The base: a case of infrastructural governance of labour outmigration in China

Since the early 1990s, the Chinese government replaced strict control over outmigration with measures of ‘infrastructural governance’. Instead of dictating who can and who cannot leave, the state manages migration by influencing the sociotechnical conditions of mobility, for instance by defining what responsibilities commercial intermediaries should shoulder and what training a migrant should receive before departure. This article unpacks infrastructural governance by examining the working of ‘base’, or jidi in Chinese. A base is a tight cluster of public and private institutions in a labour source place, designated by the government as an important player in the recruitment of migrant workers. The base manages migration by conditioning the activities that lead to migration, such as how people choose destinations, make payments, and deal with uncertainties in preparing for migration. The base also works on migrants’ relations with family members, village cadres and fellow migrants in order to shape their mobilities. The ethnographic research on the base shows that, infrastructural governance regulates migration effectively, but makes migration more complicated and more costly for the migrants. Infrastructural governance empowers commercial intermediaries and local government, and as such affects broader social relations in the community.