migration and privatization of space and power in late socialist China

LI ZHANG University of California at Davis

In this article, I examine the informal privatization of space and power occurring within China's "floating population" under late socialism. Focusing on a prominent unofficial migrant community in Beijing, I analyze the ways migrant leaders build up their power through the control of housing and market spaces and by mobilizing traditional social networks. By revealing the complexity and uncertainties within the culturally specific reconfiguration of power and social relations in post-Mao China, I challenge the metanarrative of postsocialist transformations as a teleological move toward liberal capitalism and democracy, and I articulate the dialectical relationship between space and power, [space, power, migration, social network, state-society dynamic, socialism and postsocialism, China]

Profound economic and political transformations have significantly reshaped the social landscape of many postsocialist societies since the beginning of the gradual worldwide disintegration of state socialism. Although one may feel hesitant to regard reform-era China as postsocialist due to its strong legacy of socialist institutions and practices, a transition from a centrally planned economy to a mixed market-based economy is in fact dramatically transforming Chinese society. At the dawn of a new millennium, a rising mass consumer culture, unprecedented internal migration, increasing private wealth, and the accelerated restructuring of state-owned firms have led to the emergence of various new kinds of social spaces and practices under what I call "late socialism."1 By this term, I specifically refer to a historical condition under which Chinese society is undergoing a profound social and economic transformation under multiple forces: marketization and privatization, entrenchment of global capital, and the lingering effects of socialist institutions and practices. One of the most prominent social phenomena under late socialism is significantly increased spatial mobility of people. With rapid commercialization, a booming urban economy, and gradual relaxation of state policies toward migration in the post-Mao era, some 100 million rural transients, known in China as "the floating population" (liudong renkou), have left their villages and moved to the cities to look for work and business opportunities.2 The presence of this large mobile population in the cities has initiated a very different kind of relationship between the state's control and local communities. Drawing from my larger study of the development, destruction, and eventual reconstruction of an emerging non-state-organized migrant community in Beijing, I explore the politics of the informal privatization of space and power in a period of rapid commercialization and commodification. I use the term privatization to describe a process in which private individuals and groups come to acquire control over spatial organization and social-economic order in a given locality. American Ethnologist 28(1 ):1 79-205. Copyright © 2001, American Anthropological Association.

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I seek to analyze the ways in which migrant leaders build up their power and authority by controlling housing and market spaces and by mobilizing three kinds of traditional social networks, namely kinship, native place networks, and clientelist ties with local state agents. I argue that the formation of popular migrant leadership and coalitions was a direct response to ineffective state regulation and delivery of services in certain areas such as newly established migrant settlements. But as my ethnography will also demonstrate, when the upper level government decided to reclaim control over these new social spaces, it was able to achieve its goal despite pervasive popular resistance from migrants, local suburban residents, and lower level officials. My larger aim in this article is twofold: first, to challenge some assumptions frequently echoed in popular Western discourses on postsocialist transitions—the triumph of market capitalism, the retreat of the state, and the subsequent arrival of democracy—and second, to articulate the dialectical relationship between spatial production and social power. The popular assumptions about postsocialism tend to present a vision of socialist transition as a progressive and linear move toward an already known end—liberal capitalism and democratic politics.3 They imply that the disintegration of socialist regimes and their opening up to market capitalism will automatically lead to a withering of state power (usually represented as evil and oppressive) and that such a retreat will necessarily lead to the formation of democratically based, civic social spaces built on horizontal social ties (see Putnam 1995). Recently, scholars (Bridger and Pine 1998; Bunce and Csanadi 1993; Hann 1994; Verdery 1991, 1996) have called into question this metanarrative of postsocialist transformations simply as a triumph of one epochal stage over the other, good over evil, capitalism over socialism, and democracy over totalitarianism. These scholars instead emphasize the complexity and uncertainties inherent within the culturally specific reconfiguration of economies and power relations in rapidly transforming societies. For instance, Verdery (1996) suggests that as the visible hand of the state is partially replaced by the invisible hand of the market, some of the former socialist countries experience a rise of anarchy, military dictatorship, and organized crime, or a return to the feudalist modes of social domination based on hierarchically formed patron-client relationships (see also Humphrey 1991; Ries 1998). She thus calls attention to an important process— the privatization of power in postsocialist contexts—in which Mafia-style coalitions have emerged to arrogate state power, control local resources, and dominate community life through patronage networks, bribery, and the use of violence. The experiences of Chinese internal migrants I examine in this article provide a unique lens that clarifies the complexity of socialist transformations. As my ethnographic account will demonstrate, although the social spaces migrants create in Chinese cities challenge state domination and the established social order, they are nonetheless within the gaze of state power and are far from becoming civic grounds that nourish democratic politics and social equality. The migrant world I have come to know is in constant negotiation with state power and is built on hierarchical patron and client networks that enable new kinds of social domination and exploitation.4 On this basis, I question the simplistic vision of socialist transformations as the withering of state power and as the formation of an idealized democratic polity. As already noted, my second aim is to deepen researchers' understandings of the mutually constitutive relationship between space and power in socialist transformations through an in-depth account of Chinese rural migrants' production of their own social spaces, leadership, and clientelist networks.5 Except for a few recent studies (such as Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Holston 1999), space has been largely left out of anthropological analysis of local politics and social change and for too long—because it

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is often regarded as external to the social.6 Instead, it is time and temporality that have assumed a privileged position in understandings of social and political processes. Yet, as theorists of cultural geography have forcefully argued, social space is not merely a passive locus or "container" of human activities and social relations; rather, it is an instrument of social change (Harvey 1989a, 1989b; Massey 1994; Soja 1989; Watts 1992). As Foucault puts it, "Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power" (1984:252). On the one hand, space is constituted through practices and power relations; on the other, social relationships and political domination are also spatially constituted and transformed. My attempt to theorize the relationship between space and power in late socialist China is particularly influenced by the French Marxist thinker, Henri Lefebvre. Two insights of Lefebvre's are especially germane to my formulation of how the social production of space shapes the politics of migrant community making and its relationship to state power. First, Lefebvre sees spatial production as a central component of the capitalist mode of production and social domination. He writes, "In addition to being a means of production, it [space] is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power" (1991:26). Social space can be conceptualized as a fundamental means of production because it provides places necessary to the reproduction of the family, the production of labor power, and the maintenance of class relations. He highlights the centrality of space in social and political struggles in the following terms: Space is becoming the principal stake of goal-directed actions and struggles. It has of course always been the reservoir of resources, and the medium in which strategies are applied, but it has now become something more than the theater, the disinterested stage or setting, of action. Space does not eliminate the other materials or resources that play a part in the sociopolitical arena. . . . Rather, it brings them all together and then in a sense substitutes itself for each factor separately by enveloping it. [1991:410-411]

Viewing social space as the underpinning of production is extremely useful for understanding why Chinese migrants' appropriations of urban space constitute an essential part of their social and economic struggles, as I shall explain. Second, Lefebvre suggests that if space is socially produced, a primary task is to examine the productive process of space rather than simply observing "things in space." This focus on spatial processes means that the study of social space does not reject the notion of time since what it deals with is precisely the temporality of space. So as to integrate time and space within one analytical framework, I resist treating the spatial organization of the migrant community as a static container for local politics. Instead, I examine the articulation of local power dynamics and migrants' negotiation with the state precisely through the temporal contestation of space. It is important to point out that by highlighting the power of space in this study, I do not intend to suggest that migrant spatial developments are the sole significant factor in the production of social power. Rather, I attempt to show how migrants' new spatial formation, leadership power, and a particular patron network interact with and reinforce one another, constituting a dialectical process of social production. In what follows, I begin by outlining the reemergence of internal labor migration and migrant enclaves in post-Mao China and discuss why this phenomenon is perceived by the political authorities as a potential threat to state control. I will then analyze how popular migrant leaders came to power in the process of their community making and the government's eventual response to this emerging social space and local bosses. Finally, I will reflect on the modes of Chinese state-society dynamics in an era of increased population movement, while briefly comparing the Chinese situation to that of other postsocialist societies.

