Citizenship as Reward: City-Making and the Politics of Migration in a Chinese “New Area”

This chapter deals with the intertwined relationships between city-making, migration and the differential citizenship regime in a Chinese “National New Area” built from scratch. In China, the hierarchically differentiated citizenship produced by the hukou system (also known as the household registration system) constitutes the origins of many forms of urban inequalities. The hukou regimes in Chinese metropolises not just engender distinctions between locals and non-locals but also create different classes of citizens and different degrees of full inclusion in cities. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how recent reforms in the hukou system created a “citizenship as reward” paradigm for urban governance, thus enabling the local government to relocate the native rural population and then attract over 100,000 highly educated young migrants to repopulate the rapidly urbanising area. The “citizenship as reward” paradigm, I argue, serves the state’s larger project of zoning development and regulating the social composition of the new city. Moreover, it contributes to an emerging spatio-temporal imagination of the new city to be cosmopolitan, future-oriented and exclusive to certain groups of citizens.