ABSTRACT
For three thousand years, massive city walls protected the inhabitants of China’s cities and kept other people out. After the triumph of the Communist Revolution in 1949, almost all of the walls surrounding China’s cities were torn down. Over the next twenty-seven years, policies were adopted to try to stop the flow of rural migrants to cities, to control city growth, to restrict all economic activity to agents of the state, and to relocate large numbers of urban residents in rural areas. With residency status and access to urban jobs, housing, social services, and welfare benefits, employees of the state assumed privileged positions within the cities. In fact, the government had raised invisible bureaucratic walls around China’s cities by limiting outsiders’ access to jobs, housing, and other essential services. By 1978, China was still a poor, mainly rural, economy, but in that year, China began to transform its centrally controlled economy by dismantling the state monopoly over production, commercialization, and distribution and opening the economy to competitive forces. The invisible walls should have come down, but have they?
