Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how non-residential domestic migrant laborers navigate differentiated access to modern energy services following rural electrification efforts in peri-urban Beijing, exploring ways environmentality is negotiated between both formal and informal energy infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

Beijing's rapid industrial growth in the past few decades has elevated a host of environmental issues to national concern, most notably urban air pollution. Clean air policies have been at the forefront of the city's environmental efforts, successfully integrating surrounding townships into centralized, state-owned energy grids through coal bans (Pachauri 2019), retrofitting households with energy-efficient cooking and heating technologies (Zhang 2012), and subsidized electricity pricing for residential households.

This paper looks at energy access and usage in what I cautiously describe as the "frontier" of Beijing's urban-rural divide where urban villages (chengzhongcun) offer affordable housing options for the city's floating population of domestic migrant laborers seeking work in the nation's capital. Due to their lack of household registration (hukou) in Beijing, migrant workers occupy marginal public and domestic spaces as differentiated citizens (Holston 2008) with little rights and are excluded from receiving subsidized electricity pricing. Ethnographic accounts reveal migrant residents thereby access and use energy differently from other residents, participating in informal arrangements outside of the government's stronghold on centralized energy services that more so reflect the precarious nature of their differentiated citizenship. This paper theorizes ways in which these formal and informal assemblages of household energy access in Beijing's urban-rural margins interact to simultaneously reproduce and resist environmental means of state and subject-making in post-reform China.