Migration and Privatization of Space and Power in Late Socialist China

In this article, I examine the informal privatization of space and power occurring within China's "floating population" under late socialism. Focusing on a prominent unofficial migrant community in Beijing, I analyze the ways migrant leaders build up their power through the control of housing and market spaces and by mobilizing traditional social networks. By revealing the complexity and uncertainties within the culturally specific reconfiguration of power and social relations in post‐Mao China, I challenge the metanarrative of postsocialist transformations as a teleological move toward liberal capitalism and democracy, and I articulate the dialectical relationship between space and power, space, power, migration, social network, state‐society dynamic, socialism and postsocialism, China