ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the place of ‘peasant-worker migrants’ (nongmingong) in the national economic development strategy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and considers a key new trend – officials at all levels of government now seek to shift from essentially coercive administrative measures and control of peasant migrants to more neo-liberal ways of governing them. Peasant-worker migrants are people from poor rural areas who previously would have engaged in agricultural production and who have since migrated to developing urban centres to work as paid labourers. The adoption of new governmental techniques vis-à-vis the governance of internal migrants has been made thinkable and actionable by the PRC Government’s policy shift away from a developmental strategy based primarily on increasing gross domestic product (GDP) towards building an allround xiaokang (well-off) and harmonious society (hexie shehui), through which it aims to address perceived domestic imperatives and ‘connect to the global track’ (jiegui). ‘Connecting to the global track’ is in part a simple matter of participating in the supply chain of transnational production and the administrative arrangements that extend along it, but it also means joining world policy forums and, as far as the PRC Government finds acceptable, conforming its administrative practices to international norms. Chinese integration into wider institutional arrangements has required adherence to numerous international standards, including business and labour regulations, which has produced a network of actors, both state and non-state and domestic and international, concerned with the governance of peasant migrants. This chapter examines how the PRC Government seeks to govern the migrant population and various collective agents and agencies, such as local governments and firms, to ensure that the state’s work with respect to migrants is carried out properly and smoothly. It is important to bear this dual object of policy in mind when questions of coercion, freedom of choice and governance technique are at stake.
