Drawing upon a Sinicized Marxist-Leninism, citizens' rights are represented primarily as socio-economic benefits of China's reform agenda delivered by the Communist Party. Through the policy analysis and the fieldwork in megacities Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in China, this paper explores the relationship between the hierarchical citizenship and the establishment of a welfare state through the development of recent hukou reforms and national urbanization agenda for 2014-2020 initiated by Xi government. This paper argues that the marginalized citizenship formed from former rural-urban segregation has been replaced by a hierarchical one and that migrants in urban spaces bear much the subsequent burden. Hierarchical access to welfare will be enforced rather than loosened in the period of new reform, which is also the consequence of new urbanization strategies of the state. The establishment of pilot projects starting in 2015 is a trial to shift the burden of “citizenizing the rural population and migrants” to the local governments. In the end, this paper tries to elaborate the Institutional change of a welfare state and its significance in the local “hierarchical citizenship”, which could also be reflected in how the state has interpreted the significance of different cities according to the long term development strategies.