,
it's a question of who to prosecute that claim with.
Most of Alexia's interviews were right at the interface
of state and society.
They were the people at the very bottom,
the doctors, the nurses, and the parents
in conversations with each other.
And again I think you have to have a little bit of sympathy
for the people on the ground.
Chinese hospitals are overcrowded,
they don't have enough resources.
There's all kind of things going on where they can almost
legitimately say I understand your claim, I understand it's,
there's a legal and a moral and another basis for it,
I just can't resolve it in the circumstances I'm in.
I'm a mid-level administrator at Berkeley right now,
I run an institute, and as I was writing this paper
I would think about I bet I deflect people
once or twice a week easily.
Right, once or twice a week I tell them,
oh yeah, it's a big important problem,
go over and talk to this person,
they're the ones who can really resolve this problem,
this is not in my domain.
So I think this is a very natural thing to happen
at the state-society interface when there are
certain pressures from above that really are
very difficult to resolve right at that level.
And it is hard to know who to blame.
Is it the school and is the hospital.
Or is it a bigger structure.
Is it the hukou system, at root it is the hukou system.
Rooted in these big structural things
that have to do with the center,
but everybody knows it's hopeless to get that changed.
You can't get that, you're just trying to sort it out
in your school.
And if they say it is the hukou system,
what do you as a parent do?
This principal or this doctor,
this principal can't solve the hukou system.
That is truly above his or her pay grade.
So I think this is one of the more interesting things
about the paper is how many different people you can blame
and when there are so many different to blame
and it's not clear, then you don't know who to blame.
- [Man] So has this politics of deflecting migrants,
has it become a state ideology?
Or it is more like local government--
- It's a local adaptation.
- [Man] Strategy that in fact it has never been promoted
as a sort of a way of, you know, doing things.
- Yeah, our view is it's-- - Officially.
- A local adaptation that the central government
turns their head away and allows to happen
and knows it's happening while it's busy
out of the other side of its mouth saying,
give migrants more benefits.
'Cause what's happening, what are the local officials doing,
they're complaining and saying I can't do this,
I don't have the money, I don't have the resources,
I don't have all of this, and the central government says
okay I'll turn away from it and you develop
these tricky ways to prevent people
from getting what they think they deserve.
- [Man] Okay, then the second question is
for this politics of deflecting to work,
it would need to have some successful cases.
Right, meaning that people who are able to make it, right.
You can't just simply keep deflecting.
There must be some cases where people are accepted,
or they move up, right.
So what happened to these so called successful cases.
Are they then being promoted as like, you know,
this is an example of how you could make it,
how you become like mobile and moving up in terms of class,
in terms of being able to be part of the urbanite.
- So not successful deflecting,
successful getting past the deflecting.
And that's an interesting question about variation.
- [Man] Are they then being like promoted
or how are they presented, right,
say by the local government.
You know, you guys should really look at this example.
Or do they just hide it,
they just don't want to talk about it.
- In the original documentation for this paper
I have seen discussions of the point system this way
that are wildly over optimistic
and give examples of people who accumulated
all these points.
But if anything I think those examples
lead an ordinary person to look at it and say
there's no way I could ever do all of that,
that's just impossible.
So in a sense that is a good use of a parable
to show that you could succeed and that's a good way
to put the blame back on yourself that
no I didn't work hard enough in school,
no I don't have enough money,
no I don't have enough blood to give this summer
to get more points.
So there are examples, and they do give examples
of all of this working, and undoubtedly there are
some people who do it,
who make their way through the system.
Enough to give you hope.
I think it's something I'll mention to Alexsia
as a good thing to look at is that if it succeeds
then it may not be destabilizing in that way.
If nobody gets through then people should
relatively quickly realize this is a dupe.
This is not a third category,
this is just another kind of denial.
And if it's just another kind of denial
then we're back where we were 10 or 15 years ago
where you were denying people
and then that could lead to problems.
So I'd be curious to see, there are those parables,
there are people getting through.
Are there appreciable number of people getting through,
enough that you know somebody who has done it,
enough to keep your nose to the grindstone
working to get through.
If that's true then it can last.
But there should have to be some successes, I agree.
- [Man] People believe in that possibly.
- The runarounds and things like that,
at least I know from a university campus
better than anywhere, I think we all,
at best what happens is we just give up.
We just feel beaten down by the system and we just give up.
I was in a pension dispute with Berkeley years ago
and at the end they said we treat all our faculty fairly,
but we are gonna treat you like this,
and there's nothing you can do about it
unless you want to take us to court.
And I said, okay, I've lost, I'm beaten down.
