Statecraft in Symbols

This book presents a study of how urban residency in China is regulated by state policy in the second decade of the 21st Century. Far from a straightforward divide between natives and newcomers, policy in this period has created delicate cross-classifications of internal migrants and attendant conditions under which they reside in particular urban areas. With reference to some of the most profound social theorists of the present day, such symbolic acts of division are explained as acts of statec