Border Functions in Chongqing: Measuring Public Transit Accessibility among Rural Migrants in Chongqing

Keywords: borders, migration, hukou, China, public transit
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 30

Abstract

Research on internal migration within China has often focused on the role that the hukou system has played in shaping flows of people and perpetuating inequality. Such scholarship has not only explained how China’s economic growth has been enabled by the hukou system, it has also described the ambiguous lifestyles of migrants, as well as documented the growth of inequality between rural and urban China. The hukou system has always been subject to central policy adjustments and local government practice, however the system’s present configuration is dispersed to the extent that the collection of policies and procedures that comprise the hukou system are now more diverse than ever before (Zhang 2018). Considering the diversity of policy practices, the central role that the hukou system has had in structuring internal migration in China can no longer be taken for granted. Rather, attention must be paid to the border functions enacted by local government's hukou procedures in order to parse the multiple meanings of the hukou system and its dynamic relevance. Informed by a bordering perspective this paper considers the hukou policy of Chongqing, a municipality in southwest China, in order to create a situated understanding of how central hukou reform policy has been interpreted by local officials and put into practice. Specifically, this paper examines public transit accessibility among migrants who have engaged in the municipality’s hukou reform policies, finding that a change in hukou status does not necessarily reduce the bordering experienced by rural migrants in the city.