Abstract
AbstractWhile the socialist state in China has attempted to elevate the labour of working people as a symbol of national identity, it restricts rural migrant workers’ access to public goods and equal citizenship rights. While rural migrants perform the public identity of the hard worker in order to claim both respect and benefits that go beyond legal recognition, the value of their hard work is also constrained by dubious state institutions and particularistic relationships. In rural-urban migration and market expansion, money mediates the imagination of the nation, but it also devalues rural migrants’ labour, highlighting the social inequality and disjunction between rural and urban, the rich and ordinary people, within the nation. Rural migrants imagine their inclusion in the nation through investment opportunities which always involve an opaque state.
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
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