Manufacturing Towns in China: The Governance of Rural Migrant Workers

The book, Manufacturing Towns in China: The Governance of Rural Migrant Workers, offers an engaging and unique view of the governance of Chinese rural migrants. By asking how authorities govern migrants as an ongoing source of cheap labor, this book demonstrates and interprets authorities’ power exercises in the form of governing rationalities, regulations, programs, activities, and non-factory spaces—town and village centers and migrant living zones. These power exercises take place routinely in migrants’ everyday lives but typically veil themselves. Based on their power exercises, authorities’ governance of migrants, like multiple “invisible filters” that select and help create migrant labor in non-factory areas, leads to an inclusion of many migrants as cheap workers and an exclusion of the rest. Nevertheless, by exercising their unique power techniques, migrants can resist and alter authority governance; thus authorities’ power exercises are deficient and may ultimately become futile. This book details these power exercises, offers rewarding insights, and greatly enriches our understanding of China’s local governance of migrants and migrant resistance.