UC Berkeley

Rural-to-urban migrants in China face numerous forms of social exclusion. This article argues that community-based approaches offer innovative ways with which to tackle the problems of social exclusion for rural-to-urban migrants, yet these approaches have been neglected. This article first provides an overview of the concept of social exclusion, as developed by Western European scholarship and policy discourse. Next, it examines the ways in which these concepts are relevant to the context of rural-to-urban migrants within China. Finally, this article conceptualizes the social exclusion paradigm from a community practice perspective and offers the implications of this paradigm for community-level interventions.