1 - Inequality and the Autocrat’s Toolbox

Summary

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.