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the floating population In the first three decades of socialist China, internal rural-to-urban migration was virtually eliminated by the state through the household registration system (hukou).7 Under this system, the Chinese population was officially divided into two kinds of subjects—urban hukou holders and rural hukou holders. Rural subjects were prohibited from moving into the cities. Their rural residential status denied them access to state-subsidized foodstuffs, housing, employment, and other essential services reserved for urbanites only. This situation, however, has dramatically changed since the beginning of economic reforms in 1978, leading to the rise of a mass labor migration unprecedented in modern China. For example, according to an official survey in 1994, in Beijing alone, the already painfully crowded capital city had 3.29 million migrants (also called waidiren, meaning people coming from outer provinces), who came to compete with the 12 million official permanent Beijing residents for limited urban resources and services (Beijing Municipal Planning Committee Research Team 1995). The floating population consists of people with diverse socioeconomic and regional backgrounds, but their primary goals are the same: to get rich by migrating to the cities.8 Some of these rural transients are able to bring a modest amount of capital with them to start small businesses and exploit the huge potential of the urban consumer market. Indeed, some of them have accumulated a considerable amount of wealth. But the majority of peasant workers who come to the cities have nothing but their labor to sell. The lucky ones manage to find temporary menial work in construction, restaurants, factories, domestic service, street cleaning, and other jobs that many urbanites are not willing to take. Still, there are many others who cannot find anything to do and thus drift hopelessly from place to place. Although migrants in China are not entitled to the same legal rights and social benefits as permanent urban residents and are subject to discrimination and periodical expulsion, they are now allowed to work in the cities on a temporary basis and are able to sustain themselves by acquiring daily essentials through the newly emerged iree market. In more recent years, numerous migrant enclaves (based on the migrants' common place of origin) have thrived in various Chinese cities, developing into unofficial communities outside government city planning. Despite the fact that the cheap labor and services provided by rural migrants are in high demand in the cities, the floating population is regarded by city officials and many urbanites as a drain on already scarce urban public resources and frequently blamed for increased crime and social instability. Appearing to be "out of place" and "out of control," this extraordinarily large and mobile population challenges the existing modes of state control that are largely based on the assumption of a relatively stable population fixed in space. Migrants are too far away from their places of origin to be reached by rural authorities but at the same time are not integrated into the urban control system. For many years, local urban officials were unwilling to extend their jurisdiction to rural migrants because they were considered "outsiders" in the cities and thus were not seen as subject to urban regulation. It was this lack of official control that created opportunities for migrants to develop their own social and economic niches in the cities. Later, migrant leaders gained local control through patronage and clientelist networks within these newly emerged migrant enclaves. "Zhejiang Village" (Zhejiangcun), the community on which my study is based, is one of the many unofficial communities that appeared in the reform period.9

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Zhejiangcun: an emerging migrant enclave Zhejiangcun, about five kilometers from Tiananmen Square, is the largest and most well-established migrant settlement in Beijing. This enclave was named by Beijing residents after the provincial origin (Zhejiang) of the majority of the migrants living there. Although it is called a "village," this settlement covers a large area across several suburban neighborhoods in the Fengtai district on the southern edge of the city proper. In 1995, it had about 100,000 migrants, and the majority of them (about 60 to 70 percent) were self-employed petty entrepreneurs and merchants from the Wenzhou region (mainly two areas under the administrative control of Yueqing city and Yongjia county) of Zhejiang province.10 As a relatively wealthy sector of the floating population, Wenzhou migrants mostly specialize in family-based clothing businesses in manufacturing and wholesale or retail sales. Most of the remaining migrants in the area come from other provinces such as Anhui, Hubei, Henan, Shandong, and Sichuan and work as wage laborers who perform sewing, sales, or security work for the Wenzhou migrant employers. Migration into Zhejiangcun began in the early 1980s and soon evolved into large-scale, chain migrations based on kinship ties and native-place networks.11 Wenzhou migrants' successful clothing businesses have transformed the preexisting suburban community from a once poor and bleak farming area into a dynamic private commercial center for garment manufacturing and trade. It now supplies garments not only to the markets of Beijing but also to other parts of Northern China. International traders from Russia and Eastern Europe come to buy Wenzhou migrants' fashionable yet affordable clothing goods.12 The development of Zhejiangcun is highly politicized and closely monitored by city officials for a number of reasons. First, the sweatshop-like, labor-intensive, family-based private production most Wenzhou migrants are engaged in is not deemed compatible with what the reform-era Beijing government wishes to promote in the capital: namely, modern hi-tech development, large corporate commerce, managed foreign capital investment, and lucrative international and domestic tourism. Second, based on kinship ties and native-place networks, Wenzhou migrants have begun to constitute themselves as an identifiable community with its own leadership invested in informal yet pervasive patron networks (called bang).u Third, the perceived political danger of a self-organized migrant group to rival state power is heightened by the fact that this community is located in the capital city, only five kilometers away from China's political center—Tiananmen Square. And fourth, due to the increasing demand for housing, and the use of large sums of private capital accumulated through their family businesses, Wenzhou migrants constructed numerous large walled housing compounds in the early 1990s that consequently altered the spatial organization and power dynamics in this area. I now turn to take a closer look at how these processes of change took place. privatizing space and power In Zhejiangcun, two kinds of migrant leaders—housing bosses and market bosses—assumed the primary role of maintaining local social and economic order and mediating the troubled relationship between migrants and the city government.14 The rise of this non-bureaucratically-based migrant leadership was inseparable from the very creation and control of two kinds of privatized spaces, namely combined production and residential compounds and marketplaces. At the same time, migrant leaders mobilized kinship ties, native-place networks, notions of personal loyalty,

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and clientelist connections to consolidate their power and influence. I begin by describing how a new form of private residential compound emerged in the early 1990s and at the same time nourished the power of local leaders. walled compounds and housing bosses When Wenzhou migrants first arrived in Beijing in the early 1980s, they rented rooms from local suburban farmers in the Dahongmen and Nanyuan area in the Fengtai district. Since the majority of these migrants ran their own small family-based garment production and sales businesses, their households served both as temporary living quarters and as a site for economic production. In the early 1990s, due to the rapid increase of population in the area, business expansion, and the heightened fear of robbery and extortion, Wenzhou migrants began to seek new ways to create their own housing spaces by constructing walled residential compounds. From 1992 to 1995, more than 40 privately owned housing compounds were constructed by relatively wealthy migrant developers. The earlier ones were relatively small, hosting about 50 households each; the later ones were capable of accommodating 200 to 300 households each. The largest compound consisted of 700 households. These housing compounds were locally called dayuan, which could be translated into something like "big yard," "big courtyard," or "big compound." This term signified a sense of spatial enclosure and self-protection. The origin of dayuan can be traced back to 1991 when a local village committee (cunweihui) in Nanyuan township cleaned up a small piece of deserted land and built 240 poorly constructed houses to rent (see Xiang 1995). The houses were quickly leased out to Wenzhou migrants for 280 yuan each per month, and the village acted as a corporate landlord easily collecting as much as 70,000 yuan a month.15 In a similar way, two other local villages built several rows of houses and rented them to Wenzhou migrants. In the beginning, these were just houses arranged row by row in an open area. Later, walls were built up around the houses, and such walled housing compounds became the early version of dayuan. One village committee even moved its office into a housing compound in order to regulate migrant tenants directly. Unlike those built later, these several early dayuan were constructed and managed by local village heads. In 1992, those Wenzhou migrants with more social and economic capital turned to the construction of housing compounds when they saw how profitable real estate development was. These private migrant developers later came to be known as dayuan laoban (big yard bosses). They generally had been in Beijing longer than other migrants and possessed a considerable amount of money, ability (benshi) and social prestige (mingqi) in the local community. The first and most difficult problem facing these housing bosses was to obtain land. In Beijing, land-use is strictly regulated by the government on multiple levels.16 Even temporary use of land for construction by state-owned work units or villages for legitimate reasons has to be approved by the district or county level government. Land use by Beijing hukou holders for private businesses is rarely granted. Migrants, considered "outsiders" in the city, are not even entitled to apply for temporary housing construction in the city. The only way for migrants to build housing was to go through informal channels by creating commercial alliances with local village heads in order to lease their land for construction. This was also problematic because according to relevant rulings, any use of land by a suburban village for nonagricultural purposes had to be approved by the district or city level government. Even though such collaborations could not be officially granted, land leasing deals were done covertly between village heads and migrant developers. Only the two or three largest

