Creating rural–urban boundaries: rural workers in cities and regimes of re-rustication in China

Abstract

Rural–urban difference represents a most significant social divide in China, yet the boundaries between the rural and urban spaces have shifted over time. This paper examines how the Chinese state has created and re-created rural–urban boundaries from the 1950s to the 1990s through repeated campaigns to clean out rural workers in cities and to re-settle them in the countryside. I label such practices as re-rustication and employ the concept of regimes of re-rustication to describe the changing norms and practices directed by a variety of state actors toward the goal of forcibly returning peasant workers to the countryside. Specifically, I analyse three different regimes of re-rustication to repatriate rural workers in 1960–1962, 1972–1973 and the late 1990s. These campaigns spanned three distinctive periods of China’s political economy: the transition to state socialism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the era of high state socialism in the late 1960s and 1970s and transition away from state socialism in the 1980s and 1990s. They were predicated upon, and helped to renew, the rural–urban divide in China.