MACMILLAN Manufacturing Towns in China: The Governance of Rural Migrant Workers

This book offers an engaging and unique view of the governance of Chinese rural migrants in non-factory areas of manufacturing towns. By asking how authorities govern migrants as an ongoing source of cheap labor, this book demonstrates and interprets authorities’ power exercised in the form of governing rationalities, regulations, programs, activities, and designated 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, producing knowledge that legitimates our understanding of migrants. 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 a certain number of migrants as cheap factory workers and an exclusion of the rest. Nevertheless, by exercising their unique power techniques, migrants can resist and alter authority governance; thus the authorities’ power exercises are deficient and may ultimately be futile. This book details these power exercises, offers rewarding insights, and can greatly enrich our understanding of China’s local governance of migrants and migrant resistance. Review “It will be best appreciated by readers with a solid background on China who will better understand the nuance and terminology used throughout the book (for instance Marxist references to mass-line work). … this book offers a new perspective on power relations between migrants and their governing authorities, with emphasis on the latter.” (Denise Hare, China Information, Vol. 34 (1), 2020) “The book Manufacturing Towns in China weaves together various actors, policies and regulations, governance technologies, adaptations and resistances and develops an insightful and well-elaborated argument on the ‘invisible filter’ of the territorial governance in China. … Readers are guided through a journey of different events in the past as well as in the present, in the West as well as in the East and among socialists as well as capitalists.” (June Wang, Eurasian Geography and Economics, July 16, 2019) Review “This book offers a welcome intervention into the literature on rural-to-urban migration by taking space and scale seriously as components of power. Those interested in how non-factory spaces and local authorities are central to the management, discipline and policing of migrant labor should read this compelling book.” (Professor Lisa Hoffman, University of Washington Tacoma, USA) “Yue Gong’s book contributes to unveiling a forgotten and yet illuminating space where a variety of everyday practices and resistances can be explored. This book discloses power and resistance, an excellent work appealing to readers concerned with space, migration and labor in China.” (Professor Ngai Pun, University of Hong Kong, Author of Made in China and Migrant Labor in China) “This well-organized book is an excellent work in presenting many first-hand materials about the governance of rural migrants as cheap labor and a detailed analysis of the social fabric of manufacturing towns.” (Chunbing Xing, Professor of Economics, Beijing Normal University, China) From the Back Cover This book offers an engaging and unique view of the governance of Chinese rural migrants in non-factory areas of manufacturing towns. By asking how authorities govern migrants as an ongoing source of cheap labor, this book demonstrates and interprets authorities’ power exercised in the form of governing rationalities, regulations, programs, activities, and designated 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, producing knowledge that legitimates our understanding of migrants. Based on their power exercises, authorities’ governance of migrants, like