Internal migration and state retreat in Chinese and South Korean industrialization

This dissertation examines labor migration from the countryside to cities in China, 1980-2000, and South Korea, 1960-1980. State efforts to regulate migrants' access to urban resources were thwarted by conflicts with groups that wanted migrants in cities on their terms. Poor people from the countryside were valuable to industrialists as cheap labor and to urban residents as providers of services. With low-skill labor in high demand and living costs remaining low---and a vast supply of human energy in the countryside---these powerful groups had much to gain from keeping migrants in the city on their terms. Migrants' ties at home further spurred them on to urban careers, as native place networks in China linked migrants to work in exchange for remittances and families in South Korea encouraged individual migrants to put up with the costs of low-paying work. The battles described in this dissertation reveal that even the "strong" states of China and South Korea could not control the access of apparently-weak migrants to urban resources.;The chapters of this dissertation, drawing especially on data from the cities of Chengdu and Seoul, address different sectors of urban governance. The decline of state controls over urban residence in China is traced to the support of entrepreneurial rural groups for migration of locals to cities for work. In Seoul, the demands of business and urban residents for cheap labor frustrated city efforts to eliminate the shantytowns that housed many migrants. Policing and welfare policies toward Seoul's destitute led to conflicts between central administrators and non-state coercive organizations that recruited from among migrants.;One goal of this dissertation is to put China's experience with migration and development under reforms into explicitly-comparative perspective. The lesson from this comparison, which is relevant to other parts of the developing world, is that industrialization, in an early stage, gives rise to non-state powers that challenge state control over how cities develop.