6 - Making Do and Muddling Through

Summary

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.