Making Hidden Exclusions: Immigrant-Selection Institutional Arrangements and Migrants’ Everyday Practices in Chinese Megacities

Based on the analyses of the local citizenship institutional arrangements and rural-origin migrants’ substantive citizenship practices across three migrant communities in Chengdu, this paper finds that the current local citizenship regime functions as a migrant elite selection system. All the empirical findings suggest that citizenship in Chinese megacities is exclusive and competitive, far from ‘ensuring urban and rural residents move freely and enjoy equal citizenship and public services’ alleged by text-based citizenship policies. Therefore, the separation between text-based citizenship and migrants’ citizenship practices in everyday lives contours the stratified characteristics of local citizenship in Chinese megacities today. ‘The right to the city’, which has been extensively discussed by academia, is still competitive, making hidden exclusions for many disadvantaged migrants.