Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, Eli Friedman's book The Urbanization of People provides a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens, and he details the policy framework that produces such unequal outcomes.
Friedman's research focuses on how the state responds to growing worker unrest and how cities manage flows of rural migrants during periods of high-speed urbanization. His book reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens through which to view urban life, he investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city.
As a labour sociologist, Friedman's intuition was that viewing private migrant schools as a workplace would likely capture important social dynamics of urban life beyond employment relationships. With the deepening of research, he found that it was not enough just to inspect schools: the stresses faced by teachers in private migrant schools could only be understood by considering the process of urbanization in China. As the title of the book reveals, school education is not only closely linked to the labour market and is a process of labour reproduction; it is also a part of the “politics of development” that serves a broader process of population management and capitalist transformation. Therefore, Friedman's research focus shifted from the politics of the workplace to the politics of social reproduction amid rapid urbanization (x–xi).
For China's urbanization, scholars already have many interpretative frameworks, such as “state-led urbanization,” “the urbanization of the local state,” “land and urbanization-led growth,” “unfinished proletarianization” and so on. These studies have noted that the urbanization of people lags behind the urbanization of capital, land and labour in contemporary China. The distinction between labour and people is critical. Whereas the former refers to humans simply in their capacity for economic production, the latter encapsulates a broader sense of need, for example, access to decent housing, health care and education, as well as social life and leisure. The urbanization of people indicates a process wherein humans relocate processes of production and reproduction, in relative proximity to each other, from a rural to an urban space (pp. 6–7).
Based on this understanding, Friedman sees schools as an index of a variety of social conditions, such as parents’ levels of education, position in labour and housing markets, and access to public services. Processes of urban redevelopment, spatial reconfiguration and social resistance are all reflected in the school (p. 9). He attempts to answer two key questions: 1) how does the state manage rural–urban migration? 2) what are the social consequences of the state's management of population mobility?
Friedman proposes a new concept: “just-in-time urbanization.” He is acutely aware that the Chinese government's management model for the floating population is similar to Toyota's lean management. According to classic Marxist theory, relative surplus population is necessary for capital accumulation. However, the Chinese government's management of the floating population aims precisely to eliminate excess population and ensure that everyone who flows into the city serves the needs of the city's operation. Megacities are attempting to secure labour in just the right quantities and of just the right qualities, and at just the right time, while dispensing with social protections for anyone deemed surplus (pp. 15–16). This measure resembles Toyota's “zero inventory management” and “just-in-time production.”
In Friedman's view, the Chinese government is trying to establish a correspondence between population and cities: high-end cities for the high-end population, low-end places for the low-end population. The state has consciously used restrictions on access to education as a means to limit urban population growth. In Beijing, migrant children who are unable to attend public schools have had to choose the “shadow education system”: schools in poor condition that serve the migrant community (p. 17).
Friedman's research may overstate the importance of government will. The urban government is presented as being like a god that can accurately grasp the needs of the city and the market for the floating population. But in fact, the government's attitude towards the floating population also depends on structural factors. The education policy for migrant children is actually subordinate to the national migrant management policy and local industrial policy.
My recent co-authored research with Miao Li (“Industrial Ecology and Local Citizenship of Migrant Children in Urban China,” Journal of Chinese Governance 2022 [7]: 466–488) provides an alternative explanation: the industrial ecology of host cities has a decisive impact on the inclusiveness of city-level policies concerning migrant children's urban schooling. The industrial ecology exerts an influence on the education policy of migrant children through two mechanisms: 1) the closer the economic development levels of surrounding cities and central cities are, the more likely economic competition between cities will stimulate local governments to adopt friendly policies towards migrants and their children; 2) the lower the opportunity cost for migrants to find alternative jobs and the more able they are to obtain jobs in the labour market across regions, the more likely the local government is to adopt friendly education policies for migrant children. In Guangzhou, Friedman reports, 46 per cent of migrants were living in the same place as their school-age children, whereas in Beijing it was a mere 22 per cent (p. 223). Friedman found that conditions in Guangzhou's migrant schools were certainly better than in Beijing. These facts are consistent with our theory. The industrial ecology of host cities defines the specific education policies for migrant children.
Friedman also admits that just-in-time urbanization is a stark utopia. While such a smooth spatiotemporal articulation of labour and capital can never be realized in practice, the state's pursuit of this ideal has profound consequences (p. 220). Although Friedman's conceptualization of China's urbanization pattern is arguable, he undoubtedly presents an important research agenda. The Urbanization of People will be a must-read reference for studying Chinese urban politics.
