UC Berkeley

Since the dawn of China’s economic reform in the late 1970s, internal migrants from the rural area have been a major source of labor force that fueled the rapid development in the coastal provinces, firstly in the exporting manufacturing sector and then in the domestic service sector. As the pre-reform legacy of Household Registration (Hukou) System tied their legal residency to their rural birthplace, these rural residents were long been excluded from the urban governance and social service regime. The reproduction of labor force, however, requires these fundamental functions of governmentality. Based on two participant observation field research, one in 2006 and the other in 2016, this project seeks to delineate how the governmental vacuum between the urban local state and the rural migrant laborers have been filled up by different alternative institutional arrangements at different historical moments associated with different political economic settings. In 2006, in the context of exclusive politics and the manufacturing paradigm, the “dormitory labor regime” filled up the governmental vacuum by the factory management serving as a de facto local state; in 2016, along with the emerging politics of inclusion and the expansion service sector, what this research calls “neo-corporatism” gradually replaced the previous paradigm with the market-based coalition between the local state and grassroots NGOs.

By contracting social service programs to grassroots NGOs, neo-corporatism claims, and is claimed, to be a “welfarist incorporation.” Grassroots NGOs are supposed to contribute their specialties in social services to the incorporation the migrants, whereas they themselves are increasingly relying on the local state for their survival and development. In reality, however, the differentiated governmental logics and varying configurations of community networks complicated the picture. On the one hand, depending on the state logic and officials’ incentives, two models of state-NGO coalition building are differentiated. On the other, depending on the occupational makeup of the local informal service market, the migrant communities are organized differently. It is argued, furthermore, the interaction between state-NGO coalition building and community conditions may lead to strikingly different community politics. With these observations, in the end of this dissertation, the promise of neo-corporatism will be re-examined.