Author Description

"During the summer of 2011, the Beijing municipal government launched population control measures to clear the children of migrant workers from the city. Just weeks before the beginning of the school year, bulldozers demolished more than two dozen schools serving families who had migrated to the capital from China's vast rural hinterland. It therefore came as something of a surprise when soon thereafter the central government began calling for "the urbanization of people," by which they meant allowing tens of millions of rural migrants to get official residency and access to social services in the cities where they were employed. Over the course of the 2010s, it became increasingly clear that the central government envisioned a citizenship regime in which an individual's position within the national socio-spatial hierarchy would correspond as closely as possible to their levels of human capital-high-end cities for the high-end population, low-end places for the low-end population. Using the school as a lens on the urbanization process, Eli Friedman investigate how city governments in China are managing flows of people into the city, which groups of people are included in which types of cities and why, and what the socio-economic consequences of this approach are. Drawing on more than 200 in-depth interviews with migrant parents and teachers, a careful analysis of policy documents, and direct observation in the classroom, Friedman argues that urban governments in China are providing access to public education precisely to those that need it least: school admissions heavily favor families with already high levels of economic, cultural, and social capital, a phenomenon he refers to as the "inverted welfare state." The Urbanization of People shows how this inverted welfare state functions in practice and how it changes understandings of the process of urbanization in China"--