UC Berkeley

This project focuses on the following puzzle: Why have local authorities in China engaged in a distinctive pattern of expanding and restricting public services at the same time? What explains the particular pattern of expansion and restriction?

While local officials primarily enact social policy to provide services, they have engaged in a distinctive pattern of expansion and restriction of services to also enhance social stability and control migrant workers. These governments face the daunting challenge of the world’s most rapid urbanization: they seek to attract migrant workers and to preserve social stability at the same time. Therefore, they devise an approach to the provision of social services that sometimes gives preference to the state’s goals of stability over the migrant workers’ actual welfare needs. I define social control as the state’s means, both formal and informal, of influencing members of society to make decisions and act in ways that are desired by the state. As local governments channel and contain migrant demands, collective claims of exclusion and discrimination are supplanted by individual bureaucratic battles over eligibility and documentation. At the same time, service provider discretion and migrant agency counter the effects of social control and enable some migrants to gain access to education and healthcare.

My research challenges existing scholarship on authoritarian durability, public service provision, and citizenship in China. Regulation of migrants provides a window into state control and day-to-day authoritarian governance. The literature on authoritarian durability focuses on the institutionalization of elite power transitions and harbingers of regime change, but sometimes forgets that stability maintenance is a pressing daily task never far from rulers’ minds. Contrary to some scholars of authoritarian durability who find governments give concessions to avert immediate or visible instability from restive groups, Chinese officials sometimes do the opposite and restrict benefits. Unlike other studies that focus on only whether services are provided (often to maximize efficiency or buy loyalty), I find that how public services are provided is itself a tool of social control. In contrast to the clear bifurcation between rural migrants and urban residents in the past, gradations in second-class citizenship among migrant workers have emerged. My dissertation expands our understanding of how non-democratic states hone their methods of social control.