Do I continue working, do I continue showing up
and doing my job, I do it, but...
So this getting beaten down that can work too
to just think the odds are against you
and then you just accept your lot in life
and I lost two years of pension credit
and they agreed with me right to the end
when they sicced the university's lawyers on me
to tell me to go away.
And didn't matter if I was right,
didn't matter any of those kind of things,
they said you want to take it to court,
we're gonna fight it in court.
And then we go on about our business and I...
So there are a lot of ways at which people can be
politicized or depoliticized in this process,
and we forget that apathy or giving up
can be a strategy after a point
and realizing it's just stacked so far against you
you won't do anything about it
and you'll put up with second rate education
and second rate medical services and other sorts of things.
But I think you're right, some people have to be succeeding
or it would be sensible
to have some percentage of people succeeding.
- [Man] Yeah, to stabilize this strategy.
- If everybody fails it can't last, it just can't last.
Yeah.
- [Woman] Hi.
I'm a visiting student come from Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences and I come from Beijing.
I lived there for 23 years
and I studied as a law student
for my undergraduate education so there is something
I thought I want to share
so you maybe feel it's interesting.
About 20 years before, as my parents generation is,
when you graduate from
a school, a college, or a university in Beijing,
the government will offer your job
and then offer you a hukou in Beijing.
And in that time studying in Beijing's university
seems very attractive because you can be a Beijing citizen
after you graduate.
But 10 before
if you graduate from Beijing
then you find a job in Beijing,
the company will offer you a Beijing hukou
after maybe two or three years
when the company feel you are valuable,
we want to keep you as our worker so we will find,
then we will ask for Beijing hukou from government.
Then you will be a Beijing citizen.
But to my generation because I graduate from a law school,
so many of my,
of my classmates want to find a job as a,
in law area when they,
in law area, when they come from other province
the only way to become a Beijing citizen is to
work in the government more likely work in court.
And it's gonna be very,
it's gonna be very hard.
They much pass the (mumbles) examination,
which the passing rate is three to 5%.
Then they got to pass the civil service examination
which the passing rate is not more than 5%.
After passing those two examination
they're gonna pass
the test which holding by the court.
And after being hired, after hired by court,
they're gonna wait about five or six years.
In (speaker obscured by heavy accent)
very quite slow, about
800 Canada dollar per month.
And after those five or six years
it's only the government probably will offer them
a Beijing hukou and maybe they cannot get a hukou forever,
even they pay so much.
But if you just want to find a job in Beijing,
it's gonna be quite much easier than that.
And everything goes smoothly
if you don't have a child.
Your child won't study in Beijing and
you just want to earn some money or find a high paid job,
it's gonna, this thing's gonna be perfect.
But once you want your child want to study in Beijing
in Beijing's primary school or high school then
if you don't have a job it becomes impossible in this years.
When I was a high school student there are some
migration students from other province,
they can study with us
but after those three years in high school
they're gonna go back to their province and to attend
the gaokao as the
university admission exam in China
and it is gonna be very difficult
if you study in Beijing's high school
and you attend the gaokao in their own province.
So more and more student
(mumbles) study in Beijing's high school
and then go back to their home town for that exam.
So I think it seems the social mobility
keep goes down during the past 20 years.
- That brings up a few interesting points,
so getting back to your original question that
if you're a young man or woman without,
you're healthy and you don't have children
and all you need is a job,
you can go to Beijing and you can work.
You can live outside the hukou system.
It's also interesting to hear that the hukou system
affects people at very much more exalted levels.
I don't think you law professors when you get a job
and you move from one city to another,
you think of yourself as a migrant worker,
but in China you are a migrant worker,
you've moved from one city to another
and until you get into that hukou system,
you are not even there a full fledged member
of the Beijing community.
And it has implications on you that has to be worked out
by your employer to get you a hukou
and to find some way to get you into the system
'cause otherwise you don't want to stay.
And going home for the gaokao is very important too
because there are different preferences,
it's easier if you're from the big cities
to go to a university in a big city.
Forcing kids to take the exam at home
is another form of discrimination
that makes sure that Beijing universities
are full of Beijing kids,
and Shanghai are full of Shanghai kids.
And if you're from some godforsaken place in Hunan
you have a much much lower chance of doing it
even though you've lived in Beijing your whole life.
And remember we have second generation migrant workers
in China now, this is not just first generation.
Some of these people were born there
and they've lived there their whole lives
and they still are not fully part
of the social welfare system.
- [Woman] Yeah.
And there is a word written in the government,
government document recent year,
it's called the low people.
