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Conflict Between City Image Pursuits and Migrant Workers’ Rights

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Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China

Abstract

This chapter is a review of China’s emerging city-centred growth pattern as well as its persisting residency control and dual-track land system. By discussing the fundamental right-mobility relations underpinning the low-income migrant workers’ mobility, this chapter explains: (a) the specific meaning of ‘city justice’ that should be advocated during China’s transition from a command to a market economy; and (b) the reason why, and the way in which, the ‘Right to the City’ gives way to ‘pragmatism’ at the initial stage of pro-market reform aimed towards ‘city imaging’. Dialectical Materialism, as a method, is used to provide discourse on the right-mobility relations that are constantly, and gradually, evolving to serve the institutional changes in China.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Rent seeking is defined as the individual or collective attempt to increase their personal welfare while at the same time contributing negatively to the net wealth of their community (Zhang 2004: 41).

  2. 2.

    The restrictions are imposed on the usage and transactions of rural land or housing. The administrative (re)definition of rural to urban through farmland expropriation and resident status conversion is the only legal way of urbanization (see Liu et al. 2012).

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  1. College of Resource Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China

    Ran Liu

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Liu, R. (2015). Conflict Between City Image Pursuits and Migrant Workers’ Rights. In: Spatial Mobility of Migrant Workers in Beijing, China. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14738-3_3

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