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compounds obtained some sort of approval letter from the district planning office, and this was due to these developers' powerful clientelist connections with high level bureaucrats. Local village heads were willing to participate in such collaborations because agriculture in suburban areas was declining so rapidly that they had to search for unconventional ways to generate income. A land lease deal was considered "done" when the two parties signed a simple contract specifying the term of the lease and the amount of payments to be made by housing bosses. A common term was five to six years, renewable depending on the specific situation. The village could receive up to ten percent of the total annual rent collected by the housing bosses. Village heads were not usually involved in the actual construction or management, but they were expected to help smooth the relationship between migrant bosses and those local officials in charge of allocating resources such as water and electricity. The second problem was to raise private funds for construction. For a smaller compound owned by a single family, the cost was normally less than one million yuan, so the money often came from the family's own savings (usually accumulated from its garment business) and cash borrowed from relatives and friends. But for a larger, mid-size housing compound, the initial construction cost could be anywhere between two and five million yuan. It was difficult for a single family to raise such a large sum for construction. Therefore, another popular technique was to pool money together in a rudimentary form of the shareholder system (gufenzhi). This system was largely based on mutual trust and word of mouth among a group of relatives and close friends from the same geographic origin, with little legal paperwork involved. The shareholders (gudong) usually kept a simple, signed agreement as a private record of evidence. For them, personal trust built upon kinship and friendship was deemed more accountable than formal, impersonal legal procedures. Shareholders usually had co-ownership of a housing compound and retained power in major decision making. The third problem was to obtain water and electricity for the compounds. Since these were unofficial housing constructions, they were not entitled to receive highly competitive city resources. Housing bosses had to rely on informal clientelist ties with local officials to obtain these supplies, and then at a high market price. In return, officials who covertly accommodated migrants' needs received large bribes in the form of cash, banquets, or material goods. These private housing compounds were in high demand. By 1995, about half of the Wenzhou households (roughly 30,000 to 40,000 people) in this area had moved into big yards. This form of residence was popular because it provided larger and better housing space for individual families and because it offered localized protection against crime. Furthermore, inhabited exclusively by Wenzhou migrants with the same geographic origin and occupation, these compounds provided a convenient place for economic cooperation and business information exchange. Local Beijing residents, however, revealed in my interviews with them mixed feelings about migrant housing compounds. On the one hand, some of them (especially village cadres) benefited from the income generated from leasing land to migrant bosses and thus wanted to keep the status quo. On the other hand, many locals felt uneasy about these closed and self-protected housing compounds exclusively occupied by an increasingly powerful and alien social group. Such places, they believed, could easily become convenient common grounds that promoted group solidarity and collective power among Wenzhou migrants, which might ultimately displace the power and control that local residents had in the area.

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Along with this new spatial formation, a type of patron network based on three vertically positioned social groups (local officials, housing bosses, and ordinary migrants) took shape. Housing bosses became at once "clients" in relation to officials and "patrons" in relation to migrant renters. They became a mediating social stratum that maintained local order and organized community life outside direct official planning. Renters thus received protection from housing patrons who had the economic and social capital for influencing local affairs. To illustrate how housing bosses came to power and their role in mediating conflicts and disputes among migrants and between migrants and local officials, I will provide an example of how a prominent big yard boss, Zhen,17 built up his influence through spatial control, traditional social networks, and personal attributes and experiences. I was introduced to Zhen by a mutual friend from Wenzhou. When we first arrived at his house, Zhen was rushing through his late lunch and looked exhausted. Because many households had just arrived in his newly completed compound, he was busy collecting rent and making sure that water and electricity were available to each household. Zhen was in his early forties and was a tall and husky man with dark, thick eyebrows. He was dressed in a Western-style suit with a tie, wearing a thick pure gold bracelet on one of his wrists, a typical local symbol of wealth. His hair was carefully combed and oiled. Zhen easily stood out among Wenzhou migrants because of his unusual height and charisma. Coming from a middle-income family in the town of Yueqing, Zhen was the second of nine children. After only five years' elementary school education, he drifted without stable work for many years. For a while, relying on his physical strength, he made a living by transporting people on the back of his bicycle. This was considered low-end, strenuous physical work (liqihuo), similar to rickshaw pulling. But Zhen enjoyed the mobile nature of this work, which gave him the opportunity to form social bonds with other drifters in society. They became "iron brothers" (tie gemen) who pledged personal loyalty (yiqi) to help each other. In several fights, Zhen earned his name as a local tough. In 1983, during a harsh state campaign to crack down on pornography, the police caught him watching pornographic videos at home, and he was sentenced to three years in prison. From the years in prison, he said, he learned how the police system worked and how to deal with it. Zhen and his wife came to Beijing in 1986 from their hometown of Yueqing and began a small clothing retail business. After making a net profit of 8,000 yuan for the first year (this was considered a large amount of money at the time), they set up a family-based garment manufacturing shop and moved into a local farmer's courtyard in Nanyuan township that later came to be known as Zhejiangcun. As the business grew larger, they turned to the more profitable production of leather jackets. At the peak of production, the Zhen family hired over twenty workers and owned their own store to sell their products directly. In the following several years, Zhen accumulated more wealth and spent 200,000 yuan to build a brand new townhouse in his hometown. This house served more as an emblem for his success than a place for actual living. With his growing economic capital and expanding kinship and native-place networks, Zhen also acquired more prestige (mingqi) and influence (shili) among Wenzhou migrants. As the development of migrant housing compounds became popular, Zhen decided to turn to this risky yet profitable business. Zhen and a few kinsmen first formed a private garment corporation, using its name to negotiate a land-lease contract with local cadres. Through extensive personal connections and bribes, Zhen formed a commercial alliance with a powerful local enterprise run by the Nanyuan township