In Chinese it's (speaking foreign language).
It means that, it doesn't mean migration workers,
it means maybe someone that don't work in Beijing
but they live in Beijing
as migration workers their housewife or their parents.
They are old and they may have illness but they don't work
but they have to go to hospital in Beijing.
And they also don't have money and the social insurance.
And maybe sometimes in last year the government
want to divide them from Beijing as that part of a people.
It's not a migration worker.
The worker, if you can find a job in Beijing
then you can pay for your rent,
you may have a residence.
If you can have a residence in Beijing
things goes much much better
than if you live in a makeshift house
and those years the government cleans
those low areas building and they didn't even build.
After cleaning that area, they didn't even build
some more building in this area,
they just turn this place
to garden or forest or grassland.
And so because of that the rent in Beijing
will go higher and higher in the future
because the government cleans that area.
- I mean maybe the key figure I gave in the whole paper
is that 8% of public services are paid for
by the central government, 1% of health,
three or 4% of education.
Once you do that, now we're in a world of local discretion.
I'm not sure how it works in Canada,
is it all at the national level?
Or is it, do the provinces have control
over these programs?
- [Man] Education and health and
most of the social welfare is a provincial.
- Provincial. - Yeah, but the cities
seem to have problems.
Although we've been download,
a lot of stuff has come down to the city of Toronto now.
And we have to pay for these things, but yeah it's a mix.
- But once you start--
- [Man] We have transfer payments
from the federal government to some of the provinces.
- So places like China, places like the United States,
we don't have those kind of transfer payments.
So employment, who your employer is,
who your municipal leaders are,
what your particular migration pattern is,
who's coming, who's leaving, where they're from.
All those become important and it's all up to a local city
to decide what to do with their own revenues,
and they've got to do it with their own revenues.
So of course you're gonna get
enormous variation in how these things--
- [Man] The thing about local, there was a conversation
earlier and some comments about
that this was really now
the responsibility of the local governments.
So this has devolved down on local governments.
But actually the policy is a national policy.
And it's always been a national policy in China
to limit the size of large cities and to devolve,
or to get people into the middle
and the medium and smaller cities.
That's a basic policy and it's part of
the 2020 Urbanization Plan.
So how do you do that?
Well you keep the migrants out of the big cities if you can
and get them, as you say,
deflect them into the medium and smaller cities.
So the national policy is really very important.
And it's an old policy, it goes back to
before the communist takeover, I mean
they used to write about this and talk about it.
I remember Fei Xiaotong the famous sociologist,
he wrote about this as a way of China's way of development.
Then the communists came into power
and they also tried to limit the size of big cities,
which they couldn't.
And now it's still a problem today.
And the migrants have to take the heat for it.
- On one of the listservs I read,
Stein Ringen has been writing in lately,
where he's arguing China is a totalitarian country
and as I was coming in here today I was thinking,
gee, if it's a totalitarian country they should be able
to keep migrants out of these big cities.
And they have not, they cannot or choose not to.
And once you allow them to migrate
where they want to migrate then you've created a situation
where the municipal officials in these megacities say,
what am I gonna do.
You tell me to do this and I can't do it.
You've given me an un, in America we'd call it
an unfunded mandate, and I've got to handle it somehow.
And if you want to keep them out of the city
I can do what you say, if you're gonna let them come in,
I can't do it.
- [Man] It's not totalit...
I spent a lot of time working in the Soviet Union.
Soviet Union under Stalin was totalitarian.
China is not totalitarian, it's very authoritarian.
But I don't think that, I know that debate on the listserv
that's going on right now. - He's getting started on it
right now, and it doesn't, you have people just flowing
freely across the country.
And think back to the Cultural Revolution or before that,
there was not very much free movement.
It was not far from saying
we know where everybody slept every night.
This is not the situation in China,
we don't know where everybody sleeps every night.
And this is one of these things where when you study things
at first it's easy to turn
the local officials into villains.
But one of the more interesting things is to talk to them
and to get them to explain the world they live in.
I always say one of the basic questions I ask
when I'm doing interviewing is, how are the people above you
and below you driving you crazy.
(speaking foreign language)
And they always the people below are of low quality,
the people above are idiots,
and then they explain for the next two hours
the institutions in which they live.
And you can't be completely gullible
and fall for what they say, but there's some truth
in what these municipal officials in megacities are saying.
You tell us we have to handle these people,
you tell us we have to provide services,
you don't give us any money, you tell me what to do.
And the answer is they come up with something like this.
- [Professor Boittin] Thank you so much.
- Okay.
(audience applauding)
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