In China's urban metropoles, the hukou system of household registration regulates one of the largest movements of people in human history. While rural-urban migrations are reshaping societies worldwide, the migrants who make up a great portion of urban China's low-wage labor force and burgeoning population face unique legal and social challenges. Although the trajectories of their migration do not cross international boundaries, most are legally prevented from ever gaining the within China's hukou system of household registration. The functions of this system parallel those of national citizenship policies, and are difficult to explain through standard conceptions of sovereignty and national citizenship. Extending recent work in border studies that thinks of borders in dimensions that go beyond the line itself, this thesis argues that national borders and national citizenship should not be considered as the exclusive sites from which bordering processes emanate. Instead, I argue that citizenship and bordering processes can both take place apart from the norms of nation-state territory. Based on a series of qualitative interviews conducted in Shanghai and Anhui province, this article examines the structure and effects of the hukou system as it regulates legal inclusion and exclusion of migrant workers.

This dissertation focuses on labour market returns of migrants and non-migrants in transitional urban China. Literature on internal migrants in urban China reveals different perspectives on whether internal migrants have higher or lower labour market returns than urban residents. Labour market segmentation theory highlights the effect of an institutional barrier, the Hukou system, and suggests that migrants are placed in the lower segment of the market while urban residents have many advantages over migrants. On the contrary, migration selectively literature suggests migrants in urban China are positively selected and have higher quality than non-migrants, thus suggesting that migrants have higher-level returns than non-migrants. Market transition theory provides a transitional view and suggests the inequality caused by the Hukou system is decreasing with the development of a market economy, with competitiveness increasing among both migrants and urban non-migrants. The main objective of this research is to examine the differences in earnings and occupational attainments among different population groups - urban non-migrants, temporary migrants and permanent migrants - and their changes over time, and to examine factors that contribute to the changes. Three key factors, Hukou reforms, development of market mechanisms and migration selectivity, are highlighted in this study. Using CGSS 2003 and 2008, the empirical analysis shows that first, the independent effect of migrant status on earnings was significant in 2003 but not significant in 2008, however, migrant status had a significant independent effect on individuals’ occupational attainments in both 2003 and 2008. Second, migration selection had significant and positive effects on individual’s earnings and occupational attainments in both 2003 and 2008. Third, migrants with urban Hukou status have an advantage in labour market returns. Urban migrants (temporary and permanent migrants from urban to urban) had a net earnings advantage over urban non-migrants in two years of 2003 and 2008; permanent migrants (permanent migrants from rural to urban and from urban to urban) had an advantage in occupational attainments over urban non-migrants in both 2003 and 2008. The mixed findings of decreased effects of migrant status on individual’s earnings from 2003 to 2008 and the remaining effect of migrant status on individual’s occupational attainment from 2003 to 2008 indicate that both segmentation and competition exist in urban labour markets in China. This reflects the nature of China’s transition from a planned to a market economy, where growing market forces co-exist with institutional legacies. Migrants in China are positively selected and migration experience contributes positive returns on earnings and occupational attainments.

This dissertation consists of three chapters on financial friction, misallocation and development dynamics. The first chapter considers how financial frictions and mobility distortions generate the persistence of post-reform development dynamics. I build a general equilibrium model and calibrate it to China. The mobility distortion is an occupation distortion that restricts a proportion of agents to the low-productive sector. A removal of distortions triggers the transition of the economy. Using a calibrated version of the model, the transition path displays slow convergence and mimics the patterns observed in data. The mobility distortion creates high-ability, but poor, agents before the reform. This provides a channel for financial frictions to have longer effect after the reform. Compared with the literature that uses tax distortions, the economy with mobility distortions generates slower convergence. The second chapter is a welfare analysis of the well-documented depressed migrant wage in China from a dynamic perspective. The depressed migrant wage per se attracts fewer migrant workers and lowers the migrants' consumption and the aggregate output. However, it encourages urban entrepreneurs to substitute capital for labor, relaxing the effect of financial frictions. The net effect on output and consumption depends on the stage of development. Initially, it benefits the economy by speeding up TFP growth and capital accumulation in the urban sector. In the later stage, owing to low consumption of migrants, policy intervention can increase aggregate consumption and output. The third chapter investigates why the intergenerational income mobility decreases and the inequality increase for China over the past 30 years. I propose a theoretical overlapping generation model with missing capital markets, increasing the return to human capital and increasing education cost to explain these facts. After the economic reform happens, all levels of wages go up and all families accumulate and update human capital. However, the increasing education cost and credit constraint prevent the children from rural families from accumulating human capital quickly. The urban families accumulate human capital faster than the rural families. These predictions from the model are verified in the census data. Whether this process continues or not depends on the subsidy of education. Government education policy can improve the allocation of education in the economy.

