This post is part of a feature on “Urban Struggles,” moderated and edited by Raúl Acosta (LMU Munich), Flávio Eiró (Radboud University Nijmegen), Insa Koch (LSE) and Martijn Koster (Radboud University Nijmegen).
Over the past two decades, the central authorities in the People’s Republic of China have shown an increasing concern about the inequalities between urban dwellers and predominantly rural hukou (residence registration) holders that have migrated to the cities. In 2016 a new policy on urban planning coined the concept of ‘livable cities’ and stated that migrants from the countryside have the same rights as urban residents to basic public goods and services such as healthcare and education (Xinhua News Agency 2016). Migrant workers often account for 30 per cent of the population in China’s major cities, but they comprise 80 per cent or more of the total population in urban villages or ‘villages-in-the-city’, rural villages converted into urban communities (shequ) (Chung 2010). The former village of Pine Mansion (the pseudonym of my main field site) is in a transitory state, awaiting the completion of the three phases of urban redevelopment (2010–2018, 2018–2026 and 2026-2034). During this transition, natives and migrants are subject to variegated governance, ‘diverse modes of government – disciplinary, regulatory, pastoral – that administer populations in terms of their relevance to global capital’ (Ong 2006: 78). While Ong shows how variegated governance rests on zoning technologies and results in ‘graduated sovereignty’, here this variegation occurs within the same microspatial unit.
This allows observing how variegated governance involves variegated valuation. Valuation is understood both as economic valorization and political acknowledgement of social worth (Collins 2017). I sketch the outlines of two circuits of value creation and redistribution, where value generated in one is extracted in favor of the other so as to form a wider circuit of value extraction (Simonet and Krinsky 2017). The separation between natives and outsiders relies on unequally distributed prior assets, different processes of value extraction, and the unequal redistribution of value across these population categories. Redistribution of value occurs by way of a project-based system of competitive allocation of public goods that is conditional upon prior generation of value, and mainly benefits the native inhabitants and the most economically successful migrants. Most migrant outsiders are the targets of charitable programs that simultaneously rely on and promote a form of labor extorsion, that is, their unpaid labor in the domestic and public spheres. These logics stem from the unequal recognition of the value generated for the city government by the natives’ highly valued real-estate rent and the outsiders’ lesser valued migrant labor and volunteering. They give rise to different interpretations of the “right to the city”. Urban social movements often emerge at the intersection of social reproduction, neighborhood and labor issues (Susser 2014). Here however, these divisions, added to a context of growing rather than declining public good provision, and of close surveillance, explain why contestation is limited to irony and checked by resignation.
Variegated governance in an urban village
Among China’s major cities, Shenzhen stands apart as a recently created immigrant city in which 70 per cent of the total population do not hold permanent residency status. In the former village I call Pine Mansion, which lies in Longhua, one of Shenzhen’s northern districts, the ratio of migrants is even higher – over 96 per cent. Migrants hold temporary residence permits and work in factories or run stores, restaurants or small factories.
Native villagers (yuancunmin) – whose local rural hukou in the village was converted to an urban Shenzhen hukou at the time of the village’s urbanization in 2004 – make up only 2.4 per cent (1,441) of the total population. Two-thirds of the natives are retired or do not work outside the home, and the majority of the remaining natives work at the community center and other public offices. Their territorial entitlements allow the natives to derive income from industrial and commercial real estate. Native villagers draw income from renting out housing to migrants and receive annual dividends from the cooperative companies in which they hold shares. These companies, which hold ownership rights to the collective land, also distribute welfare benefits, including social insurance and retirement pensions, to their native shareholders.
By contrast, among Pine Mansion’s non-local non-hukou holders, almost a third are employed in the private sector, and a quarter are self-employed entrepreneurs. Less than a third of women above the age of 50 and less than half of men above the age of 60 receive a retirement pension. They either work or depend on their children’s income while providing childcare for them. As non-local hukou holders, rural migrants who are allowed to move to and work in cities under the “temporary residents” category are excluded not only from the benefits associated with being native (shares in the cooperative companies), but also from most benefits linked to local urban citizenship (Shenzhen hukou). The latter, which is accessible through a points system, is out of reach for most migrants, because of the weight given to education level, job skill and house ownership in scoring points. In Shenzhen, as in other major cities of China, the points system that allows access to urban citizenship selects applicants according to their potential contribution to the city budget as well as on the basis of the contributions they have already made (Zhang 2012).
The points system, which essentially works as a mechanism for recruiting wanted migrants and restricting those who are unwanted, is reinforced by the dual-governing system that rests on self-governing for some and the close surveillance of others. Urbanization has created a duality in power and governance, one directed at the natives and the other at the migrants. While hukou-holding natives are represented by their elected leaders in resident committees and shareholding companies, non-natives have no elected representatives (they participate in elections only in their place of origin, where their residence is registered), and they are administered separately.
