China—Population Resettlement

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History of China Summary

China—Population Resettlement

Compared with Westerners, the Chinese are relatively immobile. China's 1990 census and sample surveys during the 1990s estimated that on average less than 1 percent of the Chinese population move to another city or county each year. Even after taking into account migrants missed by the criteria used in these sources, the mobility of the Chinese is still far lower than that in Western societies. Until the 1980s, China was an overwhelmingly agricultural nation whose sedentary, family-centered production system discouraged mobility; when large-scale population movements did occur, they were usually caused by natural disasters or wars. The varieties, processes, and outcomes of population relocations that have occurred since the 1980s are useful lenses through which one can gauge the tremendous political, social, and economic transformations China has experienced.

Historical Population Relocations

For thousands of years the dominant form of population movement in China was that of peasants searching for new arable land. As they left the middle region and delta of the Yellow River—the cradles and origins of Chinese civilization—they shifted the nation's political and economic center of gravity toward the south. During the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE), the vast majority of the Chinese population resided north of the Chang (Yangtze) River. By the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), the Chang River Delta and Sichuan (in western China) had emerged as new centers of settlement; by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) the Chang River Delta had become the most densely populated area in.

The southward movements of population were further accelerated by political turmoil and invasions from the north. Invasions by the Xiongnu and other "barbarians" during the Wei, Jin, and Northern and Southern dynasties (220–581), rebellions at the end of the Tang dynasty, and invasions by the Jin at the end of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1126), for example, all triggered large-scale population relocations toward southern China.

Government-Initiated Population Relocations Since 1949

The government of the People's Republic of China that was founded in 1949 has repeatedly initiated "planned" population relocations to achieve specific policy objectives. In the early 1950s, the government sent troops, farmers, and youths to northwestern and northeastern border areas such as Xinjiang and Heilongjiang, where they were to reclaim so-called wastelands and set up state farms. That would achieve the dual objectives of consolidating ethnic Han Chinese control over border areas and accelerating the economic development of those regions. Similarly, national security concerns motivated the government to relocate industries and personnel to "Third Front" inland regions during the 1950s and 1960s, driven by the rationale that coastal areas were too vulnerable during times of war.

Between the late 1960s and mid-1970s millions of educated youths were forced to leave urban areas and go "up to the mountains and down to the countryside" (xiangshan xiaxiang) to be reeducated by farmers. This rustication movement was a product of the Cultural Revolution; the young people were joined out in the countryside by the the politically persecuted and counterrevolutionaries. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, however, the majority of these victims of forced relocation were able to return to where they had come from.

Government-initiated relocations since the 1980s have been mainly oriented toward economic development objectives. For example, poverty-alleviation programs have relocated hundreds of thousands of people from resource-poor areas to locations in more favorable environments. In addition, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam that began in the late 1990s necessitates the relocation of over a million people, mostly to newly constructed towns and communities near their original homes.

Household Registration, Mobility Control, and Self-Initiated Migrations

A hallmark of the Chinese centrally planned economy is the household registration (hukou) system, established in the late 1950s and still functioning as a means of state control in the late 1990s. Every person in China has a hukou that indicates where he/she legitimately dwells. During the 1960s and 1970s, hukou entitled individuals to rationed food and clothing. Three decades later, a local hukou is still essential for obtaining subsidized benefits such as housing, schooling, and health care. It is extremely difficult for peasants to obtain urban hukou or to transfer their hukou to urban areas, thus making their survival in urban areas almost impossible. For decades, then, the hukou system served as an effective damper on self-initiated, rural-urban migrations and divided China into two separate entities, one rural and one urban. At the same time, until the 1990s the government was the main agent of labor allocation, via job assignments to graduates and job transfers for state employees. Government-sponsored work-related relocations are typically accompanied by hukou transfers that legitimize the migrants' residence in the new location.

From the 1980s, strong push forces in the countryside and new pull forces in urban areas have compelled the government to relax migration control. The mammoth rural labor surplus, estimated as up to one-sixth of the population, urgently needed to be absorbed outside of agriculture. At the same time, economic reforms induced foreign investment and encouraged urban consumption and services, both demanding cheap labor. In response, the government invented a variety of new permits and hukou statuses to facilitate the temporary migration of peasants, unleashing a floating population estimated to be anywhere between 20 million and 100 million by the mid-1990s. Marketization, decollectivization, and decentralization further undermined the state's role in labor allocation and engendered the emergence of labor markets in China. But the labor market is highly gendered and segmented. Young single peasant women are sought after, but upon marriage and childbirth most women stay in the villages to farm while their husbands may continue to engage in migrant work. In urban areas, peasant migrants are relegated to the bottom rungs and are generally blocked from prestigious and high-paying jobs.

Unlike the first three decades of the People's Republic, post-Mao China is marked by population relocations primarily from inland to coastal regions, high rates of rural-urban migration, increasing prominence of self-initiated moves that rely heavily on social networks, and in general a greater heterogeneity of migration types. But rural-rural migration continues to be important, especially since marriage migration remains the leading reason for female migration in China. The enormity of the population relocations, in conjunction with the legacies of social institutions such as the hukou system, have fostered new thoughts and debates on the social and economic implications of migration. Topics under discussion include the emergence of new social classes in Chinese cities, segmentation of the labor market, the impact of migrants on urban services, gendered division of labor in peasant households, and the feminization of agriculture.