ABSTRACT
Despite recent reforms to China’s hukou system, internal migrants in urban centres continue to face significant barriers in accessing welfare benefits and public services. This study introduces the concept of the perceptional welfare boundary to explain how welfare exclusion persists beyond formal institutional constraints. Drawing on qualitative data from focus-group interviews with migrants in Shenzhen, the analysis shows how this boundary is produced and sustained accross three dimensions of welfare engagement—enrolment, benefit access, and information acquisition—through which migrants interpret and navigate welfare institutions in everyday life. The findings reveal that welfare exclusion arises not only from policy thresholds but also from migrants’ perceptions of attainability, bureaucratic complexity, and informational inequality. These subjective interpretations transform formal eligibility into internalised and self-reproduced barriers. By illuminating the cognitive and emotional mechanisms underlying welfare exclusion, this study advances a more nuanced understanding of the intersection between citizenship, mobility, and social positioning in contemporary China.