Spatiality and Urban Citizenship in Late Socialist China
On 1 October 1999, the People’s Republic of China celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Like Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping before him on similar anniversaries, the party-state leader, Jiang Zemin, waved his hand at tens of thousands of civilians and military personnel as he inspected the grand parade passing through Tiananmen Square. Although, in a certain sense, this highly elaborate and ritualized ceremony conveyed the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to a socialist regime, the social and economic realities of China have changed significantly during the reform era. What we witness today is widespread commercialization, rapid privatization of state-owned enterprises, largescale labor migration, and increased foreign investment. A popular saying captures the fundamentals of the socioeconomic transformations undergone since Mao’s policies were succeeded by those of Deng and Jiang:
When Chairman Mao waved his hands,
the entire nation sent the urban youth down to the countryside (xiaxiang);
When Deng Xiaoping waved his hands,
the entire nation jumped into the sea (xiahai: to engage in private business);
When Jiang Zemin waved his hands,
the entire nation stepped off their posts (xiagang: were laid off).
With its vivid images, this saying represents three phases of Chinese socialism as three distinct historical moments. First is the period of high Maoism, as exemplified by brutal, class-based ideological struggles, collectivism, and absolute egalitarianism, during which millions of urban youth and professionals were sent to the countryside and underdeveloped border regions to be “reeducated” by peasants. Second is the early stage of the post-Mao economic reforms and the shift to a market-based society, during which numerous private entrepreneurs emerged, as well as the so-called floating population—some 100 million ruralto- urban migrants. Last comes what I call the late socialist condition,1 a unique historical moment at which the Chinese economic system has largely shifted toward a capitalist mode of production mixed with reduced state-managed production, while the political-legal system remains largely dominated by one-party rule.2 This period has witnessed soaring social inequalities and the emergence of millions of laid-off urban workers cut loose from the state system.
The profound changes of the post-Mao period raise important questions regarding the nature of Chinese urban citizenship, a unique system formulated on the basis of a centrally planned economy, the hukou, or household registration system, and a rigid rural-urban divide. As increased spatial mobility and deepening marketization gradually erode the economic and social basis of this urban citizenship, new meanings of urban belonging and struggles over citizenship rights are emerging. Focusing on migrant entrepreneurs and laid-off workers in Beijing, this essay examines how these two contrasting social groups grapple with recent reconfigurations of wealth, social space, and urban citizenship. I document the ways in which the social and economic positions of laid-off urban workers and migrant entrepreneurs shifted in the 1990s and analyze how these changes have complicated the question of urban citizenship in late socialist China. My thesis is that what might be called urban citizenship in socialist China is the site of an enduring spatial politics whose terms have been set by the hukou system, which divides national space into two hierarchically ordered parts: the city and the countryside. I use the term urban citizenship to refer specifically to the package of rights and entitlements associated with legal residency in the city, including access to state-subsidized housing, grain, medical care, and virtually free education for one’s children. Under the regime of citizenship that currently prevails in China, social equality is often sought within either of two spatially demarcated realms, not between them. Such a regime, characterized by explicit spatial and social hierarchies between rural and urban areas, presents a sharp contrast to the Western liberal ideal of a citizenship that bestows equal entitlements across the board for all members of a given political community. Consequently, the struggle over citizenship in socialist China often takes place between those who are officially classified as “urban residents” and those designated as “rural residents.” In recent years, the rise of the floating population that crosses rural-urban boundaries has increasingly challenged this form of socialist citizenship, built on an explicit spatial asymmetry. With deepening privatization and commercialization, access to jobs, education, and other substantive urban resources no longer neatly correlates with a Chinese citizen’s official hukou status. What these changes have brought about is a more complicated, intense, face-to-face struggle over claims to urban space and resources in the new socioeconomic order.
In analyzing the changing relationship between spatiality and urban citizenship, I also explore what the departure from a communist socioeconomic system means to Chinese people in different social and economic locations. Rather than treating socialist and postsocialist transformations simply as a matter of one system replacing the other, I see this process as an articulation and reworking of two or more systems, which set conditions and constraints on one another.3 The result is often a hybrid system with internal tensions and contradictions that generate fresh transformations. In China today, the socialist past is not dead; it constantly reemerges to frame present experience, while acquiring new meanings in everyday social struggles (cf. Watson 1994; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Hubbert 1999).
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Notes
This essay draws on fieldwork I conducted among migrant communities in Beijing in 1995–96, 1998, and 1999. Research was funded by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, the Committee of Scholarly Communication with China, the Wenner-Gren Anthropological Foundation, the President’s Council of Cornell Women, and a faculty research grant from the University of California at Davis. I wish to thank Nancy Chen, Sara Friedman, Gail Hershatter, Lyn Jeffery, Jennifer Hubbert, Mark R. Miller, Aihwa Ong, Mark Seldon, Dorothy Solinger, Martin Whyte, an anonymous reviewer for Public Culture, and especially Beth Povinelli for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.
- The condition of late socialism in China can be said to have emerged as early as the late 1980s, but its fuller form took shape only after Deng Xiaoping’s momentous “southern journey” in 1992. During this tour, Deng visited several regions in southern China where economic reforms had been embarked on earlier than in other places. He delivered an important speech that urged greater economic reforms and the further opening up of Chinese society to the outside world. This event is generally regarded as a crucial moment that set the trajectory of post-Mao Chinese society.
- This is not to say that the specific modes of governmentality have not altered under late socialism, since they certainly have (see, e.g., Rofel 1999; Shue 1995). Rather, what I intend to emphasize here is that in spite of all the changes brought by reform, the political system as a whole is still committed to the socialist ideology.
- Although this concept has often been used to refer to the articulation of modes of production, it can be easily extended to the articulation of different social and cultural forms (Comaroff 1985).