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government. According to the contract signed between the two parties in August 1994, the enterprise would provide Zhen with 52 mu (nearly four hectares) of land on the less-populated southern edge of Nanyuan. The term was set for seven years and could be renewed later. The enterprise was also responsible for obtaining necessary documents from the local government and for arranging water, electricity, and sewage services with relevant bureaus. As a return, the local enterprise would receive 300,000 yuan for the first year and collect 30 percent of the annual income from the Wenzhou developers thereafter. Meanwhile, using a shareholder system, Zhen raised nearly ten million yuan from some twenty shareholders, most of whom were relatives from his lineage and his wife's natal family. Accommodating about 6,000 migrants, his housing compound (named "Jinou") was completed in July 1995; it was the largest and best organized compound in the settlement, providing a variety of family-run services such as a day-care center, beauty salons, grocery stores, telephone services, restaurants, video stores, clinics, and entertainment centers for youngsters. It evolved into a centralized place for Wenzhou migrants and their nascent leadership. As the chief boss who controlled the largest housing compound, Zhen's influence expanded rapidly. He further consolidated his leadership power in the following ways. First, he acted as a patron and protected the interests of his renters by establishing a security system to prevent robbery and theft. He hired twenty private security guards to live on the compound. Second, he and other housing committee members became the mediators in settling various disputes and conflicts within the compound, including domestic quarrels, interhousehold conflicts, and labor disputes between employers and workers. Third, he mediated the relationship between state agents and ordinary migrants. Periodically the district tax bureau, the bureau of industry and commerce, and the police sent officials to collect fees and dues from migrant households. These unwelcome officials often provoked conflicts between government agents and migrants. Housing bosses usually worked with both sides to reduce the friction: on the one hand, they bought off the bureaucrats through gifts and banquets in exchange for special favors such as lowering fees and taxes; on the other hand, they tried to persuade renters to comply with certain routine official taxation in order to avoid deeper governmental hostility. Housing bosses were powerful local leaders in the migrant settlement, but they were not the only ones. Next, I examine another kind of migrant leader, market bosses who gained power through controlling newly established private marketplaces. marketplaces and market bosses By 1995, a number of large and middle-size marketplaces were established in Zhejiangcun.18 They could be divided into four types according to the ways in which they were organized. The first type consisted of several hundred small individual shops spread along the two major local streets. Some of them were privately owned, while others were established by local subdistrict government and leased to migrants. The second type included about one thousand makeshift stalls organized in two enclosed areas. They were put up and managed by a small group of market bosses. The third kind was a permanent, modern, multistory building, Longqiu. It was owned by two Wenzhou bosses and contained several hundred counters. The fourth type was a permanent market building, Jingwen, owned and regulated by the district level bureau of industry and commerce although a large part of its construction fund was raised from Wenzhou migrants. Focusing on Hu, the owner of the Longqiu market, I will show how market bosses gained power and maneuvered among government agencies, migrant stall

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keepers, and customers. At the entrance area into Zhejiangcun, the first thing that catches the eye is a large two-story building with shining blue glass walls. This is the "Beijing-Longqiu Commercial and Trade Center/' a major garment trading market run by Wenzhou migrants. Local people call it "Longqiu" (meaning "dragon pond"), a poetic name taken from a famous scenic site in the Yandang Mountains in Wenzhou. Every day, from dawn to dusk, thousands of customers come in and out of this building to buy and sell clothing products. Its owner and manager, Hu, in his mid-thirties, came from a small town in Wenzhou. He left home for the first time when he was 16 and began working as a helper in his patrilineal uncle's business in Hangzhou. A few years later, he came to Beijing with two senior relatives—his mother's brother and his wife. Later Hu married a woman from his village and brought her to Beijing. They were able to set up a small clothing production shop and rented counters to sell garments in two large state-owned department stores in downtown Beijing. Like other Wenzhou bosses, Hu relied on his extended kinship network for receiving social resources in his business expansion. After about ten years' successful capital accumulation, he decided to develop a large-scale market. At the time of my fieldwork, Longqiu was formally registered under a stateowned Beijing seafood product company, which provided the temporary use-right of land and served as a camouflage. The initial construction cost, about 30 million yuan, came from nine migrant shareholders who borrowed money at high interest rates. Hu and another shareholder eventually bought all the shares and forced the seven smaller shareholders out. Since this market building is exclusively funded by private individuals rather than government agencies, its owners have strong control over it. But this does not mean that private marketplaces exist entirely outside of state control. Market bosses have to negotiate constantly with greedy government officials who have control over such things as issuing business licenses and collecting regulation fees (guanli fei) and taxes. Market bosses also seek political backing (kaoshan) from powerful upper-level bureaucrats. For example, Hu managed to obtain for his market the autograph of an influential national figure in China—Wang Guangying, the brother-in-law of the People's Republic of China's (PRO first president and himself a wealthy entrepreneur and a highly positioned bureaucrat. Wang's autograph is prominently displayed in big golden characters on the roof of the Longqiu market as a political talisman (cf. Kraus 1991). Local residents and migrants have told me that they believe this connection to high bureaucratic power is the most important reason why Longqiu was not demolished during the 1995 government cleanup campaign. Unlike housing bosses who were deeply involved in policing migrant everyday life and public order, market bosses are only interested in maintaining market order and mediating the relationship between stall keepers and customers. Market bosses frequently face dilemmas when it comes to deciding whose interests they should represent and protect. On the one hand, they want to protect the interests of migrant stall keepers so that the stall keepers will continue to support the market; on the other, they also attempt to appear impartial in settling disputes so that customers will not be too angry to return. If a market boss favors stall keepers, some customers might send complaints to the local bureau of industry and commerce, which can threaten to shut down the market. But if a boss stands up for customers, stall keepers might regard him as a traitor to his Wenzhou fellows. Market bosses also tend to adopt a metropolitanoriented attitude and view themselves as independent industrial and commercial entrepreneurs (gongshangyezhe), not just petty migrant entrepreneurs (getihu). Their ties with the migrant community are not as close as those of housing bosses, and their

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power tends to be limited to the market sphere. For example, the Hu family moved off the settlement a few years ago and now lives in a semisecluded, upscale elite Beijing community inhabited mostly by movie stars and wealthy entrepreneurs. The preceding ethnographic accounts reveal that control over the use and organization of social space constitutes a vital source of power for migrant leaders. Their abilities to create and regulate private housing and market spaces are essential for the development of their popular authority. Therefore, the newly created community spaces are not merely the background for migrant social and political struggles; rather, they are a key component of these struggles. But space is not the only source of power; migrant leaders also rely on various social networks to create a "cultural nexus of power" (Duara 1988), which I will explore in the next section. kinship, bang, and clientelist ties Anthropologists such as Fortes and Evans-Pritchard (1958) have demonstrated the importance of lineage in the formation of political systems in stateless societies. In Zhejiangcun, kinship plays a central role in local politics because it provides the immediate social basis for local bosses' consolidation of power. Prior to migration, married women in rural Wenzhou usually did not maintain economic connections with their natal families once they joined their husbands' patrilineal families. But my research indicates that after they migrated to the cities, daily social contacts and economic cooperation between the wife's natal family and the husband's family increased rapidly. In other words, migrant kinship networks have extended beyond the patriline to include the wife's natal kin as well. This expanded kinship helps pull more individual families' resources together to form business partnerships and provide mutual aid among relatives, helping to ensure survival despite intense market competition.19 Taking Zhen's family as an example: both Zhen and his wife came from a very large family. There are nine children in his and four in hers. All of their siblings are married and thereby form a larger web of family ties. By 1995, most of their relatives (more than one hundred) had left rural Wenzhou and settled in Zhejiangcun where they have their own garment businesses. These family members provide a social basis for a far-reaching, powerful nexus of Zhen's influence (shili). As his influence expands, even remotely related relatives and friends are willing to identify themselves with him to acquire protection from his name. This expanded kinship network further contributes to the reinforcement of the power of the Zhen family. Migrant leaders (particularly housing bosses) also build up their power through what is locally known as bang, an informal social grouping based on voluntary associations, personal loyalty, and shared locality. Due to the lack of government protection against crime, it is common for Wenzhou migrants to align or identify themselves as being under the patronage of a prominent local boss. The majority of such groupings are casual and do not require any formal membership, but they provide ordinary migrant families with local protection and accountability. For example, if a migrant family has a strong relation with a powerful patron, its business is relatively safe from robbery and extortion. Ordinary families who do not have such connections have to pay whatever is demanded by extortioners and keep it quiet to avoid future revenge. A young migrant explained to me how such patron relationships work: "Say we want to exhort 50,000 yuan from you because you have just made a lot of money. Now, if you are on good terms with a patron, he might persuade us to take only 5,000 yuan. If his shili and mingqi were very strong, we would accept his proposal. Otherwise, he would lose face and give us trouble later."

