The Urbanization of People - by Eli Friedman

About the Book

Eli Friedman 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. He provides a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.

Book Synopsis

Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship.

The Urbanization of People 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 on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services.

Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.

Review Quotes

Surfaces the voices of rural migrant families caught between economic imperatives and shifting state priorities.-- "Pacific Affairs"

Offers excellent raw material on a profoundly subaltern working class social group in China.-- "Against the Current"

A serious and thought-provoking account of the experiences of people who have relocated to the city for work opportunities.-- "Choice"

An essential guide to both the ways in which the country's authorities have succeeded in engineering solutions to dilemmas that have stymied the development of other states and the degree to which its leaders have sabotaged the aspirations of critical segments of their citizenry.-- "International Labor Review"

An excellent case study for research on immigration between nations.-- "Developing Economies"

A must-read reference for studying Chinese urban politics.-- "China Quarterly"

A revealing study of migrant schools as the lever of China's unique project of 'just-in-time' urbanization. Friedman shines an essential light on the human struggles among migrant children, parents, and teachers and the rigid sociospatial class and citizenship hierarchies that lock them in place even as they move to the cities. A must-read for scholars in education, labor, development, urban, and China studies.--Ching Kwan Lee, University of California, Los Angeles

Friedman's study takes a whole-person and intergenerational approach to the question of how China's national policies and access to its capital city's public services are designed to discriminate and exclude this dynamic population that the city simultaneously relies upon for its informal labour.-- "China Labour Bulletin"

In this magnificently researched and troubling study of China's urbanization process, Friedman situates migrants--teachers, children, parents, education activists--at the center of a tale of exploitative, unequal development, in which rural migrants are simultaneously highly valued and yet treated as outsiders, easily disposed of. A phenomenal piece of work in every way.--Ralph A. Litzinger, Duke University

The book is expertly researched, and rich with both data and personal interviews. It will be of interest to a range of readers beyond the academic sphere and including those interested in development, the economy, and social studies in China and the region.-- "Asian Labour Review"

This is an enormous endeavor well accomplished. Backed up by rich fieldwork and painstaking research over many years, this book tells a poignant story of China's prodigious urbanization, on the back of a huge migrant labor class, through their and teachers' struggles in the arena of education. Friedman also advances a provocative and rigorous theorization of the process linked to the state-designed sociospatial hierarchy and biopolitical machinery.--Kam Wing Chan, University of Washington

About the Author

Eli Friedman is associate professor and chair of international and comparative labor at Cornell University's ILR School. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (2014) and coeditor of the English edition of China on Strike: Narratives of Workers' Resistance (2016).