About the speaker:
Tianlong You, Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Yunnan University, Ph.D. in Socioogy of Law from Arizona State University, J.D. from Hofstra University. His interests include international migration, study of Chinese Overseas, border studies, platform economy, rural e-commerce. He received degrees in political science, law, anthropology, and sociology during the years in the United States, served as judicial intern for the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, worked as associate editor and executive articles editors for two law journals, and volunteered for the Arizona chapter of ACLU as community legal advocate. Recently, he guest edited a special issue on China's borderlands for China Information, a top China studies journal.
Abstract:
This article contributes to the debate on the “local governance turn” by considering a recent immigration context in an emergent destination: Yiwu, China, a county-level city which is home to tens of thousands of immigrants. We investigate how a smaller-sized county government strikes a balance between drawing at foreign businesspersons, as well as an even larger-sized domestic Muslim population, for economic development, and preventing security threats by implementing “a whole-of-society approach”. This approach, though in resemblance to the multi-level governance (MLG) which is increasingly adopted in the field of migration policy in European states, has its unique Chinese characteristics. It finds that, at the county level, government agencies of Yiwu proactively reach out to foreigners through creative and high-tech measures. It also finds out that besides the county-level institutional innovations, the police bureau remains heavily dependent on the traditional and intensive management at the neighborhood level. Non-public actors, such as businesspersons, along with their own chambers of commerce, play vital roles in this management system through close collaboration with the public sector.
Venue: Room 516, Sociology School Building