The distinctive household registration (hukou or huji) system of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) divides the population into two groups whose political rights and legal status are unequal. This thesis focuses on Shanghai to examine the establishment of the hukou system in the 1950s in the course of the rural and urban reforms led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although the system has been explained as a result of the CCP’s industrialization strategy, my investigation has led me to conclude that the hukou system was an indirect rather than direct consequence of industrialization. My examination also shows that “rural” and “urban” in the PRC are essentially neither residential nor occupational categories; rather they are closely connected with political privileges. The first part of this study focuses on the consequences of the CCP’s land reform and collectivization campaigns after 1949. During this period, a large number of people who had moved freely between urban and rural areas, playing active roles in both, were uprooted from the countryside. At the same time, the CCP carried out a series of expulsions from Shanghai and other cities. Hundreds of thousands of urban residents, particularly those lacking secure employment, were removed after being labeled as “undesirable.” Thus CCP policies turned the cities and the countryside into two separate worlds. Next the dissertation outlines how the PRC state evolved after 1949, focusing on those directly maintained on the government’s payroll in Shanghai. This group was small in the beginning but soon began to expand. During the 1950s, after taking over almost all public-service institutions, the state took steps to absorb private enterprises through the policy of “public-private joint operation.” A large cohort of workers was thus added to the state payroll. Following these changes, the cities had become home mainly to employees of the party-state, together with their dependents. The state provided various benefits to its insiders. At the same time, it reduced most of the rural population to a kind of serfdom, while putting in place a set of mechanisms to secure the boundary between insiders and outsiders. / Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2012-06-27 09:01:49.88

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the process of internal migration in Peoples' Republic of China. It focuses on low-skilled rural migrant workers, their overall characteristics, role in the economy and their status within Chinese society. This analysis aims to prove that despite the fact that rural migrants represent an essential element of Chinese economy, and have contributed by a great deal to China's economic take-off, they are still a very discriminated group of Chinese society and are constantly facing violations of their rights.

The diploma thesis is concerned with real estate market in China. This paper is about the system hukou, one child policy or history of Real Estate market in China, which are coherent problems with this theme. The problem of real estate bubble is also described in this diploma thesis.

Educational disparities in China are rooted in the country’s longstanding rural-urban divide, which the hukou system has institutionalized. However, following a comprehensive reform of the hukou system (2014-2020) disparities in access to education remain ubiquitous. This raises questions regarding the reform itself, in terms of its agenda and effectiveness, as well as regarding the real driving factors of educational disparities in urban China. It is a complex issue that requires a multidimensional analysis, which shall consider both the hukou and other exclusionary factors as potential causes. These include mechanisms inherent to China’s education system, culture, and historical dynamics of social stratification. Making an in-depth review of the literature through institutionalism lenses, this research takes shape in the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of equality of opportunity and social mobility. Supported by empirical indicators and qualitative data, it provides an in-depth and timely understanding of the hukou and underlying factors of educational exclusion that undermine equality of opportunity and hinder upward social mobility among migrant children. This research finds that hukou status is still the biggest determinant of people’s equality of opportunities and social mobility in China and argues that the reform had the potential to make a positive difference. Thereby, this research's main explanation for the resilience of educational disparities in this context is that the 2014 hukou reform’s core intent was to modify migrant spatial distribution in favour of small and midsize cities, as opposed to their current concentration in megacities, and, in doing so, policymakers overlooked many challenges and barriers associated to migrating to lower tier cities and undervalued the importance of education for migrants. This research thus concludes that, rather than a definite lack of political will for solving educational disparities, the reform fell short on schooling issues because economic ambitions have taken precedence over social development and equal access to welfare, including education, among all Chinese citizens.

The history of now-developed countries implies a common transformation path of economic development. That is, within an economy, as wage grows in non-farm sectors, labour migrates out of agriculture. With fewer workers, agricultural land resources may concentrate into the hands of fewer but larger farm operations (agricultural land consolidation), with more investment and higher production specification. However, the development process of China is less likely to trace the same path as it does in these countries, given its distinctive institutions. To examine the development process in the unique context of China, this dissertation focuses on two questions: (1) how do China’s rural workers self-select into off-farm employment (OFE)? (2) How does agricultural land consolidation occur in China? In addressing the first question, I use Roy’s self-section model to analyze the following three occupational choices of China’s rural residents: farming only, local OFE, and migratory OFE. Based on household survey data from 101 communities in rural China in 2004 and 2007, the empirical results show that individual and household characteristics are important self-selecting factors for OFE participation. More importantly, I find that the increase of OFE in China is largely consistent with market-driven expectations. In addressing the question of whether and why the consolidation of farm operations develops in China’s agriculture, I assess the divergence between the size of farm operations from equal entitlements. The theoretical model predicts that a higher opportunity cost of farm labour, in the form of the urban wage, exerts a positive influence on consolidation of farm operations through rental arrangements. A Gini index is used to measure the inequality of farmland operations relative to equal farmland entitlements, with greater inequality being consist with higher consolidation of farm operations. Empirical results support the theoretical prediction, specifically, a 1000-yuan increase in the annual urban wage, holding all other influences constant, increases the Gini index by 0.012 (mean=0.26) over the 2004-2007 period.

