China, cities and social conflict

An interesting interview in the New York Times with Jeremy Wallace, a political scientist at Ohio State University. His new book, “Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China” discusses why big cities pose a danger for authoritarian governments, what China has done to undercut those threats and whether the current push to create mega-cities might change all this.

Big cities are dangerous because they are more likely to produce economically and politically destabilizing protests. These large cities, often full of slums, can explode. Urban protests can quickly overwhelm regimes, even seemingly stable ones like Mubarak’s in Egypt. When one or two big cities dominate the urban landscape, big protests can end a government, as we saw in Tunisia and Egypt in the Arab Spring. China hasn’t prevented urbanization. It’s managed it. It’s not that it’s anti-urbanization. China’s city system is flat. It has many large cities that are fairly anonymous. It makes it less likely for any city to be powerful enough to bring down the government. Beijing is a very large city, but it’s also the case that Beijing is for the most part full of winners, who have done well through the reforms. These people are likely to be pro-regime and proponents of the status quo. On the other hand, there are migrants who have not done as well. While they live in the city, they aren’t of the city. Because the state limits farmers’ ability to sell their rural land, they tend to think of themselves as temporary migrants. During the recent global financial crisis, tens of millions of Chinese migrant workers lost their jobs. Because of the hukou system, millions of suddenly unemployed workers left coastal cities and dispersed to the villages and small cities of China’s interior.

China’s household registration system, hukou separates its rural and urban populations. While those born in cities have a local hukou that gives them access to social services, those born in the countryside have a harder time getting access to services when they migrate to cities. China’s State Council released plans for reforming the hukou system. The new reforms make it easier to move to small and medium cities but still maintain the system’s core: strictly controlling the population of large cities. Even with market reforms, China continues to manage urbanization through the hukou system. People born in rural areas that move to cities for work aren’t given the same access to social services. These migrants are treated as second-class citizens. The state has tried to incentivize farmers to stay in the countryside or move to small cities. Many leave their children in the countryside with relatives, since the state supports free primary education for them only in the countryside and would make them pay hefty fees to attend urban schools.

Although the Communists [sic] came to power on the back of a rural-peasant army, they quickly switched to talk about the importance of the city. They quickly implemented the hukou system to prevent the “blind flow” of farmers into cities. Even though Mao was perceived as a champion of the peasantry, his government didn’t work on their behalf. Governments in developing countries typically think that ensuring the basics for urban residents — cheap food, housing, education — will help secure political stability in their major cities. To pay for these benefits, governments have to tax someone, and that burden usually rests on rural farmers.

In addition, the Chinese followed a Soviet model of focusing on heavy industry, believing that the only way a country can become modern is through industrialization, in particular through industrialization in cities. What the Chinese had that most countries didn’t was a system to prevent flows of people into cities. Controlling the population flows allowed them to industrialize without having surplus populations of underemployed that fill the slums in other countries.

It created the elaborate danwei, or work unit, system with cradle-to-grave social services for lucky urban factory workers. The difference between the danwei system and situation in the countryside starkly reflected China’s urban bias under Communist rule. The state provided nothing for the farmers and in fact taxed them to pay for the construction of urban factories and social services. The farmers understood they weren’t benefiting from this arrangement. They wanted to join this urban proletariat and began to move to cities, but the regime was unable to find or afford jobs for all of these migrants. So the regime in the 1950s began registering individuals based on where they lived, then separating urban and rural populations, and eventually restricting migration from rural to urban areas through the hukou system. Under Mao’s planned economy, people could only purchase food and other staples with coupons, and those coupons were tied to one’s home locality.

James C. Scott talks about the spatial geography of cities. Wide boulevards help the state see and govern its cities. The narrow streets of Paris created bottlenecks that could be barricaded by revolutionaries in a way that was impossible after, beginning in the 1850s, Georges-Eugène Haussmann created wide boulevards which heavy artillery can access. Beijing, similarly, is full of boulevards wide enough for tanks. Even its housing tends to take the form of super-block apartment compounds. There are still walls inside China’s cities. The hukou system itself has been called an invisible wall around China’s cities, but the cities themselves contain many walls inside that can help the government maintain social control. Chinese university students have also been pushed farther and farther away from the city center. In Beijing, for example, university expansions are closer to the Great Wall than to Tiananmen Square. By contrast, Hong Kong is a different case. It is an example of a city with high density. News travels so quickly. Beijing increasingly seems to be spread out in a tremendous way, with its Sixth Ring Road marking its physical growth. It takes people a long time to travel. In Hong Kong, because it’s more dense and proximate, protests can spread more quickly and unexpectedly, as we saw during the so-called Umbrella Movement this fall.