Migrant outsiders are policed by the patrol center, the Wangge, whose mission is to keep a database of the migrant population, and by the Chengguan, in charge of urban management enforcement. The Chengguan supervises the shareholding companies’ use of the natives’ collective assets and makes them play their part in urban renewal. (The Chengguan head and his assistant are both native villagers, which enables them to negotiate with the companies’ heads; they all belong to the same lineage.) On the other hand, the Chengguan deals with everything related to what is euphemized in Party discourse as “raising the quality of urban culture” – in other words, the elimination of everything that looks disorderly and messy. The Chengguan head and his assistant boasted that “there are no more untidy postings and messy street vendors” in Pine Mansion. The measures they took to achieve this, however, are quite drastic. If a phone number is mentioned on a posting, they block the phone line until a fine has been paid. Street vendors are chased and fined, and their selling carts are confiscated. In short, unskilled migrant workers are no longer welcome in upgrading the urban environment.
Conditional provisioning and project-based funding
There is a clear connection between urban renovation and increased governmental responsibility for the provision of public goods. Before redevelopment started, public goods were partly financed by Pine Mansion’s shareholding companies and the local lineage foundation, but as a result of the transfer of land use rights from collectives to the state, they are now entirely covered by the government. This change is not so much the result of a more stable and equitable mode of budgetary allocation. Rather, the government raises the level of provision of such urban infrastructure only when and where the collectives agree to engage in urban development programs.
Since the start of Pine Mansion’s redevelopment project in 2010, visible signs of change have appeared: roads are in better shape; the quality of public transportation has increased as bus shelters have been erected at regular intervals on the road that services the newly built residential towers; police forces and street cleaners have increased in numbers; and the frequency of garbage collection has gone up. This increased governmental intervention constitutes an investment in infrastructure to attract real estate developers who will sell housing at higher prices and pay use rights to the government.
Although some of the budgetary reallocation has benefitted the non-registered population, this funding mainly takes the form of temporary programs that offer limited relief rather than creating structural changes. Funding, particularly for social work aimed at non-natives, is subject to the logic of project-based competitive bidding. The various communities compete at the district level for titles such as the most ‘livable’ or the most ‘compassionate’ community.
For instance, Pine Mansion community center’s social workers launched the “Sunshine Lunch” (yangguang wucan), in 2014. The rationale for the project was the fight against disorder, luan (according to social worker Mrs. Yu, to prevent students from “wandering around in the community”). While a survey counted about 2,000 school-aged children among Pine Mansion’s non-registered population, the program was restricted to 20 children, because of lack of space and of money. By 2018, Sunshine Lunch had been terminated. It had operated for a three-year period, during which the social workers had applied six times to different departments that supported funding for different periods.
The allocation system has been streamlined, and its project-based logic has been intensified under the heading of Shenzhen’s new “livelihood program” (Shenzhen Jiayuan Wang). However, the beneficiaries are generally not the neediest communities but rather those who already partly fulfil the criteria of “livability”. Pine Mansion has benefited more than other communities from this favorable context by being listed among the sub-district’s key priorities. Pine Mansion Community Centre was granted money for its “Zhenneng Project” – named after the founding ancestor of the lineage to which most of the natives belong. Although the lineage is not officially recognized by the party-state, the project was legitimized by including public “National learning” (guoxue) lectures but also charitable activities such as afterschool care for (mainly) non-native schoolchildren, organized by the social workers and supervised by volunteers.
Again, the project received funding for only one year, and all of the activities had stopped by 2018. However, as a result, Pine Mansion was labelled “a live sample for community construction within the district” – a title that will attract buyers of the new apartments. The sub-district government more durably invested 700,000 yuan (approx. 100,000 euros) in the renovation of the public place facing the ancestral temple, the use of which was until then restricted to natives. The square was endowed with a children’s playground and fitness equipment, a concrete stage for communal and propaganda activities, and a brand-new basketball court. During the day, the square is mostly used by non-native grandparents who take care of their grandchildren. One elderly man among the group I named the “Temple Square Grandpas” described his daily schedule as consisting in cooking, going down to the square, going back home to cook lunch, going down to the square, then dinner, and then often back to the square again.
The public ground is also used on the weekends by the community’s social workers for events that target non-natives. From March 2018 onward, a Beneficence Day was to be organized in each of the district’s 57 communities on the last Sunday of every month, as part of the district’s philosophy of “community building” (shequ yingzao). On Beneficence Day, services such as free haircuts and medical examinations are offered by volunteers. Among the people getting a haircut was a man in his fifties from Anhui who had been living in Pine Mansion for more than 10 years. He is unemployed and lost his livelihood when the Chengguan confiscated the cart he used to sell tofu he made with his wife. His only source of income is his rural old-age pension of 60 to 70 RMB per month. He commented on the natives, who earn money by doing nothing besides renting out apartments, and stated that although well intended, activities like Beneficence Day would not bring substantial changes to people’s lives.
