Presentation about China’s migration regime in the workshop on East Asian Migration Governance

Elena Meyer-Clement and Wang Xiang made a presentation titled “Political steering of urban citizenship: China’s migration policy for internal migrants and foreign immigrants” on the workshop on “East Asian Migration Governance in Comparative Perspective: Norm diffusion, Politics of Identity, Citizenship”. The workshop is organized by the Einstein Visiting Fellow Project led by Prof. Dr. Gunter Schubert and it took place at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin on October 12-13.

Elena and Xiang’s paper examined the changes in China’s internal migration and immigration policy since Xi Jinping’s administration. They argue that China’s new approach to governing migration is still in the making, but recent policy changes point to further adaptation of China’s approach to international trends of migrant selection, namely attraction of high-skilled labor and rejection of low-skilled labor. The paper is set for publication in the edited volume associated with the workshop.

Wang presents hukou reform research on 14th ICARDC

(Group photo of conference attendees. Credit: ICARDC XIV Organizing Committee)

The 14th International Conference on Agriculture and Rural Development in China (ICARDC XIV) was held in Ningxia University in Yinchuan, Ningxia Province in China from October 21 to 23, 2018.

Wang Xiang made a presentation in the panel “Urbanization and Rural-urban integration” about the latest hukou reforms in Guangdong province. She argues that despite ambitious reform plans to the hukou system, the Chinese government is not abandoning mechanisms that can allocate public resources to different subpopulations and steer internal migration. The urban-versus-rural bifurcation in the hukou system is being replaced by a more refined and tiered system of differentiation that defines what kind of migrants go to what kind of cities. Despite the removal of urban-rural differentiation in the hukou system and the ambitious targets of integrating migrants, China’s citizenship regime appears to retain differentiation rather than move towards unification.

(Credit: author)