ABSTRACT
China’s market reform has dramatically altered the relationship between the state and society in the provision of public goods and social services. The development of China’s market economy is facilitated to a large extent by the creation and unleashing of an entirely new labor force in the manufacturing and service sectors: rural migrant labor in urban China. It has been estimated that around 150-200 million rural migrant workers are now working in cities (People’s Daily 2006; Shan 2007). A survey conducted in 2003 by China Enterprise Confederation found that peasant workers comprised 57.6 percent of the labor force in the industrial sector, with 68 percent in processing or manufacturing industries and about 80 percent in the construction industry (Zhongxinshe 2004). However, despite the great contribution made by rural migrant workers to China’s economic growth and urban boom in the past two decades, there is yet no central policy to integrate them into urban life and the social service provision system. Migrant workers remain on the margins of society and are excluded from benefiting from the prosperity and economic development that their labor has created (Solinger 1999; Wang 2005). The plight of migrant workers highlights the pitfalls of China’s uneven market reform and an urban-biased social policy and household registration system (the hukou) that divides the Chinese population into urban and rural, with differential entitlements to state welfare and social service provision (Wang 2005: 148-9). The marginalization of migrant workers occurs alongside two other important developments in China’s state-society relationship: one is the withdrawal of the state as the sole provider of social services, and the other is the rise of social actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to fill the gap. As Saich notes about the state’s withdrawal,
continued rapid economic growth is vital to party survival but this will entail further layoffs, downsizing of the government bureaucracy, and the shedding of more government functions on behalf of society or the likelihood of social instability and unrest will increase. Pluralism of service delivery is now a fact of life with voluntary organizations supplementing the
state in providing basic services and with private institutions in health and education expanding.
