Inequality and the Individualization of Social Rights in China

• In Event: Chinese State Capitalism: Labor, Corporate, and International Strategic Issues

Abstract

How do policies intended to expand workers’ rights end up undermining
their claims to benefits owed to them? China’s push to integrate 280
million migrants into its cities has increasingly individualized
contention over social rights and situated its negotiation on the
state’s turf. Collective claims of exclusion and discrimination have
been supplanted by one-on-one bureaucratic battles over eligibility
and documentation. New regulations that grant social rights to a few
while creating different barriers for others make it harder for
migrant workers to make demands, much less organize. Local variations
and adaptations only serve to further obfuscate the process and make
it a complicated patchwork of policies that need to be navigated year
to year or any time someone relocates for a job. Many outsiders even
blame themselves for not securing the necessary paperwork or meeting
the requirements for securing healthcare, education, and other social
services. This results in the state being able to nudge migrants to do
what the government prefers them to do while avoiding being held
accountable by those same targets. Cities, meanwhile, get to keep a
steady pool of labor to boost local economic development without
having to provide the full set of rights to people living and working
there. Public services as social control is part of a broader trend of
what I argue has been the individualization of Chinese politics and
state-society relations. In the Xi Jinping era of authoritarian
consolidation and recentralization of power, this remains one area
where policy formulation and implementation have remained relatively
decentralized and left in the hands of provincial, municipal, and
district officials. The institutional structures behind inequality are
deeply entrenched in social policy for migrants and its day-to-day
implementation. It works as a stopgap but may cause further problems
down the road.

Author

• Alexsia Tiffanie Chan, Hamilton College