ABSTRACT
In Beijing, China, Henancun has been a migrant enclave space for informal recycling workers, mostly from Henan Province, since the late 1990s. Following a chain and channelized migration, the Henan migrant workers in Beijing face a series of challenges: they encounter a double-exclusion dilemma, whereby the economic conditions in their hometowns and the political and institutional realities in the city have prevented them from either joining the city or returning home; this bind further subjects them to a “permanent temporality” in their life and work. Based on multiyear field research conducted in Beijing, we look in this chapter not only at how rural migrants cope with the exclusionary policies in the city but also at why migrants make the constrained choice of building a parallel society. In effect, this connects them to the rural and urban worlds and equally alienates them from both worlds as outsiders. We argue that although the rural-to-urban migrants face serious institutional challenges in the city, their stories reflect migrants’ struggles to construct a functional society for themselves, spatially and culturally, in between the two ends of a migration journey.
