The Making of Mobile Subjects: How migration and institutional reform intersect in northeast China

Xiang Biao examines the increase in outmigration as a result of the emergence of new ‘mobile subjects’. He identifies how institutional reform turned individuals into mobile subjects. He looks at how individuals in northeast China became ‘free labour’, that is, labour disembedded from previous tight encapsulation of work units. The emergence of mobile subjects, however, does not imply a total withdrawal of the state from the social life. Mobile subjects instead result from carefully designed and implemented policies. Development (2007) 50, 69–74. doi:10.1057/palgrave.development.1100430