The aim of the master thesis is to characterize development trends of Chinese urbanization since the establishment of People´s Republic of China until today, approaches to these trends and evaluate their sustainability. Thesis includes four main parts. The first part introduces main urbanization theories: Stages of Urban Development, Differential Urbanization, and Environmental Kuznets Curve. The second part characterizes the development of Chinese urbanization, defines two main determinants of the future development and tries to cover different potential future scenarios. The third part deals with Chinese urban policies, such as five-year-plans, Urbanization plan and reforms. After that, the sustainability issue is evaluated. Last part of the thesis deals with urbanization trends and policies in Chongqing municipality.

This thesis examines how themes about migrant workers, especially women migrant workers are depicted in the two films The world, Shijie 世界 (2004), directed by Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯 and Angels wear white, Jianianhua 嘉年华 (2017), directed by Vivian Qu, also called Wen Yan 文言. In the background of the thesis the subjects hukou 户口, the system of household registration; the floating population, liudong renkou 流动人口, the people who are not living at the place where they are registered at, according to the hukou system and black hukou, heihu 黑户, the people who lack hukou altogether are discussed. The methods used in the thesis are a qualitative thematic analysis and semiotics. The theories that are the basis of the analysis are Laura Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze, Emirbayer and Mische’s concept of agency and Steven Lukes’s concept of power.    The themes that are explored in this thesis are work, accommodation, the ID card and the passport, the commodification of the female body and women who are sex workers, the female virginity, violence as well as symbols and role models. Both films show that a person’s status as a migrant worker who is lacking an ID card or as a migrant worker who has their hukou elsewhere determines the living conditions of the person in China. Angels Wear White depicts how being in possession of an ID card or not affects whether you get access to healthcare, work opportunities and your housing situation. In The World poor living conditions for the migrant workers are depicted. Both films show differences between the sexes, where women are treated as object of male desire and the female body becomes an object that can be bought by means of money or services. The female’s virginity before marriage is valued greatly, which affects the young women migrants’ experiences in the film.    Some symbols that appear in the film are the white dress, that symbolizes a female ideal, the ID card and the passport that are symbols of social as well as physical mobility in Chinese society, lastly the theme park is a symbol of the dreams and desires that are being shaped in contemporary China.   Keywords: “the floating population”, “hukou”, “female migrant workers”, “The World”, “Angels Wear White” / Den här uppsatsen undersöker vilka teman kring migrantarbetare, särskilt kvinnliga migrantarbetare skildras i the två filmerna The world, Shijie, 世界 (2004), regisserad av Jia Zhangke 贾樟柯och Angels wear white, Jianianhua嘉年华 (2017), regisserad av Vivian Qu också kallade Wen Yan 文言. I bakgrunden beskrivs bland annat hushållsregistreringssystemet hukou 户口; den flytande befolkningen liudong renkou 流动人口, de personer i Kina som inte bor på den plats som de är registrerade på enligt hukou-systemet samt heihu 黑户, svart hukou, de personer som helt saknar hukou.     Metoden för studien är en kvalitativ filmanalys som grundar sig på en tematisk analys och semiotiken. Teorier som används i analysen är Laura Mulveys teori om den manliga blicken, Emirbayer och Misches begrepp som beskriver agens samt Steven Lukes maktbegrepp.    De teman som behandlas i uppsatsen är jobb, boende, id-kortet och passet, kommodifiering av kroppen och kvinnor som säljer sex, den kvinnliga oskulden, våld samt symboler och förebilder. De båda filmerna skildrar hur en persons status som migrantarbetare utan hukou eller status som migrantarbetare med hukou på en annan plats påverkar personens levnadsvillkor i Kina. I Angels wear white skildras hur id-kortet eller avsaknaden av id-kortet påverkar möjligheten att uppsöka vård, möjligheterna till anställning och boende. Även i The world har migrantarbetarna erfarenheter av boenden som är undermåliga. I båda filmerna uppvisas skillnader mellan könen, där kvinnor blir objekt för manlig åtrå och där det finns exempel på när den kvinnans kropp och sexualitet blir en vara som kan köpas med pengar och tjänster. Kvinnans oskuld innan äktenskapet värderas högt, vilket påverkar de unga kvinnliga migrantarbetarnas erfarenheter i de två filmerna.     Flera symboler framträder i filmerna, den vita klänningen fungerar som en symbol för kvinnoideal, id-kortet såväl som passet fungerar som symboler för social och fysisk rörlighet i det kinesiska samhället och temaparken blir en symbol för de begär och drömmar som formas i Kinas samtid.