In the summer of 2010, thousands of migrant workers employed in auto parts suppliers for Toyota and Honda walked off the job to demand higher wages and better working conditions. This and other evidence (including a wave of employee suicides at factories owned by Foxconn) strongly suggested that migrant workers were no longer willing to put up with the labor practices that have made China the workshop of the world. The chapters in this collection provide valuable context to understand migrant workers as an emerging and influential third sector in Chinese society and politics. Indeed, while the title of this impressive and wide-ranging collection makes an obvious play on the “one country, two systems” formulation, the contributors show clearly that China has three, not two societies, with the third consisting of migrant workers who possess a legal and social status, and political attitudes, clearly separating them from their urban and rural counterparts.
Most of the fifteen chapters in this book came from a 2006 conference that addressed new perspectives on rural–urban inequality. In his opening chapter, Martin King Whyte frames the volume's contributions as addressing two paradoxes: First, how and why did the rural revolutionaries of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) introduce policies and practices in the Mao era that institutionalized high levels of rural–urban inequality? Second, with the subsequent dismantling of many institutions from the Mao era (including class labels), how have rigid residency classifications and restrictions on migration, as well as high levels of discrimination against migrants, managed to persist in a rapidly marketizing economy?
Several of the chapters describe how CCP policies in the 1950s and 1960s imposed extreme forms of rural–urban inequality, but why such policies came into being remains a puzzle. Many of the chapters address directly or indirectly the second paradox of why the household registration (hukou) system and its legacies survive, and indeed thrive, in the reform era. In addition, readers will find very important, if sometimes technical, treatments on the size of the rural–urban income gap and how it has changed over time, and several insightful discussions of how China's income gap compares with and is reinforced by other inequalities, such as employment status, ethnicity, and gender.
Whyte's chapter speaks most directly to the question of the origins of China's rural–urban inequality. He argues against the conventional wisdom that the 1950s and 1960s brought a leveling of rural–urban differences, and observes that “the actual trend looks much more like descent into serfdom for rural residents in the Mao era, with only partial liberation from those bonds in the reform era” (p. 5). The chapters by Hanchao Lu and Wu Jieh-min show persuasively that the CCP established a new order that separated rural and urban societies in ways that did not occur before 1949. Hanchao Lu's essay artfully describes the high esteem and pride of place held by small towns in the elite and popular culture of Republican China. Wu Jieh-min's chapter uses theories of citizenship to show that China's trajectory since 1949 has been one of status differentiation rather than universalizing citizenship or social solidarity found in the evolution of many capitalist market economies.
Other contributors take to task another piece of conventional wisdom, that China's persistent high inequality is driven by the gap between rural and urban incomes. It is true that China's rural–urban income gap is among the highest in the world, with urban household earnings about triple those of rural households. However, as two chapters by economists show, this gap fails to account for purchasing power differences between urban and rural areas, as well as nonwage income such as subsidies (both chapters use 2002 data from the China Household Income Project). With adjustments made for these and other factors, the chapter by Terry Sicular and colleagues shows that, in fact, intra-urban and intra-rural inequalities account for three-quarters of China's total inequality, and rural–urban inequalities only one-quarter.
It is well known that China's partial reforms on migration have permitted rural residents to take up temporary employment in cities, where they face discrimination and unequal access to educational and social services accorded to urbanites. Part III provides four concise chapters dealing with education, health care, the digital divide, and intra-urban mobility. Part IV contains the most interesting chapters in terms of how migrants experience discrimination and how they feel about issues of justice and rights.
Wang Feng's chapter, based on his work with the China Justice Survey, presents the finding that migrants, relative to urban and rural residents, have positive evaluations of the reforms and of their prospects in the future. Lei Guang and Fanmin Kong's chapter reports on the results of their experimental research design in which two pairs of job applicants were sent to Beijing job fairs. They found that prospective employers' discrimination against women (including urban residents) in the experiment was as strong as their discrimination against rural migrants. Arianne Gaetano richly documents the experiences of two rural sisters over a ten-year period in Beijing's labor market. Finally, Xiaojiang Hu and Miguel Salazar present a fascinating look at urban Tibetans' discrimination against Han migrant shopkeepers in Lhasa, discrimination that would fuel anti-Han rioting in the city in 2008.
The work concludes with two lucid analyses of policy debates on the agricultural crisis (by Lei Guang) and hukou reforms (by Fei-ling Wang). Despite the occasional press fanfare and stated intentions of Chinese policy makers to dismantle the hukou system, Wang shows in an update of the findings from his 2005 book on the subject that reforms are going nowhere because of overt local government resistance.
One Country, Two Societies provides multiple lenses for scholars and students to examine inequality and its discontents in contemporary China. A concluding chapter would have helped tie together common themes (an index also would have been useful), but the chapters speak well for themselves, and suggest many promising areas for future research on a problem that is not going to recede in the foreseeable future.