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Unlike bureaucratic power that largely relies on impersonal rules, legal codes, and official appointments (see Herzfeld 1992; Weber 1981), the power and prestige of migrant leaders in Zhejiangcun is inseparable from bodily-based traits such as valor and fearlessness. "Not afraid of death" is seen as a core component of masculinity and central to the construction of power in this social setting. A patron must be willing to risk his life for his followers, and the very risk and potential danger is what earns him respect and power. Too often in social science accounts, power is viewed as something disembodied. Yet the production of power in Zhejiangcun is inseparable from the embodiment of masculinity. For example, all big yard bosses are males; women are usually excluded from acquiring formal leadership status in local politics. The power and prestige of migrant bosses is largely contingent upon locally recognized "prowess" (Boretz 1996) or masculine ability to get things done. Prowess is more than abstract valor or ability; it conveys a sense of charisma based on the special gifts of the body and spirit. Masculine persona as embodied through one's body image and manner is essential for demonstrating benshi. For instance, Zhen's height and physical strength as well as his ability to fight (dajia) are all regarded as concrete expressions of his masculinity—the basis of prowess. It is the combination of this near-mythical, latent masculine prowess and benevolent appearance in public that give Zhen an aura of power.20 A migrant patron also depends on his followers for popular support. He usually has a group of youngsters who enjoy cigarettes, drinks, and meals at his expense. These young men can be easily mobilized to fight when conflicts with other groups erupt. They also prevent the patron's business from being sabotaged by rivals. As a Wenzhou migrant told me, 'Those who have large private businesses all have their own people (meaning hired thugs) in hand. Otherwise, local toughs will come to destroy their businesses and take their fortune away, especially when the police are not much of a help and are themselves connected with hooligans." The emergence of migrant bang is an alternative way of establishing order and control at a place where local protection is not offered by the government. Such informal groupings, however, are not as entirely innocent or benevolent as their members claim. Migrant leaders can use gangs to exploit other ordinary migrants and strengthen their own power, even by using violence. Nevertheless, migrant gangs are different from those that live solely on robbery, extortion, and drug trafficking. Lumping bang together with the "underworld," as the official discourses do, can only obscure rather than illuminate the complex role of the migrant leadership (see Zhang in press a). The last kind of network is derived from asymmetric personal connections (guanxi) with the police, village and township cadres, and district officials who have direct control over land use, resources, and regulation rules. Such clientelist ties are central for migrant bosses who need to demonstrate their abilities to get things done for their clients. For example, since migrants are not considered real or full members of the urban community, they are frequently subject to criminalization and unfair treatment by the police. A common duty for a migrant boss is to serve as a middleman to plea-bargain with the police to get troubled migrants out of jail. One day, I saw Zhen outside the local police station and asked him what brought him there. He replied: Last night, the police raided my friends' houses to check their temporary resident permits. They took away identification cards from some of them because their permits had already expired. The police also threatened to expel them out of the city. But the problem is this: the police station in the area suddenly stopped issuing or renewing permits to us recently; at the same time they insisted on checking our permits and

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accused us of being illegal "floaters." I think that they intentionally create this situation. I know some people in the police station. So I went to get my friends' cards back. He said this as if it was an effortless task. But I knew how difficult it was for an ordinary person to ask favors from the police, let alone ask for the return of seized identification cards. Obviously Zhen had unusual connections with the police in order to do what he did. As one migrant suggested, "Zhen knows the local police so well that he can walk in and out of the police station frequently and easily as if it were his own home!" Besides making clientelist ties with Beijing officials, housing and market bosses also create similar ties with regional government officials. For example, Zhen recruited a Wenzhou official appointed at the Beijing liaison offices to be a shareholder of his compound.21 This was a special "empty share," which meant that the holder did not have to provide any investment money but was entitled to receive part of the profit later, a sum that could reach ten times his salary. By accepting this favor, this director became personally tied to the fate of the compound and would do anything he could within his power to protect it. In addition, the migrant bosses contribute to the public welfare of their hometowns to gain government support and societal recognition in their place of origin. In 1994, Zhejiang province suffered severe damage from one of the worst floods in its history. The local and provincial governments solicited emergency funding from society. Many Wenzhou migrants in Beijing donated money. Zhen alone generously contributed 100,000 yuan and thus became well-known for his considerable economic power and was praised for his collectively oriented spirit. His philanthropic act was cited as a good example of what the official ideology promoted: getting rich is glorious, but getting rich without forgetting others in poverty is truly laudable. The Zhejiang provincial government awarded Zhen an honorary cup. This cup, displayed on a shelf in his dining room, is more than a statement of his humanitarian act; it is also a symbol of his political capital. Clientelist networks created by migrants can be seen as a special form of guanxi, a practice that has been widely explored by recent anthropologists in both rural and urban Chinese contexts (see Kipnis 1997; Yan 1996; Yang 1994). Most of the studies tend to put emphasis on the production of horizontal guanxi networks among ordinary people. By contrast, my account focuses on the vertically integrated clientelist ties between migrant bosses and officials on multiple levels. This type of guanxi contains little affective sentiment (renqing) but is built on mutual economic benefits calculated on the principle of market exchange. The absence of emotional ties in the clientelist networks formed in Zhejiangcun is conditioned by the asymmetric structural positions between officials with formal bureaucratic power and migrant entrepreneurs with newly acquired private wealth. Such transactions of bureaucratic power, money, and favors between officials and private entrepreneurs is of course not unique to migrant communities, but is a salient, nationwide phenomenon in post-Mao China. As many scholars have shown, clientelist ties have become the operational principle for private businesses in the reform era (see Pieke 1995; Solinger 1992; Wank 1999). Historically, a similar process called guanshangheliu (the merger of officials and merchants) figured centrally in the 19th century (see Ma 1995). Now, as then, even if private merchants gain considerable economic power, they seek cooperation and commercial alliances with state officials to secure their positions. Such informal alliances, however, are not always stable and can become fragile under certain harsh political circumstances.

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My interviews with local and city officials clearly indicate that they perceive the informal privatization of space and power among Wenzhou migrants largely as an anomaly to the socialist order and a potential threat to state control. It created strong anxiety in the upper levels of government officials who subsequently decided to eradicate the emergent migrant leadership. Zhejiangcun is represented in the officially controlled media and press as the hotbed for organized crime and disorder in Beijing. Such discourses are in fact part of the production of knowledge/power that is central to ordering and regulating strategies (cf. Foucault 1972), entailing concrete social and political consequences.22 This ongoing contestation over spatial control and power between Wenzhou migrants and the city government eventually led to a devastating political campaign that shattered the lives of tens of thousands of migrants in this settlement. the demolition In November and December 1995, the central PRC and Beijing city governments mobilized a campaign to clean up Zhejiangcun. Although the explicit aim was to remove illegal building construction in the area, the ultimate goal was to eliminate what was perceived as a spatialized form of social power outside official control.23 As one official in the campaign team alluded to me, ''A community with its own territorial ground (dipan) has the potential to become a separate regime of power." Such official concerns about political control and stability were heightened by that fact that Beijing is the emblematic heart of Chinese political power, symbol of modernity, and popular national and international tourist destination. Therefore, government control and scrutiny of non-state-directed communities and social forces are much tighter there than in other parts of the country. The official apparatus of the campaign was called the "workteam" (gongzuo dui), composed of 2,000 diversely positioned government officials. The workteam was directly led by top Fengtai district officials under the supervision of the city government. Campaign activities were reported daily to the mayor and other central party leaders via daily campaign newsletters.24 The majority of the team members who did the actual day-to-day campaign work were lower level district, township, and subdistrict officials, policemen, and village cadres. The campaign was carried out in a "closed" manner because, as some workteam members told me, upper level officials feared that if popular resistance rose during the housing demolition and violent suppression had to be used, media exposure would damage the image of the Chinese party-state. It would also invite severe criticism from the international community concerning human rights. As specified in the government propaganda materials released to the public, the immediate goal of this campaign was to destroy all the Wenzhou migrants' housing compounds as well as some other illegal buildings put up by local farmers to accommodate migrants. Throughout the campaign, upper and lower level officials had very different views about how to handle the relationship between political control and economic gain. For the former group who did not receive direct economic benefits from Wenzhou migrants, maintaining political stability and state control was more important than anything else. They preferred to sacrifice local level economic interest to ensure stability. In one official's words: "Economic loss cannot be compared with political loss in the larger scheme of things." By contrast, local officials (especially village cadres) regarded economic growth and prosperity as a true source of stability. Thus, there was considerable instability and conflict within the "state" itself.

