The Floating Population as Subjects

Rural-to-urban labor migration is by no means unique to Chinese society but is found in most parts of the world. Yet the conception of Chinese migrants in the post-Mao era as a floating population and the specific cultural and political meanings attached to this new kind of subject are distinct to China. How does the late-socialist state attempt to transform millions of rural migrants into a third kind of subject (neither rural nor urban) in a period of unprecedented spatial mobility? What discursive and nondiscursive practices do state agents use to achieve their subjectification? How do rural migrants respond to and subvert new modes of state domination?

This chapter explores these questions by focusing on everyday state practices that deprive the migrants of the same rights to the city that permanent urban residents have. I argue that the floating population is made possible through multiple strategies both inside and outside the state apparatus: the reworking of the household registration (hukou) system; cultural processes of naming, categorization, and media representation; and the invention and implementation of new regulations that govern everyday migrant life. Contrary to the predictions of some Western analysts and journalists that the hukou system will soon be abolished, the post-Mao regime does not intend to do away with this system; rather, the hukou system has been reformed and made more flexible to serve the new need to reregulate peasants on the move.

The first half of this chapter traces how the category "floating population" was created and analyzes its cultural meanings and three techniques used by the dominant discourse to shape migrant subjects. It then discusses a number of nondiscursive forms of regulation specifically targeted at the floating population. But turning migrants into "internal aliens" (or noncitizens) in the cities is not a one-way process completely controlled by the state. As social agents with their own intentions, desires, and ideological histories, Chinese migrants do not simply take up or internalize the subject position offered to them by the state (see Giddens 1979). The second part of the chapter thus examines how, based on their increased economic capital and consumption power, some migrants have come to reshape the meanings of the available social categories while struggling to develop their own sense of self and social belonging beyond officially defined urban citizenship. Chinese migrants are able to subvert the meanings of the available categories (such as "floater") "not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system that has no choice but to accept" (De Certeau 1984: xiii). In sum, the dual process of "being-made and self-making" (Ong 1996) is the focus of my inquiry into migrant subject formation.

Naming and Categorizing Mobile People

In his investigation of the cultural and political invention of the Chinese peasantry (nongmin), Cohen (1993) argues that modern intellectual and political elites transformed China's rural population into the peasantry, a culturally distinct and alien "other" that the new socialist society aimed to liberate. By denaturalizing the taken-for-granted category "peasantry," Cohen further analyzes the political and social consequences of this practice in the reconstruction of the modern Chinese political economy. In a similar spirit, I argue that the floating population is a socially constructed category and that it is important to analyze how it was invented at a particular moment in recent Chinese history. So far, few studies of Chinese migrations have examined the history of the floating population and its thick layers of cultural and political meaning. By stressing the socially constructed nature of this category, I do not intend to suggest that it has no real social basis. Rather, I hope to illuminate how mobile people are conceived of as floaters and that the meanings attached to this category are an integral part of social and political struggles with real consequences.

Two important theoretical points have informed my analysis. First, categorizing and naming are inseparable from social power. "The labor of categorization, of making things explicit and classifying them" (Bourdieu 1991: 236) is a crucial mechanism for defining the meaning and order of the social world. Therefore, as many scholars have demonstrated, naming and categorizing do not simply describe, reflect, or represent social order, but also shape and reshape power relations among different groups (see, e.g., Borneman 1992; Foucault 1972; Koselleck 1985; Zito and Barlow 1994).

Second, in his study of the historical-political semantics of asymmetric counterconcepts, Koselleck (1985) argues that historically formed social concepts should not be viewed in isolation; instead, we need to trace the asymmetric structural relationship between antithetical binary concepts to denote the relations of power that produced them. Building on Koselleck's insights, I maintain that to better understand how and why labor migration is conceived as a floating population in China today, one must ask: Who did the naming and who was named? Against what and at what historical moment was this category invented and on whose terms? What political and cultural ramifications does this social category entail?

Before the implementation of the 1958 household registration rule, there was a short period of rapidly increasing rural-to-urban migration in the early 1950S (see Solinger 1999a; Davin 1999). Although the state was not entirely absent in monitoring this migration, official regulation was largely erratic, fragmented, and ineffective. As a result, many peasants had moved into the urban industrial sectors by 1954. In those days, migrants were not treated as a distinct group of subjects who needed to be put under special control and legal regulation. Neutral terms, such as yimin (migrants) or ximin (migrating or relocating people), were used to refer to relocated peasants. Other slightly different, nonjudgmental terms regarding migration, such as qianxi (relocate), renkou yidong (population movement), and renkou liudong (population mobility), were also used.

By the mid-1950s, voluntary labor migration to the cities came to be seen as an urgent national problem. According to Selden (1979), about twenty million peasants rushed into the cities from 1949 to 1957, and these rural migrants could not be fully absorbed by urban industry, thus exacerbating the problem of urban unemployment (Walder 1984). Further, some...