An ad recruiting a sanitation worker at a mall (@Guangzhou, 2016) . It is said that the position is open to workers of any household registration types (hukou) and offers comprehensive social insurance benefits.

Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion​:
​Pension Expansion in China

My dissertation, Politics of Inclusion and Exclusion: Pension Expansion in China , examines subnational variation in pension coverages in China. By using original dataset of 31 provinces and 288 municipalities in China, two rounds of survey data on labor dynamics in China, and more than thirty in-depth interviews, I explore why some localities develop a pension regime inclusive to informal workers that distributes welfare benefits on the basis of local citizenship, while others consolidate the existing employment-based welfare regime that concentrates welfare benefits on workers with formal and stable employment.

I argue that the impact of labor informalization varies across localities depending on the level of labor importation--the level of which internal migrant workers are used in the local labor market. When labor informality intrudes local workers’ employment, local governments incorporate the increasing number of local informal workers into the social safety nets by developing a universal welfare system that unties welfare entitlement from one’s employment position. However, labor informality does not contribute to the development of a universal welfare system when the shock of labor informalization is absorbed by non-local migrant workers.