Rental housing management as surveillance of Chinese rural migrants: the case of hillside compound in Dongguan

Abstract

Governance of numerous rural migrants has always been crucial to China’s social stability. Through a Foucauldian lens, this paper discusses surveillance of rural migrants and studies a new local approach called rental housing management (RHM). During recent years, local authorities in Dongguan have been developing RHM into an operation of incremental Panopticism that consists of gradually reinforced surveillance techniques—partitioning, monitoring, digital entrance guarding, and local registration—in retrofitted rental residences. The RHM enforces local authorities’ inspection and control of migrants, and induces migrants’ self-reporting, self-inspection, and self-protection. This creates difficulties with migrants’ social interaction and community building. This paper reveals that local authorities have been transforming surveillance approaches from management based on hukou (household registration) into RHM that furthers localized spatial governance of rural migrants in the hukou reform.

Keywords:

• Rental housing
• surveillance
• incremental Panopticism
• rural migrants
• hukou