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During this event, unorganized and semi organized popular resistance was widespread among not only migrants but also local farmers and workers who had constructed additional rooms in their houses for rental income. Many of the local residents refused to tear down their housing additions as ordered by the government. Popular rage was also expressed in the burning and destroying of government campaign notices. After encountering such resistance, the Beijing government decided to take harsh measures to move the campaign out of impasse. Pressure was put on local officials and cadres to show concrete signs of progress; they were warned that they could face serious political charges for not fulfilling their duties. Migrants and local farmers were notified that if they refused to flatten their own illegal housing additions, forced demolition would begin soon and they would receive a heavy fine and other punishments. Local cadres and party members were urged by higher authorities to demolish their own illegal structures to provide a good example to the community. Constantly pressed and threatened by workteam members, some local residents began to tear down their housing additions. Once the destruction began in certain areas, some residents began to dismantle their own housing to avoid government persecution because, as they told me, they felt no one could stop the campaign. By early December, 1995, the majority of illegal housing additions built by the locals had been demolished. Migrants who lived in those additions were forced out and many of them moved in temporarily with relatives whose housing had not yet been destroyed. Migrants in the big housing compounds suffered most from the demolition campaign, but they also articulated the strongest resistance. On November 18, housing bosses and migrants from one housing compound drafted an urgent appeal in the name of all migrants in the area and submitted it to the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (quanguo gongshang lianhehui) and the National Association for Independent Workers (quanguo geti laodongzhe xiehui). The letter argued that migrant workers and entrepreneurs should be protected by law because they benefited the city's economy. It also urged these organizations to help stop the campaign. A few days later, in the name of migrants in Jinou, the largest housing compound, shareholders of this compound drafted another appeal and forwarded it to some top party officials and the State Council. In it, they argued that the city government's decision to clean up Zhejiangcun would destroy ordinary migrants' normal economic activities and community life. Debunking the official representation of big yards as hotbeds for crime and disorder, they stressed that migrant housing compounds actually provided a better work environment and social order than the outside. But these appeals were largely ignored by the organization leaders and officials because, according to my migrant informants, they wanted to protect their own political positions by taking a conservative stand. As Wenzhou migrants appealed to government organizations in Beijing, they also actively sought political backing from their regional governments. The nativeplace identity became a mechanism through which political alliances between local government and migrants of the same place of origin were created. The Zhejiang provincial liaison office delivered an appeal to the Beijing city government to stop the campaign, and two provincial officials met with the vice directors of the campaign. But their request was turned down. Two days later, the Zhejiang provincial government sent a formal delegation to Beijing for further negotiation. The delegation suggested allowing some major housing compounds to stand and delaying the demolition deadline for others. This was also rejected. Under these political circumstances, all the migrant housing compounds were flattened by the government's bulldozers in less than two weeks and turned into piles

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of debris. A once lively community with a flourishing private economy suddenly resembled the bombed out remnants of a war zone. Nearly 40,000 migrants lost their homes and were forced out of the settlement.25 The majority of them dispersed to rural counties outside the city proper, and some went to Tianjin and other parts of Hebei province (such as Baoding, Langfang, and Sanhe). Only a small portion of them managed to hide in run-down suburban factories, out-of-business motels, and remote villages. But this was not the end of the story. Three months after this political hurricane had dwindled, the majority of displaced migrants began to return to what had been Zhejiangcun to rebuild their community and businesses. Since most available space within local villages was already rented out, returning migrants had to create new ways of locating housing. Some sought rentals in neighborhoods adjacent to Zhejiangcun or moved into nearby high-rise residential buildings where they paid higher rents than before. Others lived in housing compounds disguised in one of two ways. One was to borrow the title of a Beijing government agency and start a seemingly legitimate business, such as a clinic, and then build apartments on the acquired space. The other was to turn the existing space in local state-owned enterprises into migrant residences. This was made possible by recent state enterprise reform. Since the mid 1990s, the crisis of failing state enterprises had reached the point where many large and mid-size firms were forced to close down or dissolve. In Zhejiangcun, several state-run factories were facing shut downs. This situation presented an unusual opportunity for migrants to form new economic alliances with the factories struggling on the edge of a late socialist society. In 1996, some Wenzhou return migrants began to rent the abandoned factory buildings; the factory managers used the rent money to support their laid-off workers (see Zhang 1999). In this way, four factories in the area were turned into covert migrant housing compounds. Disguising housing compounds was done mainly to avoid the scrutiny of upper level officials and could only occur because local officials who knew what was going on turned a blind eye to this practice. Or, as the Chinese saying goes: "Opening one eye and closing the other" (zheng yizhi yan, bi yizhi yan). The postdemolition period also saw an amazing development of market structures in Zhejiangcun. During my additional research trips back to this community in 1998 and 1999,1 found that three brand new large permanent garment trading plazas had been constructed. These structures are arranged through complex commercial alliances that involve multiple actors: migrant bosses, local and Wenzhou government agencies, and several state firms of Beijing. These new collaborations and developments not only expand the market capacity of Zhejiangcun but also better secure the migrants' position in the city because their livelihoods and interests have become more closely tied with those of the local government and enterprises. But because the number of disguised housing compounds is much smaller than that of previous housing compounds, the power of housing bosses has also declined significantly. Many former housing bosses have now turned to market development and thus strengthened the leadership of market bosses. Thus, the informal privatization of space and power continues in the postdemolition period. But its specific forms have changed. Most recently, the Beijing city government has begun to shift its regulation strategy from eliminating the nascent migrant leadership to partially appropriating it as a means for indirect control of the ever increasing migrant population. In so doing, migrant bosses may be able to secure their power and leadership position in the local community but are also brought under tighter scrutiny by the late socialist state.

