China—Internal Migration | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

About 4 pages (1,197 words)

History of China Summary

China—Internal Migration

From the 1950s to late 1978, strict controls limited population mobility in China. Even by the time of the 1982 census, China still had a very low level of migration to urban areas for a country at its level of development.

Pre-Reform Migration

In the early 1950s, rural migrants moved to the cities in large numbers. Estimates suggest that from 1949 to 1953 the urban population grew by twenty million, 70 percent of which was attributable to migration. To combat the growing pressure on housing, transportation, education, and health facilities, a system designed to monitor population movement was introduced in 1951. Through a series of regulations culminating in the "Regulations of Household Registration in the People's Republic of China" issued in 1958, the Chinese government developed perhaps the strictest set of controls over the movement of population in the modern world. The basis of control was the hukou, or household registration system. Deriving from China's traditional household registration system, it also incorporated elements of the labor registration system of the Soviet Union. Under the system each household possessed a registration book listing its members and categorizing the household as "agricultural" or "nonagricultural." This division has become a fundamental social divide in China, producing what has been called "a castelike system of social stratification" that keeps the peasants on the land and reinforces a spatial hierarchy in which Beijing, Shanghai, and the other big cities are considered the most desirable places to live and therefore the most difficult to move to.

Under the planned economy with overwhelming state control, people were supposed to reside and work only where they had their hukou; any stay in other places over three days needed to be registered at the police station. Transfer of hukou was granted only under such circumstances as an assignment to a job in another area or a marriage across administrative boundaries. The hukou was the passport to employment and the rations that were issued only locally.

Despite the severe restrictions, considerable rural-to-urban migration still existed. According to official estimates, between 25 and 30 million people obtained hukou transfers from one province to another between 1949 and 1978. This figure does not include hukou migration within provinces, which would have been of a greater magnitude, or unsanctioned, non-hukou migration.

The government organized both economic and political oriented migrations during this period. Economic migrations primarily involved skilled workers in large-scale development projects and students pursuing higher education. In the 1950s peasants were officially recruited into the urban labor force and given nonagricultural status. Later they would be recruited as contract workers for the urban labor force. At the same time, more than 1 million people were moved from heavily populated areas of Shangdong Province to open up sparsely populated areas elsewhere between 1955 and 1960, while in January 1959 it was announced that Zhejing Province was to send 300,000 young people to help develop Ningxia Province. Large public-works projects also forced significant migrations; by the mid-1980s, more than 5 million people had been moved to make way for reservoir construction.

Political migrations included job assignments to frontier areas such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet; punishment or political exile; and conscription. Punishment and political exile produced some of the most substantial urban-to-rural migration of the period. It is estimated that between 400,000 and 700,000 rightists were exiled to the rural areas in 1957, where some were to stay for more than twenty years. During the Cultural Revolution urban areas sustained a net loss of almost five million people to rural exile. Individuals who had been politically disgraced were sent for particularly long periods, but ordinary intellectuals and cadres were also sent to the countryside to undergo months or even years of labor reform. In the early 1970s, some 20 million Red Guards were directed to go to the villages for reeducation.

Apart from those organized migrations, spontaneous permanent migrations are estimated to have involved at least 10 million people from 1949 to the mid-1980s. Most spontaneous migrants were peasants continuing migration patterns established before restrictions were imposed. However, before the economic reforms of the late 1970s institutional barriers to migration imposed by the government made movement from a village to an urban area as difficult as movement across national borders elsewhere in the world.

Internal Migration Since 1978

The scale of internal migration in China increased enormously with the advent of economic reforms. Figures commonly given for the migrant population vary from 40 to as high as 100 million. Migrants are generally divided into three categories: those who have crossed an administrative border with official permission (qianyi renkou), the floating population (liudong renkou) or "blind migrants" (mangliu) without official permission, and temporary contractual laborers from the rural areas (mingong). The floating population in the biggest cities is estimated to form between one-fifth and one-third of their total population. Big cities everywhere have attracted very large numbers, but migrants also go to rapidly industrializing areas such as the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong Province and the towns of southern Jiangsu.

The majority of migrations in China are within the same province. According to the 1990 census, between 1985 and 1990 there were more than 23 million movements within provinces, compared to more than 11 million between provinces. Available data indicate that approximately one-third of migration was interprovincial in 1990, representing rapid change from 1988, when less than one-fifth of migration had been interprovincial. Migrants from the eastern region tend to stay closer to their native areas, whereas migrants from the less developed central and western regions are more likely to travel to the more developed seaboard provinces, especially those of southeastern China.

Four major reasons have been commonly identified in migration during the reform era: urban-rural disparity, rural surplus labor, development of township and village enterprises (TVEs) and urbanization of rural towns, and business opportunities. Indeed, rapid economic development has offered tremendous job opportunities to migrant workers.

Although it became much easier to move from one area to another after 1978, household registration has remained extremely difficult to change. In 1985 the Ministry of Public Security issued a new regulation on temporary residence certificates for the urban areas. Migrant workers who have obtained these are allowed to live in the urban areas but do not enjoy the social benefits to which permanent urban residents are entitled.

The impact of migration is varied. It has given some people the chance to lift themselves out of poverty and to acquire new skills. At the same time, the influx of rural migrants has caused the urban infrastructure considerable strain. Many migrants lead difficult lives in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. While migrant earnings have brought new wealth to the countryside, some fear that the departure of so many young, educated residents will be to the detriment of rural society. However, there is no doubt that by providing cheap labor and filling in economic vacuums, migrants have made major contributions to China's economic success.