Cities demobilize migrant workers through partial and incomplete inclusion at what is perceived by local authorities and migrants as the higher meso-level of regulation of institutions. The local state plays two main roles in migrant education services. As regulators, municipal authorities shut down, take over, or certify private, “people-run” migrant schools that serve as informal substitutes when rural students cannot enroll in urban public schools. At the same time, they exclude, segregate and separate, or include those students in public schools as providers. Three main approaches to regulation and integration are (1) suppression and exclusion, (2) selective absorption and segregated inclusion, and (3) certification and full inclusion, as exemplified by Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu, respectively. Municipal and district officials use migrant social policy in this area to push visible results and avoid blame and criticism and employ complementary approaches between private regulation and public integration.

Why do most migrant workers still lack access to urban public services despite national directives to incorporate them into cities, reported worker shortages, and ongoing labor unrest? How do policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them? This opening chapter maps out the challenge of urbanization as development and situates the concept of political atomization and the main findings of this book in the larger context of inequality and authoritarian distribution. The concept of political atomization helps us understand four phenomena better: how authoritarian regimes exercise social control beyond coercion, why the perceived exchange of promised services for loyalty bolsters authoritarian resilience, how public service provision works without elections, and why there have been new gradations of second-class citizenship and structural inequality in China. To show how political atomization works, this book tracks the dynamics and consequences of the process from the state’s perspective through migrants’ points of view. This book uncovers emergent and evolving sources of embedded inequality, social control, and everyday marginalization in China.

Individuals improvise around authoritarian control and government restrictions in everyday circumstances. By shifting the focus from gaining institutional access to meeting their needs, migrant workers make do and muddle through despite being relatively powerless vis-à-vis the Chinese state. Newcomers have devised strategies of survival to scrape together needs so that they can keep their jobs, save their disposable income, and attain medical treatment when necessary. At the individual level, they frequently rely on visiting illegal private health clinics or try to straddle the rural–urban divide. In community-based innovations, they negotiate with their employers to opt out of paying into social insurance schemes (and thereby run against the common notion that all outsiders want to be included) or craft small-scale, self-run insurance arrangements. These practices suggest that migrants have found ways to curtail some of the effects of social control, but notably it is mostly at the margins. The effects of political atomization are therefore muddled, and the state’s use of public service provision as a tool of social control largely remains intact.

The second chapter identifies and conceptualizes political atomization. Political atomization explains two outcomes better than existing literature: why incremental expansions in social policy can entrench inequality and how authoritarian states sometimes use public service provision as a tool of social control. It also accounts for how policies said to expand workers’ rights end up undermining their claims to benefits owed to them in China. Alternative explanations are inadequate, and the research design, methods, and sources of the book offer different insights. The theory of political atomization is situated within the literatures on authoritarianism, immigration, and welfare states and elucidates in detail how the process works and why it persists. There are trade-offs and risks to this approach, but embedded inequality ultimately serves the state. Unpacking political atomization illuminates how everyday marginalization of people works on the ground in their lived experiences.

The final chapter concludes with broader implications. After recapping how the previous chapters fit together to form a larger window on social control beyond coercion, it scrutinizes the limits of political atomization with a focus on perverse outcomes that result from the accumulated effects of individualization. Next are implications for China for inequality, the economy, migrant welfare and citizenship, and the authoritarian state’s social control toolbox. China is not alone in using political atomization, and a comparative perspective can spur future research on how the phenomenon already exists in not only other developing and authoritarian countries but also in democracies and developed countries. It ends with an examination of inequality and the state, noting that individual-level schemes are no match for systemic deflection and demobilization to address the entrenchment of inequality in social policy.

Although rural migrants are frequently deflected and only selectively incorporated into urban public benefits, they have ways to undercut elements of social control and attain some education and health care. Resourcefulness and practical priorities help them find bureaucrats who practice co-migrant empathy and work within existing formal institutions to pry open what institutional leeway they can. When those are insufficient or inaccessible, they create and turn to private alternatives to get health care and education in the city. “People-run” schools are informal institutions that fill the gaps of public service provision, enabling migrants to keep their jobs when they get sick or have families in their destinations. However, because they are makeshift and typically operate on the outskirts of cities and in the shadows of legality, they can become subject to sudden intervention or regulation by the state. At other times, the government allows them to operate. The subversion of control is possible but not without the risk of being reverted into a target of the state.

Municipalities deflect demands for benefits instead of meeting them or denying them outright to resist and undermine elements of the central government’s urbanization strategy. This diffuse promise of phantom services operates at what is experienced by local officials and migrants as the person-by-person micro-level of provision. Urban authorities sometimes do so by establishing nearly impossible eligibility requirements or requiring paperwork that outsiders struggle to obtain. At times they also nudge migrants to seek health care or education elsewhere by enforcing dormant rules or by shutting down a locally available service provider. Local officials use these ploys for both political and practical reasons. Limiting access isolates and disempowers migrants and is cheaper than offering benefits. Phantom services are a consequence of the localization of the household registration system and a sign that new axes of inequality and gradations of second-class citizenship have emerged.