Social Transformation Of Urban Migrant Workers Citizenship

The problem of migrant workers is a prominent one during the transition of Chinese society from a traditional agricultural society to a modern industrial one. With the advancement of the system reform and the releasing of the administrative barriers of the urban-rural dual structure, masses of migrant workers enter the city to work and live. As an inevitable result of institutional change and social transformation, migrant workers, on the one hand, have made an enormous contribution to cities'construction and economic development, and narrowed the gap between city and town; on the other hand, because of the existence of urban-rural dual structure and the legal and social discrimination, migrant workers suffer unequal treatments for unequal identities. As citizens of our country, the citizenship of migrant workers is missing under the existing institutional arrangements. The lack of citizenship of migrant workers not only involves the discrimination, but is related to fairness and justice of society as a whole, the country's overall economic development, and social harmony and stability. This is not only a social problem, but also a political issue. Therefore, enabling city migrant workers to obtain the effective citizenship is a comprehensive, fundamental issue that needs to be resolved urgently.Based on the domestic researches on city migrant workers and related foreign theoretical studies, this thesis studies the problem of migrant workers from a unique perspective, that is, the perspective of citizenship. The thesis adopts the theory of citizenship as an analytical tool, and selects the four-dimensional analysis of the civil rights paradigm of Janoski to verify the citizenship of city migrant workers of China's social transition. The author tries to analyze the reasons for loss of citizenship, on the basis of which she puts forward some constructive views to solve this problem. The first part of the thesis describes the background, the significance of the topics, the literature review as well as the research methods; the second part focuses on citizenship theory, the introduction of the civil rights paradigm of Janoski. Then the author utilizes this paradigm to analyze the citizenship of city migrant workers from the following four aspects: legal rights, political rights, social rights and participation rights; the third part demonstrates the reasons for the missing of city migrant workers'citizenship in our nation. This thesis holds that the missing of migrant workers'citizenship is caused by the institutional, social, subjective and historic factors synthetically.The fourth part of the thesis is the most important one. In this section, the author holds that to solve the problem of the missing of urban migrant workers'citizenship, first, the institution innovation should be introduced, which is specifically linked with the household registration system, the system of political participation, the social security system, employment system, as well as the education and training system; Second, the improvement of the legal system, and the social assistance in the migrant workers'integration into the cities play a key role in their attainment of citizenship; Third, the elements of migrant workers themselves play a more indispensable part in their obtaining of citizenship. These elements include the improvement of the systematization of the migrant workers, and the enhancement of their overall qualities as well as civic awareness. In short, only through the systematic approaches and comprehensive consideration of all factors can we solve the problem of the loss of city migrant workers'citizenship fundamentally.