Building the civilized city for free
In the promotional video released for its 40th anniversary, Shenzhen boasts that it is “a city of immigrants . . . with 1.35 million registered volunteers”. The points-based system for accessing local hukou includes contributions such as participation in charity activities (e.g., donations made to local communities), blood donation, and voluntary services. One can earn 5 points by offering 250 hours of voluntary services. This is ideologically justified by the aim of “enhancing the sense of belonging of migrant workers, making migrant workers hopeful, hardworking, more law-abiding, and more caring for the city” (Baidu Baike). Furthermore, the official discourse proclaims the will to create a philanthropic culture in every urban community as part of “community construction”, and an increasing number of charities involve volunteer-based activities that are supposed to foster migrants’ integration in the community and the city. Most of the charitable activities organized for migrants are actually facilitated by migrant volunteers.
Each Shenzhen shequ now has its own team of volunteers. In Pine Mansion, the group has about 70 to 80 registered volunteers, mostly migrant women. It is mainly the community center’s social workers who request them to participate in events that are expected to take place in each community, such as giving free haircuts on Beneficence Day. The community center is understaffed (60 employees, that is, one employee per 1,000 inhabitants – compared to 26 employees in Vaud canton of Switzerland, where I live). Volunteering makes up for the community center’s lack of means by constituting a form of supplementary, unpaid labor, while the community center’s social workers are also expected to perform some amount of free labor when they organize community events on the weekends such as Beneficence Day. Volunteering is a requirement and an integral part of their job.
The migrant volunteers participate in a range of activities with similar charitable but also civilizing goals. Other activities include the “old people’s birthday party”, which is organized every year by the community center; on a more regular basis, they also help out with medical check-ups for the community’s elderly people. In both instances, mainly natives benefit from their volunteering. The volunteers also perform free labor for community construction such as “environmental protection” activities (cleaning up garbage from the streets) and “parent–child” activities (the same, but with their children). They also organize more recreational activities that ratify them as urbanites, such as meeting at the basketball grounds to go for Sunday morning jogs or riding the new tramway.
The “temple square grandpas” who have been living in Pine Mansion for many years tend to voice a sense of injustice based on the lack of recognition given to the labor they have spent building the city, and view the charity programs with some amount of irony. By contrast, these younger migrant women consider it only just that a ‘first-tier’ city like Shenzhen should drastically select – through the points system – its future urban citizens (they remind us that ‘the right to the city’ is an empty signifier, see Harvey 2012: xv, 87). They often work part-time while raising their children. They have a volunteers’ WeChat group in which they spread news about upcoming events, and they meet very often. For them, volunteering is a way of meeting friends and making the most of the city experience. They hope for upward social mobility and are sensitive to the threat of disorder, luan – they adhere to the civilized city ideal. Such aspiring middle-class migrants consider it their duty to raise their own “quality” and that of their children through education, as well as to shape the “civilized city” through their volunteering.
Conclusion
Migrant workers, mainly the women among them, are the most active in building livable communities but have no access to formal citizenship unless they hold high degrees or are able to buy an apartment – the value generated by their labor is given only selective recognition. Without an urban hukou, they remain largely excluded from the value redistributed in the shape of public goods such as public education and urban pensions. They were given access to the new public square, but this minimally allows them to perform free labor, the reproductive tasks of childcare and volunteering in charitable activities – or benefiting from them, in the case of the poorest. The case of Pine Mansion shows how the unequal redistribution of value is closely tied to unequal valorization, or the unequal recognition given by state policies to the generation of value by different categories, and a range of forms of labor extorsion (Delphy 2015).
Paradoxically, the very mechanism implemented to help the social integration of rural migrants will evict the poorest migrant workers and replace them with middle-class homeowners. The likely outcome will be micro-government for spatially segregated social strata according to different rationales that already prevails in most of urban China (Tomba 2014). This enables the state to replace an earlier language of class struggle with one of harmonious cohabitation. It also runs the risk of blinding us to the relational processes of value extraction. Luigi Tomba’s findings are based on data gathered in neighborhoods that have already been subjected to segregation. Here variegated governance is enacted within a single territorial unit – the urban community in its transition phase, enabling us to see how circuits of value are shaped by variegated governance.
Anne-Christine Trémon is a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Lausanne and is currently leading a team project on public goods in Chinese urbanized villages; her research interests include migration, urbanization, kinship and political economy. On Shenzhen, she published “Local capitalism and neoliberalization in a Shenzhen former village” in Focaal, 2015, and has a forthcoming book with Cornell University Press.
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Cite as: Trémon, Anne-Christine. 2020. “Variegated Valuation: Governance and Circuits of Value in Shenzhen.” FocaalBlog, 20 July. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/20/anne-christine-tremon-variegated-valuation-governance-and-circuits-of-value-in-shenzhen/