In his classic study, Political Man, Seymour Martin Lipset, advanced an interesting correlation between components of economic development and democracy - with one of those components being that of urbanization. Urbanization is not only critical in a country’s development from an agricultural society to an industrial and service society, but also seems correlated towards facilitating a sustainable democracy. Comprising a total of 36.9% of the world population China (19.67%) and India (17.23%) hold our attention because of their growing importance on the international political and economic stage. As the world has entered into a majority urbanized age, these two behemoth countries will soon follow suit. How they proceed is critically important for sustainable progress of the globalized system. Our goal in this paper is to examine these countries’ respective experiments in absorbing rural populations in hopes of better understanding how the practice of citizenship is improved or undermined in this process. China, an authoritarian country, is gradually liberalizing economic policies as well as some limited liberalization in political participation while India, a liberal democracy, is gradually tightening control by maturing legislation and empowering decentralized authority. This comparison is born in the belief that new questions and perspectives can be garnered, which can further inform the study of the cases individually by observing how these two countries, being polar in many ways, are addressing many similar problems and gravitating towards similar policy. In particular, we have found tentative evidence that Indian rural citizens have a better chance to affect change than their Chinese rural counterparts. However, this statement must be greatly qualified. For the majority of migrants in both countries, exercise of citizenship is a mute point. The Chinese government appropriates peasant lands without hesitation and the Indian government will obliviously clear slum areas for new infrastructure projects. The most successful migrants - and they are in the extreme minority - are the ones who have the best chance of affecting change. We are seeing that this group in India is able to affect political change that not only sets precedents for others to attain similar rights but also sets forth change that has nationwide implications. The successful Chinese migrant, by contrast, only serves to reproduce and exacerbate the inequalities that now exist between urbanites and ruralites because of 1) a certain institutional mechanism in place called the hukou (or household registration system), which grants unequal privileges to urban and rural citizens and 2) the introduction of markets, which has served to commodify citizenship - rich rural migrants can buy their way into holding an urban hukou without improving the lot of migrants in general. Those familiar with the China-India comparison literature will know that China outpaces India on many measures, such as household savings, female literacy, luring foreign investors, and modernizing its cities. There nevertheless has been a growing sub literature (Huang 2003; Kohli 2004; and Friedman and Gilley 2005) that has sought to challenge the overall assessment of “China is a success/India is a failure.” This paper complements this sub literature by comparing the plight of rural migrants in their quest not only for a better economic life but a political one, too
