Urban citizenship, quality domesticity, and the queer precarity of rural migrants in Beijing

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2018Lack of local hukou restricts migrant access to a slate of social services in Beijing, designed to prevent migrants from settling in the city, outsourcing social reproduction of the labor forces back to the countryside. The dual land system acts in tandem with the household registration system to relegate migrants to informal settlements in the city margins then incentives demolition of these settlements for profitable development. Through a descriptive, geospatial analysis of the Beijing 2000 and 2010 Census and municipal land transactions, this thesis contributes a systemic understanding of the spatial relationship of large residential developments and migrant settlement patterns. Regional variance along characteristics of education, agricultural, and collective hukou differentiate the primarily young clusters of migrant settlements past the 5th Ring Road. The age structure in and around the sites of large scale redevelopment indicate the outsourcing of social reproduction. This spatial and temporal marginalization through which migrants are denied access to proper urban family, domesticity, and citizenship leaves migrants in a state of queer precarity