The launch of economic reforms and the subsequent explosion of legislation have inevitably changed the way in which state and society relate in contemporary China. Before reforms began, people were fixed in their work units or villages, through the strict enforcement of the household registration or hukou system. The patron-client relation, or the instrumental personal ties between individuals and low-level officials within work units, played an important role in maintaining social control. Since reforms began, however, the state has offered more and more space to society, in order to stimulate the market economy. As a result, it has sought to govern and control society through use of legal rules. An unavoidable question, therefore, is how does the state bring these legal rules into play?

One of the major themes of related literature is that law is not a limit on the state, but instead an instrument by which political power is exercised and protected. While these studies offer a general picture of the role of law in China, they are inadequate in that most of them look principally at formal legal institutions and conduct doctrinal analysis using Western legal concepts. Due to the limitations of this approach, they cannot answer how exactly law operates in real life; specifically, they do not address the role of law in balancing economic development and political stability, especially when the two conflict; nor do they address the effect of law on pre-existing hierarchical social classifications. Moreover, the emphasis of the instrumental use of law often assumes or implies that the state is able to achieve its goals via the mechanism of law, while legal realists and legal sociologists often remind us of the indeterminacy and unintended consequences of legal enforcement. These studies, carried out largely through doctrinal analysis of legal texts, thus are quite likely to neglect the complexity of legal enforcement in the real world.

Taking a grassroots-level empirical approach, this article advances its inquiry through a case study of a rural migrant community in Beijing. I examine the interaction between internal migrants and the state, and explore how a piece of legislation governing migrant business was widely evaded, and the reasons why sporadic campaigns, an important method of law enforcement in China, were used by the state against migrants in the enclave. By so doing, I argue that law is not just a simple instrument of the state for achieving its goals, as asserted by many previous studies. Instead, law, through its enforcement by sporadic campaigns, is a sophisticated regime, one that balances the interests of high and low levels of government, reinforces an existing hierarchical relationship, and ultimately fulfills the goal of social control. Further, I argue that even seemingly ineffective laws affect society in indirect and unconscious ways.

Two reasons led me to address these issues by through study of an internal migrant enclave. For one thing, internal migrants are themselves a result of the economic reform which loosened the shackles on the movement inside the country; the interaction between these people and the state offers a direct contrast between the social control regimes before and after the introduction of "rule by law". For another, sporadic law enforcement campaigns adopted as a way of law enforcement in combating migrants shed light on similar campaigns used for many other purposes: for example, the anti-crime campaign, the recent campaign against unregistered internet cafes, and the campaign against illegal publishing businesses. I hope that this case study can illuminate the way law is enforced in China more generally.

This article first documents the development of the migrant enclave, known as Zhejiang Village, and the interaction between migrants and the state. It then explores why sporadic campaigns were adopted by the state to combat migrants, and who were the winners and losers as a result. It concludes that the state in general has an interest in controlling, but not eliminating, migration, and that the use of campaigns satisfies the needs of different, competing interest groups within Chinese bureaucracy and society.