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conclusion Managing the floating population and migrant enclaves has long been regarded by certain government officials as the most difficult task facing the post-Mao political regime. Though the socialist state had successfully penetrated local Chinese society through a grassroots cadre system in the past, given a relatively stable population, it has not been able to create a new mediating social stratum to regulate the much more mobile, fluid, and culturally diverse migrant population. My analysis suggests that the tension between the floating population and the state is partly derived from the state's refusal to grant a legitimate status to the mediating social stratum between migrant masses and the state.26 Historically, native-place associations (tongxiang hui), occupational guilds, trade coalitions, and other kinds of migrant organizations played a powerful role in reconstructing migrant identities, communities, and labor markets among various Chinese diasporas (see Crissman 1967; Goodman 1995; Ho n.d.; Honig 1992; Mann 1987; Rowe 1984; Sangren 1984; Skinner 1977). Such popular organizations provided a structural basis for migrant leadership to mediate local affairs and were largely welcomed by the imperial Chinese state and foreign receiving governments in favor of indirect control.27 But after 1949, popular organizations, especially territorial-based associations, were either eliminated or brought under direct state control in order to prevent them from developing into oppositional political forces (Sun 1993).28 Despite the recent resurgence of popular organizations in reformera China (see White 1993), no comparable entities have formed among the migrant population due to persistent political pressure.29 Popular migrant leaders I have examined in this article could have functioned as "political brokers" (Barth 1959; Swartz 1969; Vincent 1971) in the local power dynamic by offering better security and protection to migrants than that provided by official authorities. As entrepreneurs who have gained the most from economic reform, what they want is not a fundamental restructuring of the political regime, but only a partial reordering of power dynamics in their local space from which they can benefit directly. But this popular leadership is largely criminalized and alienated by city officials and thus cannot further develop to fulfill the role of policing local order and mediating the relationship between this new community and the state. Wenzhou migrants' struggle to develop their own community and reshape local power dynamics further demonstrates the mutually consitutive relationship between space and power. In particular, I have shown how crucial the control over key social spaces—residential and production sites as well as marketplaces—is for the emerging migrant leadership to develop its authority and influence (shili). The government's effort to regain control over this community also relied on a fundamental reshaping of its spatial order through housing demolition. Therefore, space serves as a focal point for social and political struggles in Beijing. Thinking beyond this specific case, I would like to call greater attention to the politics of space in future studies of late socialist transformations since this issue has not been adequately addressed in the socialist context by researchers. The government campaign to clean out Zhejiangcun (and later, other migrant communities in Beijing) indicates that the power of the late socialist party-state does not simply retreat from people's social life as the metanarrative of postsocialism predicts. The Chinese party-state, better understood as an internally divided regulatory regime, continues to play a salient role in shaping people's everyday lives, social spaces, and identities, despite accelerating market forces; at the same time, the ways in which state power operates have certainly changed.30 There is a general tendency today toward returning to clientelist politics in the local power dynamics in China

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(Pearson 1997; Wank 1999). Pervasive triadic clientelist ties have formed among officials, local bosses, and ordinary migrants. These ties have enabled new modalities of governance as local bosses become the de facto regulators and facilitators in administering local affairs backed by their personal connections with officialdom. The (re)emergence of clientelist politics has also been observed and analyzed by scholars working on Russia and Eastern Europe (Humphrey 1991; Verdery 1996). Verdery (1996) presents this phenomenon as the re-emergence of feudal-like forms of governance and power; migrant bosses in China, too, sought traditional forms of social networks to strengthen their power, but I emphasize the ways in which the actual contents of these networks and migrant leaders' use of them changed under the radically different kinds of political and market conditions operating today. Both housing and market bosses managed to combine commercialized kinship ties, native-place networks, brotherhood, private capital, and clientelist connections with local followers and bureaucrats, creating a style of leadership with both traditional and modern characteristics. It is important to point out that the kind of unofficial community and localitybased patron coalitions I have described tend to be found in certain areas and sectors in China, such as migrant enclaves. So far, large-scale Mafia-like organizations have not flourished in China as they have in some postsocialist countries such as Russia (see Handelman 1993; Humphrey 1991; Ries 1998; Shchekochikhin 1994). Despite pluralization and privatization of power on the local level, central state control remains prominent in China. Although migrant bang coalitions have gained a measure of control over local affairs and have evaded governmental rules, they are far less powerful than the underworld organizations found in post-Soviet Russia. Finally, to gain a deeper understanding of the diverse forms of social and political dynamics in late socialist China and other postsocialist societies, the question that needs to be addressed is not merely how much state power dominates everyday social life, but how the modes and foci of the socialist governmentality have changed under new social and economic conditions.31 notes Acknowledgments. In this article, I draw upon my larger anthropological research on the floating population in Beijing. My project was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship and supplementary grants from the Committee of Scholarly Communication with China, the Wenner-Gren Anthropological Foundation, and the President's Council of Cornell Women. Cornell's Sage Graduate Fellowship and the Marion and Franklin Long Fellowship, and Harvard's An Wang Postdoctoral Fellowship provided the luxury of time for the write-up. I would like to thank the following individuals who provided insightful comments on early versions of this article: Benedict Anderson, John Borneman, Stanley Brandes, Sara Friedman, Stevan Harrell, Jennifer Hubbert, Mark Miller, Aihwa Ong, Elizabeth J. Perry, P. Steven Sangren, Vivienne Shue, G. William Skinner, and Dorothy Solinger. My thanks also go to the anonymous AE reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and thoughtful suggestions. I am grateful to members of the dissertation writing seminar of the Department of Anthropology at The University of California at Berkeley, the faculty and students of the Department of Anthropology at The University of California at Davis, and the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University where I presented earlier versions of this article. 1. I use the term "late socialism" to avoid implying that current societal transformations in China will necessarily lead to the demise of the socialist regime. Rather than conveying a sense of breakdown, rupture, and death of the existing system, late refers to a condition characterized by some fundamentally new developments mixed with the legacies of the old system. Hence, the notion of "late socialism" is similar to Jameson's conception of 'late capitalism" in that "what 'late' generally conveys is the sense that something has changed, that things are different,

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that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older" (Jameson 1997:xxi). 2. I do not want to launch a detailed analysis of the causes of migration in post-Mao China. For those who are interested in fuller explanations of the causes of internal migration in China, see Banister 1986; Davin 1999; Goldstein and Goldstein 1985; Li 1999; Liang and White 1996; Mallee 1988; Sharping 1997; Solinger 1999; and Yan 1999; Yang 1993.1 also wish to note that the category "floating population" was invented at a particular time in recent Chinese history and was employed by the state to turn rural migrants into a new kind of inferior, disciplinable subject (see Zhang in press c). 3. For example, Fukuyama's notion of "the end of history" (1989) predicts an ultimate demise of socialism and triumph of market capitalism and liberal democracy as the final and universal form of political-economic structure for all human societies. Although this view has been criticized by many social scientists, it continues to influence the popular political discourses of the West. 4. The ethnographic materials presented in this article are drawn from my fieldwork in the Wenzhou migrant community in Beijing from June 1995 to September 1996. I interviewed about 110 migrants from 70 households from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, and many local residents and government officials. I made two follow-up research trips in January 1998 and July 1999, to trace more recent developments in this community. Here let me also register my sincere thanks to Xiang Biao, a Wenzhou native, currently a Ph.D. student at Oxford University, who was then a graduate student at Peking University, for his friendship and assistance. He introduced me to the Wenzhou migrant community in Beijing and shared several stimulating conversations with me on the floating population. 5. Space does not allow me to engage the various debates on "power," a topic that has dominated anthropological discourses for many years. I want to point out, however, that in this article "power" is understood as a culturally specific construction of prestige and influence implicated in everyday social relationships and cultural symbols (see Duara 1988; Wolf 1990). Decentering power into relational processes makes it possible to unravel power struggles in formalized visible state apparatuses and social organizations and also in diffused, invisible social networks, cultural symbolism, and everyday practices that together shape social domination and contestation (cf. Foucault 1972, 1978). 6. In most early anthropological studies of China, little attention was paid to the productive role of space (especially urban space) and its intrinsic link to power dynamics. One of the few exceptions is G. William Skinner's now classic analysis of China's regional structure as a hierarchy of town- and city-centered local and regional systems (1964-65, 1977). In more recent studies of reform-era China, the role of space in shaping social and political processes remains largely underdeveloped and undertheorized (except for Davis et al. 1995; Hershkovitz 1993; Rofel 1999). Very recently, a few extremely interesting works by China historians have appeared that explore the role of urban space in shaping everyday life, social identity, and politics in early 20th-century China (see Esherik 2000; Lu 1999). 7. The hukou system was enacted by the Chinese central state in 1958. Its primary goal was to block rural to urban migration in order to avoid what government officials perceived as a pathological growth of oversized cities and to ensure the agricultural production of grain to supply those working in industry. Restricting people's spatial mobility was also an important strategy used by bureaucrats to maintain socialist stability at that time. For detailed information regarding the origin, function, and socioeconomic consequences of this complex system, see Cheng and Selden 1994; Dutton 1992; Solinger 1999; and Zhang 1988. 8. It is worth stressing that the floating population is not a homogenous group. Rather, Chinese internal migrants' urban experiences vary greatly depending on a number of factors such as gender, place of origin, previous capital accumulation, and social networks. As a result, their senses of social belonging are also very different (see Zhang in press b). 9. When I conducted my fieldwork in the mid-1990s, the four most prominent migrant enclaves in Beijing were Zhejiang Village, Henan Village, Anhui Village, and Xinjiang Village, all of which took as their organizing principle the common native place of the migrant dwellers in each enclave. See Ma and Xiang 1998 for a detailed account of the history and condition of

