ABSTRACT
The large-scale, high-speed urbanization in China over the past three decades has produced a vast number of dispossessed. This chapter examines the remaking of urban citizenship in contemporary China through the lens of migrant workers' rights movements led by non-government organizations (NGOs). It discusses the theoretical debate on urban citizenship and the right to the city and then examines what the "right to the city" entails in the Chinese context. The chapter identifies three central issues for expanding urban citizenship rights in China—the discrepancy between formal laws and substantive rights, the urban-rural hierarchy as reinforced by the hukou system, and the repression of civil and political rights in the conceptualization of Chinese citizenship. It also discusses migrant workers' rights conditions in Chinese cities: by the year 2010, their number had grown to between 150 and 200 million, and they have become by far the largest marginalized group suffering from the current exploitive urban citizenship regime.
