Inequality with Chinese Characteristics: How to Atomize a Nation Without Firing a Shot

A new book by Alexsia T. Chan claims that discrimination against internal migrant workers is not an accident but a strategy.

By Massimo Introvigne

December 1, 2025

Alexsia T. Chan and her new book.

If you have ever wondered how an authoritarian regime can maintain control without breaking a sweat—or a rib—Hamilton College’s Alexsia T. Chan’s “Beyond Coercion: The Politics of Inequality in China” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025) offers some clues about the art of bureaucratic suffocation. Forget tanks in Tiananmen or surveillance drones buzzing overhead. The Chinese state, Chan argues, has perfected a quieter, more elegant form of repression: political atomization. It’s repression by red tape, domination by document, and inequality by design.

Chan’s central concept—political atomization—is not just a clever academic term. It’s the state’s preferred method of turning potential dissenters into isolated administrative units, each too fragmented to organize and too dependent to resist. The book’s focus is China’s vast population of rural migrant workers, those millions who build the cities but remain legally and socially excluded from them. Despite national policies promising inclusion, Chan shows how local governments have weaponized public services to demobilize, not empower.

China has over 290 million migrant workers, nearly 20% of its population. By 2030, it is expected that 70% of the Chinese population, one billion people, will be living in large cities. Yet as Chan reveals, only a fraction—less than 30% of internal migrants in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai—have access to urban public services such as education, healthcare, and housing. Local governments find ways to dodge compliance even when central directives mandate inclusion.

“Political atomization” is a “divide and conquer” strategy. It aims to prevent internal migrants from mobilizing as a group, which would be dangerous for the regime. This would happen, Chan argues, if services were uniformly denied to all migrants. In China, “few migrants gain access to urban entitlements,” and others are told they will be accessible soon. Although these “phantom services” never materialize, the promise is enough to divide those who believe in the promise from those who don’t. “Because a few are able to gain access to services,” the system of political atomization “makes it more difficult for them to build a collective consciousness, much less engage in collective action.”

Is this a strategy by the central authorities in Beijing, perhaps by Xi Jinping himself? Chan answers that it doesn’t really matter. “It is difficult to definitively determine whether it was a wholly formed, premeditated master plan from the start, but it need not be to work.”

The mechanism works through a three-pronged strategy of exclusion, absorption, and segregation, particularly in education. Migrants excluded from public education resort to their own private schools. However, migrant-run schools are often denied certification, shut down, or starved of resources. A few private schools are absorbed into the public system—but only those that serve the state’s image. Local officials cherry-pick institutions that can be showcased as “inclusive,” while leaving the rest to rot. Even when migrants are allowed into public schools, they are often placed in separate classes, denied extracurriculars, and excluded from parent-teacher associations. It’s apartheid with a syllabus.

A poorly furnished classroom in a school for migrants’ children in Beijing. Credits.

Chan’s fieldwork is meticulous. She interviews school administrators, local officials, and migrant parents, weaving their voices into a scholarly and deeply human narrative. One parent recounts being told that her child could attend a public school—if she paid a “temporary residence fee” equivalent to two months’ salary. Other children are excluded from educational services because they lack a local “hukou” (household registration). Indeed, keeping the migrants registered with their “hukou” in their remote local villages is a primary strategy to exclude them from city services.

Healthcare access for migrants is similarly restricted. Only a small percentage of migrant workers have access to urban medical insurance, despite contributing to the local economy at scale. They open their own illegal medical clinics, but, just as it happens for their private schools, they are at risk of being raided and shut down by the police. Housing policies are equally exclusionary: migrants are often confined to overcrowded dormitories or illegal tenements, while urban residents enjoy subsidized apartments and mortgage benefits.

Migrants may invent creative forms of resistance. Some would “negotiate with their employers to opt out of paying into social insurance schemes,” from which they derive no benefits, replacing them with “small-scale, self-run insurance arrangements.” However, these “individual-level schemes are no match for systemic deflection and demobilization.”

Chan’s real achievement is showing how Chinese policies claiming to improve the migrant workers’ lot are not just inefficient—they’re strategically cynical. The state doesn’t fail to include migrants by accident. It succeeds in excluding them by design. Public services are used not to uplift, but to isolate. Benefits are dangled like carrots, then withdrawn when workers get too organized. It’s a system that rewards compliance and punishes collective action.

A bus taking migrants from Badong, in rural western Hubei, to the provincial capital Wuhan. Credits.

Ironically, this atomization is sold as modernization. Chan dissects government reports that boast of “inclusive urbanization,” while simultaneously documenting how local officials manipulate enrollment data, redefine eligibility criteria, and reclassify migrants to avoid accountability. It’s a bureaucratic shell game, and the house always wins.

Chan also explores the psychological toll of this system. Migrants internalize their exclusion, often blaming themselves for not trying hard enough to integrate. The state doesn’t just control bodies—it colonizes minds.

And yet, “Beyond Coercion” is not a despairing book. It is a call to recognize the sophistication and fragility of modern authoritarianism. Chan doesn’t rely on Cold War tropes or caricatures of Chinese despotism. Instead, she offers a nuanced, data-rich analysis of how inequality is manufactured, maintained, and masked. While “harmful to migrants’ well-being” and, unbeknownst to the authorities, “bad for economic growth,” political atomization may “gradually corrode regime stability.”

The book is essential for anyone who believes repression always requires violence. Chan shows that in China, control is often exercised through the mundane rituals of governance—forms, fees, and forgotten promises. It’s not the boot that crushes dissent. It’s the bureaucrat who misfiles the migrant’s application.

Source: bitterwinter.org