Internal migration in socialist China: An institutional approach

This dissertation analyzes internal migration in socialist China from an institutional perspective. The overall objective is to understand the actual process of migration regulation, and the intersection between migration and social change in China in the last fifty years.; Despite the recent surge in studies on Chinese migration, less attention has been given to migration outside the sphere of contemporary rural labor migration, such as planned migration and migration before economic reforms. Plausible reasons include lack of a theoretical framework for socialist migration and unavailability of data and document information on migration and its regulation process. The dissertation intends to fill the literature gap by providing a conceptual framework of socialist migration and incorporating various sources of data accumulated in research and fieldwork throughout the years.; The dissertation contributes to the literature in five aspects. It provides a conceptual framework focusing on the bureaucratic process of migration decision making in a socialist system. It compares six major national migration data sets by developing a schematic framework for data comparison. It investigates institutional structures and regulation processes of migration regulation, and identifies major channels of socialist migration. It analyzes overall change of migration and related institutional change at national and municipal levels in the last fifty years and uncovers the nature of gradual change. Finally, it contributes to the literature by illustrating the importance of migrant agency and micro-process in several settings. China has been believed to be exceptionally successful in migration control compared to most countries in the world. However, an in-depth look at the actual regulation and planning process reveals the limits of state power in controlling the geographic mobility of its citizens.