Class without Place: Right-to-Education Petitions among the Migrant Middle Class in Beijing

• In Event: 261 - Section on Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 14. Structural Roots and Political Outcomes

Abstract

The rise of social activism in China has spawned a growing literature on contentiousness in Chinese society. Recent literature has addressed rural unrest among peasants, worker struggles, and increasingly, activism among the urban middle class. This study focuses on collective action among a different group that is growing in both size and importance, namely the urban migrant middle class. I follow a group of middle-class internal migrant parents in Beijing in their petition campaign for the rights of their children to sit the national university entrance examination locally, and examine the migrant parents’ political paradigm in terms of its issue, values, actors, and modes of action. I argue that the migrant middle class differs greatly from low-income internal migrants in that it has experienced significant upward social mobility, but it also differs from the local urban middle class in that the gains in upward social mobility have not been fully institutionalized in place under the household registration (hukou) system. The contradictory position occupied by the migrant middle class at the intersection of class and claim to place, that is, having achieved middle-class status without having established the claim to place, may explain some of the contradictions and incoherence in the migrant parents’ political paradigm, and why they have pursued mobilization strategies more conservative than those adopted by the local urban middle class. I argue that, much more than just the right to education, the migrant parents’ petition campaign is an important claim to place, without which their class position remains precarious.

Author

• Irene Pang, Brown University