The illegal immigrants inside

In China, there are 240 million internal migrants out of the approximately 740 million internal migrants on the planet, a figure equal to all international migrants worldwide. Among these internal migrants, approximately one hundred million are illegal in their own country due to an internal passport system, the hukouwhich links social rights to place of birth and thus blocks the freedom to move and work within China for its own nationals. There are few countries in the world that still have an internal passport system. But the maintenance of this regime makes illegal Chinese labor attractive for global competition from Chinese products and foreign investments, due to its low cost. This work, based on Chloé Froissart’s thesis, focuses on the definition and functioning of citizenship in the Chinese political regime. It is the culmination of meticulous field work, particularly in the Chengdu region (Sichuan), which makes it one of the most in-depth studies of a system, the hukouwhich leads to Chinese people of rural origin becoming illegal migrants in their own country.

How many are they ? There are no figures, but various data lead us to estimate the number of internal migrations in China at 240 million, or as much as the total number of international migrants on the planet, including some 90 to 100 million illegal immigrants, these internal migrants. without documents authorizing them to move to their country for employment purposes. How did we get here? ? The author explains, in this fascinating and well-documented work, that the fundamental separation of status between urban and rural residents established in the 1950s has remained unchanged, or almost, today, with an internal passport. All Chinese are citizens, but some are more equal than others because their treatment differs radically depending on whether one comes from urban society or from a rural environment, a discrimination that is all the more difficult to accept as they are peasants. who, under the era of Mao Tse Tung, financed the industrialization of the country through their work and allowed urban workers and employees to be supported by the State from birth to death.

THE mingongpeasants who became illegal urban workers

With the galloping industrialization of cities over the last thirty years, then the process of massive urbanization linked to entry into the market economy, a new category of second-class citizens has appeared, the mingong (migrant peasant workers) with a hukou agricultural but left to work in town. Due to this system which has become hereditary which blocks spatial and social mobility, a gap is widening between their de facto situation (rural people occupying urban professions) and their legal status (because all social rights remain linked, in China , at the place of birth This gap is all the more marked as China experienced the largest rural exodus in world history during this period and the urban population has now exceeded the rural population (690.8 million). urban dwellers out of 1.35 billion inhabitants in 2011) including 32% of urban dwellers without a hukou urban in the city where they live.

Chloé Froissart, in the first part of the work, explains how Mao created, with the hukoua caste society instead of a classless society. This system of population registration and control defining relations between the state and Chinese citizens and intended to create industrialization without urbanization, turns its back on the Western conception of citizenship resulting from the Enlightenment. It fixed the dual character of Chinese society. Inspired by the Soviet propiska established in 1932 and abolished in 1994, the hukou is maintained without any real noise of suppression because it makes it possible to reconcile as best as possible the market economy (with illegal workers deprived of rights and very little paid, therefore very competitive on the world stage) and the stability of the communist state which monitors, controls and punishes in the manner of the analyzes of Michel Foucault to which the author refers. Discrimination is growing between a privileged minority in hukou urban and the majority of Chinese citizens, living in the city but holding a hukou rural, at the risk of their rights, subjected to identity checks, detention and sometimes beaten to death. Since 1958, we can in fact “ to come down » status but not « to go up ”, or very difficult. These internal migrants play the role of “ gastarbeiter », of temporary workers, sent home at the end of the projects. They pay taxes for their rural residence, providing subsidies to the urban population who have often left the working world.

A workforce without the right to mobility

Has the reintroduction of the market led to flexible management of hukou ? Above all, it led to the reappearance of spontaneous migrations in the 1980s and 1990s, freeing part of the agricultural population from their ancillary tasks but separating the place held in the production system from the place of residence. If, as Chloé Froissart writes in the second part of her book, Chinese agriculture has low productivity, Chinese farmers nevertheless feed more than a fifth of humanity while only exploiting 7% of cultivated land, the market economy is mainly urban and the city attracts farmers with higher incomes and a surplus of comfort with access to consumption and leisure. 80 million population floating » left the countryside between 1980 and the mid-1990s, at the cost of losing his social rights. They are mainly young people (23 years old on average), educated, single, having never cultivated the land and who often grew up or were born in the city because we inherit the hukou by his mother, less mobile initially than men. Through the hukouthe State seeks to “ strictly control the development of large cities, rationally develop medium-sized cities, and vigorously promote the development of small cities » (p. 99). While the State thus slows down mobility, the poor provinces seek on the contrary to encourage migration to lighten the weight of the population on the land and reduce poverty.

This very bureaucratic system applied to 1.3 billion inhabitants is inefficient, leading to multiple “ bribes » relating to residence permits and campaigns of “ cleaning » people without rights, deprived of education, health, voting, bank loans, right to a second child, employment contract and subject to daily repression, dismissed in the event of economic recession and often fulfilling the “ 3D » (dirty, dangerous and difficult jobs). Women are discriminated against even more than men because they are subject to endless schedules, where professional life with relatives, themselves rural people who have come to the city, merges with private life. With the market economy, the system has adapted, forming an invisible wall between urban and rural people who have migrated to the city, without calling into question the hukouexcept among academics and NGO and during massive strikes. Many obstacles stand in the way of widespread awareness: land remains an insurance policy in the event of a crisis and many urbanized rural people do not want to give up this safety valve. ; the relationship of migrants to the law is partly explained by the distrustful relationship of peasants to the State to which they prefer family and relational solidarity ; appeals to unions, bosses and local institutions often have little effect.

The question of integration

With the 2000s, Chloé Froissart exposes, in the fourth part, a new issue that appeared on the agenda of public, national and local policies, the integration of migrants in the city because this additional workforce has become the pillar of the Chinese economy and its global competitiveness due to its low cost, making China the first country to receive foreign direct investment in the world. Parallel schools were created to avoid a new generation of illiterates among the second generations of migrants, a publicized awareness of the gap between the urbanization of China and the inadequacy of the political-administrative system governing citizens, to the needs of the liberal economy, light reforms allowed the elites of money, of the most sought-after diplomas to buy a hukou urban (but with a “ blue stamp » only and not a “ red stamp » hereditary), but hukou plays too important a role to be abolished.

The rights defense movement, presented in the fifth part of the book, remains divided, despite the mobilization which gave rise to the murder of a young person in 2003 (Sun Zhigang affair), but political power tends to fade away. before the administrative power, despite some progress (development of employment contracts, in particular) and a large wave of strikes in 2010. The author concludes that Chinese citizenship is stratified, migrant workers have supplanted the old working class of time of Maoism, urban proletarians from the countryside remaining the most marginalized. She writes that “ The chances that deepening economic reforms and continued migration could ultimately lead to the democratization of the Chinese regime remain low, with sudden radicalization and politicization of workers appearing unlikely as migrants have been promoted to the status of a new working class » (p. 376). THE hukou remains the pillar of the Chinese authoritarian regime: obstacle to freedom of internal movement but maintaining a precarious balance which guarantees China the maintenance of the party in power and its economic attractiveness, which explains that the reforms of the hukou have made little progress in recent years. When will there be equal rights for citizens? ? It is thanks to this remarkable work that we can measure how far we need to go to bring standards into line with reality.