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Filtering Rural Migrants as Cheap Labor: Three Authorities’ Governance

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Manufacturing Towns in China

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Abstract

This chapter examines the governance of migrants in the 1980s and 1990s and lays out an in-depth empirical and theoretical foundation for a deeper investigation of the transformation in governance since the early 2000s. Based on the theoretical perspective of governmentality, Gong identifies the political rationalities of the government, village collectives, and industrialists as respectively, pastoral power, sovereignty, and discipline in their governance of migrants. The authorities design and implement various governing programs and technologies and form governable spaces in manufacturing towns that act as multiple “invisible filters” to include migrants as cheap labor.

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    Yue Gong

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Gong, Y. (2019). Filtering Rural Migrants as Cheap Labor: Three Authorities’ Governance. In: Manufacturing Towns in China. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3372-9_3

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