Using ethnographic data gathered in Beijing during 2017 and 2018, this article examines numerous urban population displacement events using the concept of spatial governance in order to understand the spatialization of governance in urban China. A particular focus of this article are the Beijing-wide displacements of the so-called “low-end population” that followed a fire in Xinjian Village in 2017. The analysis in this article uses geographic understandings of spatial informality to interrogate how space is made informal and subsequently illegal as a means of population control. The article puts forward the idea that spatial governance is one of the key forms, if not the key form, of governance in urban China. It highlights changes in governance that have resulted in space becoming not just a site for control, but the medium for techniques of control over China's urban population.

This study draws on a case study of Wukan and interviews with migrants and peasants in other sites to examine how migration shapes popular resistance in migrant-sending communities (i.e. rural China). Findings demonstrate multidimensional roles played by migrants and returned migrants who act as a vehicle of informational and ideological transmission and at times directly participate in or even lead rural resistance in origin communities. Both the transmission and participation processes foster political consciousness and action orientations among peasants. The importance of migrants is exemplified in the Wukan protests but is also found in other settings under study. In general, migrants represent a latent political force that acts upon serious grievances back home. The findings provide a useful lens for understanding the diffusion of popular resistance and the linkage between urban and rural activism in China.

Drawing from ethnographic data from 48 households in four villages in rural Anhui, this study explores how two practices known for upholding son preference are affected by rural–urban out-migration, with a particular focus on the division of labour in agricultural work and patrilocality. The study deploys the concepts of an intergenerational contract and the “unsubstitutability” of sons and finds that a weakening of the intergenerational contract can take place without substantially challenging the unsubstitutability of sons. The study concludes that although male out-migration undermines the argument that sons are needed to secure male manual labour in family farming, the vital role of male labour as a rural livelihood strategy largely persists. Moreover, although the study identifies migration-induced exceptions, patrilocality remains the main organizing principle for social and economic life for both male and female migrants. Hence, the study finds little support for the prospect that migration is attenuating son preference in rural China.