In this paper we examine urban ^ rural return migration in China. We argue that the traditional success ^ failure dichotomy approach used for analyzing return migration is inadequate and that it must be expanded to address better the institutional context of the transitional economy. Using an empirical study of Sichuan and Anhui provinces, we analyze the selectivity of return migrants and their reasons for return, focusing not only on how returnees compare with continuing migrants, but also on their decisionmaking. The analysis indicates that returnees are negatively selected among migrants and suggests that failure migrants are more prevalent than are typically portrayed in the literature. The results also highlight family demand as an important reason for return. These findings suggest that migrants' institutional and social inferiority in the city undermines their likelihood to succeed in the destination and reinforces their desire to return when family needs arise. Our analysis raises questions about the optimism of existing studies about the contribution of return migrants in China's countryside.

The study of split households in China and elsewhere has tended to focus on rural-urban migration. But the phenomenon of split householding, in which members of the family live separately, is also common among urban-urban migrants, despite the relatively little scholarly attention this group has received. Against this backdrop, this research is concerned with urban and educated split households in China, with a particular focus on how women in these long-distance relationships negotiate relational power in their split households. This paper draws on a combination of 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of public socio-political rhetoric, both historical and contemporary, regarding husbands and wives from split households to shed light on the contemporary relationships between urban, educated Chinese parents and patriarchal values rooted in the Confucian family system.

This research reveals that household-splitting is not only a strategy in service of a family’s economic goals, but also a site that potentially (re)shapes gendered values and norms. Split householding incidentally serves as an outlet for women to gain a sense of respite from their “wifely duties” and discover new forms of autonomy, and for men to more freely express emotions of pain and regret, challenging the convention that emotions are associated only with femininity. While such newly constructed freedoms are not a consciously engineered result, these findings support the notion that gender relations in China are at a crossroads between entrenched patriarchal ideologies and narrow spaces of alternative gender practices.

Through a mixed qualitative approach, this dissertation injects politics into an otherwise apolitical discussion of the largest water management project in human history, China's South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP). The SNWTP, which transfers water from south-central China to the country's political and economic heart on the North China Plain (NCP), is being pursued as a means to transforming water management into a space in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can assert its power, rather than a space in which that power may be undermined. I demonstrate how the SNWTP is fundamentally underpinned by the CCP's need to maintain continued economic growth in this critical water-stressed region, which serves as a key factor in its ability to maintain political legitimacy. In pursuing this ultimate goal, the government is presenting the SNWTP in apolitical terms by putting forth what I call "discourses of distraction," or alternative stories about an environmental controversy that serve a particular political agenda. These discourses, I argue, are being employed as a strategic tool to depoliticize the SNWTP, mask its social and ecological impacts, and deflect attention away from three major anthropogenic sources of water stress on the NCP, because to address them would undermine economic growth. In addition to demonstrating how discourse can serve as a political tool, the dissertation illustrates the utility of scalar constructions in political maneuvering around the South-North Water Transfer Project. It also illustrates the ways in which the SNWTP has necessitated a range of temporal, spatial, and sectoral trade-offs, which both reflect and reinforce existing power discrepancies and set in place a pattern of inequities that is likely to persist for decades.