Acquired but Unvested Welfare Rights: Migration and Entitlement Barriers in Reform-Era China

Zhang, Li; Liu, Meng

doi:10.1017/s030574101800084x

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Since the market-oriented reforms introduced in the 1990s, China has adopted a relatively flexible hukou system, providing rural populations with limited freedom of movement (Zhang 2010). This has encouraged a significant number of peasants to put down their hoes in search of employment in cities, which has historically created “the laborer tide” ( mingong chao ) (Shao and Bo 2013).…”

Section: The Hukou System Peasants and Left-behind Children In Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing compassion: The affective dynamics of rural representation in the Chinese reality TV show X-Change

Wei

2023

Television & New Media

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Unlike Western reality shows that are often criticized as devaluing and delegitimizing lower-class people, the Chinese reality show X-Change claims to recruit social attention, compassion, and support for rural people, especially children who have been left behind. This article examines this claim by conducting a multimodal interpretative analysis of the show, focusing on the employment of narrative, discursive and audiovisual strategies that register compassion in the representations of rural identities, bodies, and rural-urban encounters. I argue that the show offers a nuanced emotional repertoire of compassion, which simultaneously empowers and disempowers rural people by integrating a humanitarian tender-hearted sympathy with a socialist positive empathy, and a neoliberal philanthropist pity. In so doing, I reveal the ways in which reality television is embroiled in the intricate interplay between state ideology, sociocultural psychology, and neoliberal logic in post-socialist China.

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Section: The Hukou System Peasants and Left-behind Children In Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Managing compassion: The affective dynamics of rural representation in the Chinese reality TV show X-Change

Wei

2023

Television & New Media

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“…Formal employment can provide some access to social security systems, but as few as a quarter of migrant workers secure permanent job contracts (CHIPS 2013). Even transferable benefits like pensions have limits for migrant workers, including incomplete transferability (Zhang and Li, 2018).…”

Section: Naturalisation In the Hukou Systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hukou as benefits: Demand for hukou and wages in China

Vortherms

Liu

2022

Urban Studies

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As China encourages urbanisation, a necessary process is the urbanisation of its people, granting local-urban hukou, or local citizenship, to migrant populations. But reforms encouraging urbanisation are dependent on migrant populations wanting to become formal, registered urban residents. What is the demand for hukou? Based on a unique probabilistically-sampled contingent valuation survey of over 900 migrants in Beijing and Changsha, we use migrants’ willingness-to-pay for hukou as a measure of demand for urbanisation. We find that migrants in Beijing are willing to give up between 9% and 14% of their income over five years to gain local-urban hukou. Migrants in Changsha are much less willing to pay for hukou with a willingness-to-pay indistinguishable from zero, and rural migrants have a negative willingness-to-pay. This study contributes to the broader literature on the impact of China’s hukou system by providing a unique test of migrant workers’ willingness-to-pay for local citizenship.

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“…While workers can withdraw the contributions they have made, they cannot fully transfer the contribution that the employer has made on their behalf to other localities. The employer's portion of funds stays in the social pooling system of the localities that hosted the non-local worker; it does not follow the worker (Zhang & Li, 2018).…”

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confidence: 99%

Toward an inclusive system for informal workers? Diverging impacts of labor informality on Chinese workers’ pension enrollment

Yang

2021

Int J Soc Welfare

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The Chinese pension reform of 2011 allowed informal workers to enroll either in the employment‐based pension program or in the residency‐based pension program. Despite this historic pension reform, the question of how labor informality influences one's pension participation under the reformed pension regime has been insufficiently discussed. This article fills this gap by analyzing two waves of a national‐level survey—the China Labor Dynamic Survey of 2012 and 2014. This article makes the following two points. First, the impact of labor informality differs across the two pension programs. Second, local citizenship filters the negative impact of labor informality, but only for the residency‐based pension program. Having “local” citizenship does not offset the negative impact of labor informality on workers’ enrollment in the employment‐based pension program. These findings show how the recent reform is ironically reinforcing the existing social cleavages between different types of Chinese workers.

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Acquired but Unvested Welfare Rights: Migration and Entitlement Barriers in Reform-Era China

Cited by 8 publications

References 21 publications

Managing compassion: The affective dynamics of rural representation in the Chinese reality TV show X-Change

Managing compassion: The affective dynamics of rural representation in the Chinese reality TV show X-Change

Hukou as benefits: Demand for hukou and wages in China

Toward an inclusive system for informal workers? Diverging impacts of labor informality on Chinese workers’ pension enrollment

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