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these migrant communities. Although the physical condition and the peripheral location of these migrant enclaves are similar to those of slums and shantytowns formed by incoming rural migrants in early 20th-century Shanghai (see Lu 1999), there are some important differences between them. For example, dwellers in the migrant enclaves today usually rent rooms from local households rather than build their own shacks. Most of them are not unemployed but self-employed. Some, like Wenzhou and Xinjiang migrants, have their own family-based businesses and therefore have more economic capital than the local urbanites. This situation is also different from that of the spatially demarcated migrant shantytowns or squatter settlements commonly found in other countries. For comparison, see Perlman 1976 on squatter settlements in Rio de Janeiro and Chavez 1992 on a Mexican immigrant shantytown in the United States. 10. Yueqing, which consists of, in large part, rural areas, was previously a county (xian) before it was reclassified as a county level city in the early 1990s. Many migrants who identify themselves as coming from the Yueqing area still hold rural household registrations and were farmers prior to migration. Even today, many of them have land in their home villages, but the land is mostly farmed by hired migrant laborers from other provinces. 11. In-depth accounts of this migration process and the development of the community can be found in works by Zhang (in press c), Xiang (1999), and Ma and Xiang (1998). 12. The business success of Wenzhou migrants is by no means accidental. It is deeply rooted in a distinct entrepreneurial spirit and a long emigration tradition in their place of origin. In my forthcoming book, I offer a detailed account of the local history and mercantile culture of Wenzhou, which, I argue, contributes to the flourishing of entrepreneurial activities and spatial mobility among Wenzhou people today. 13. In his excellent study of Zhejiangcun, Xiang (1999) also points out the centrality of marketized traditional networks in the formation of local power structure and what he calls a "nonstate space" with political implications. 14. Since Zhejiangcun is such a large community with nearly 100,000 migrants, it is extremely difficult to obtain an accurate number of local migrant bosses. But based on the number of dayuan (big compound) and garment markets that existed before the demolition, I estimate that the total number oi housing and market bosses in 1995 was between 100 and 200. 15. Yuan, also known as Renminb'i, is the unit of Chinese currency. The exchange ratio of yuan to U.S. dollar was approximately 8 to 1 in 1995. 16. Particularly in recent years with rapid urbanization and commercial developments, land in Beijing has become extremely precious. The suburbs that were once covered by farm land are now target areas for urban development. Therefore, strict rules on land control are applied. For details regarding such rules, see the collection of official documents compiled by the Beijing City Planning and Regulation Bureau (1993). 1 7. All names of informants in this article are pseudonyms. 18. Although the city government regarded migrant housing compounds as an anomaly to the official vision of the urban order of things, it largely tolerated the development of private marketplaces. According to my interviews with officials, this is because thriving marketplaces were generally viewed as a positive sign of commercialization and modernization. By contrast, family-based production involving the use of wage laborers was associated with the crude class exploitation found in cottage industries during the early stage of primitive capital accumulation in the West and therefore was deemed problematic. 19. Historically, kinship ties have also served as a crucial social basis for Chinese migrants to form their own communities and develop their economic niches in the receiving society (see Oxfeld 1996; Skinner 1958; Watson 1975). 20. Anthropologists have offered rich analyses of the personification of power among "big men" in the context oi Melanesia (see Godelier and Strathern 1991). Their studies show that masculinity and personal embodiment of power are key components of local politics. Such accounts, however, are largely absent in the analysis of power and authority in socialist and postsocialist societies. 21. Most provincial and city governments establish liaison offices (lianluochu) in Beijing to represent interests of people from their own provinces and mediate the relationships between Beijing authorities and provincial governments.

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22. Elsewhere (Zhang in press a), I have analyzed in greater detail the productive power of the official representation and criminalization by the media and press of Zhejiangcun and the so-called floaters. 23. The motivations of this campaign and the social conflicts it invoked are more complicated than what the space allows me to present here. For in-depth accounts, see Zhang in press c and also Dutton 1998:147-159. 24. The newsletters were not released to the general public during the campaign, but they were available after the campaign. This set of documents provides a close account of how the campaign was actually carried out and what resistance the workteam encountered (see The Headquarters for Cleaning Up and Reordering the Dahongmen Region 1995). 25. The rest of the migrants (mostly those who rented from individual local farmers) managed to stay in the settlement. They were not driven out mainly because they did not live in the compounds and thus were seen as unorganized and not a major threat. 26. Historically, the gentry had attained some sort of bureaucratic status or qualifications for such status (see Ch'u 1962). Leading merchants and traders drawn into what Mann (1987) calls "liturgical governance" during the Qing period were also more or less bureaucratized and appropriated by the state to participate in preserving local order. These social strata were encouraged by the state to regulate local affairs as a supplement to indirect state control. Local bosses in southern China during the Republican period acted like political brokers who mediated between the rapidly shifting military regimes and the rural populace who needed local protection (Siu 1989). Also see Billingsley's study of social banditry (1981). 27. Of course, this is not to say that there were not any conflicts and tensions between native-place associations and state structures before 1949. Under certain circumstances, the existing tensions could be intensified and develop into open conflicts. For example, Goodman (1995) has described the struggles over the use of space in Shanghai between the native-place guilds and the colonial power. I would like to thank one of the AE reviewers who encouraged me to make this point more explicit. 28. In the past, popular organizations had been an origin of revolutionary forces (i.e., peasant uprising), and the Chinese communist party itself also consolidated its power by working through various local popular organizations such as workers' unions, peasant associations, and women's associations (Hershatter 1986; Honig 1986; Perry 1993). It would not be surprising if the same process took place against the party/state in power under the socialist conditions. Thus, since 1949, all forms oi organizations were directly led by governmental authorities. The notion of "non-governmental" nearly equals "anti-government" in the leftist socialist ideology. 29. During my fieldwork, I came to realize that the formation of migrant leadership took a different route in a less visible terrain. In order to capture the subtle power relations in this community, I need to look beyond formal institutions and into what the Comaroffs call "the texture of the everyday" (1987:192). 30. The continuing salient role of the state in China has also been analyzed by scholars in different contexts (see Oi 1989; Perry 1994; Shue 1988; Solinger 1999; Walder 1986; Watson 1994). Shue (1995) points out that the "thinning" of intrusive, oppressive, and restrictive modes of state power is often accompanied by a simultaneous "thickening" of a regulatory power, buttressed by the expansion of local bureaucratic apparatuses. 31. I use Foucault's notion of governmental ity (1991) here to refer to the art or strategies of governing practices that aim to shape, guide, and affect the mind and conduct of persons through multiple level social domains such as the family, communities, and the state (see also Ong 1999:6).

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accepted May 2, 2000 final version submitted June 12, 2000 Li Zhang Department of Anthropology University of California at Davis Davis, CA 95616 lizha ng@pa cbell. net