The Settlement of Rural Migrants in Urban China—Some of China’s Migrants Are Not “Floating” Anymore
Rachel Connelly
Economics Department
Bowdoin College
Brunswick ME 04011 USA
Kenneth Roberts
Economics Department
Southwestern University
Georgetown TX 78626 USA
Zhenzhen Zheng
Chinese Academy of Social Science
Beijing PRC
March 2010
1
The Settlement of Migrants in Urban China—Some of China’s Migrants Are Not “Floating” Anymore
1: Introduction
The sweeping economic and social changes affecting China are compressing into a few decades the transition from a predominately rural agricultural society to an urban society based in manufacturing and services. The pioneers in this transition have been the millions of Chinese migrant workers who have left their rural villages to work in the cities. These labor migrants form the vast majority of what the Chinese call the “floating population” (liudong renkou), the official term for all of the people who are away from their place of permanent household registration.[1] At first, most of these labor migrants were men who planned to return home after a few years, but women now comprise nearly half of all rural migrants. Recent evidence shows that not only are more women migrating, but they are going after marriage, often with their husbands and children. As migrants increasingly migrate as families, they are more likely to settle in their urban destinations.
The goal of this paper is to investigate the issue of permanent settlement in Chinese urban areas. In a major review of international labor migration, which scholars argue provides the best model for understanding rural to urban labor migration in China (Cai, 2001; Fan, 2004; Roberts, 2000) , Sassen (1999: 142) found an important similarity over time and space was “the formation of permanent settlements for a variable share of migrants … even when there are high return rates and even when a country’s policies seek to prevent permanent settlement.” In this paper, we consider which factors determine settlement, and what types of people are most likely to settle in the Chinese context. To accomplish this goal, our study uses the 2000 Chinese Census, the 2005 One-percent Population Survey, and the 2001 Chinese Urban Labor Survey (CULS). The 2001CULS data collection effort, which focused on five large cities and specifically targeted migrants in a separate sampling frame, yielded 500 migrant interviews in each city and included dimensions of settlement beyond length of stay. We argue that self employment, coresidence with family members, remittances, and current hukou status are all aspects of the settlement process, in addition to length of stay. We explore each of these aspects in this initial portrait of the new settlement of the Chinese rural migrants in urban areas.
The next section explores theoretical approaches to the issue of settlement and Section 3 applies those theories to factors affecting settlement in China. Section 4 provides a statistical portrait of the interrelationship among the various aspect of settlement, followed in Section 5 by a multivariate approach to three of the identified aspects of settlement. Section 6 concludes the paper.
2: The Role of Settlement in Migration Theory
2.A: Neoclassical Theory and Return Migration
The focus of migration theory has been on the causes and consequences of movement from one place to another, so it is only natural that standard migration theory has assumed permanent migration as the norm and return migration as the anomaly. Yet close examination of any migration process shows a very large proportion of migrants do return to their place of origin, whether they are legal immigrants to the United States or guest workers to European countries (Dustmann, 1996).
Neoclassical economics views migration and return as rational decisions that weigh the costs and benefits of staying in the destination versus returning to the origin. In situations where a significant wage gap between sending and receiving areas persists over time, a simple application of neoclassical theory can only view returnees as failures, unable to reap the benefits available to them in the destination (Constant and Massey, 2002). Neither the surge of circular labor migration around the world in the last several decades nor the remittances that these migrants send home fit into this simple formulation of return migration as a permanent migration that has gone bad.
A more sophisticated application of neoclassical theory that is consistent with circular migration brings intentions to return into the analysis. These intentions are reflected in behavior during migration: “it is the expected return which links the economic behavior of the migrant in the host country to the economic situation in the home country” (Dustmann, 1996). Thus, because wages and the opportunity cost of leisure are higher in the destination, migrants with an intention to return will work harder while there, and older migrants will invest less in destination-specific human capital. Within this model, the reason migrants intend to return is a strong preference for residence in the community of origin combined with the difficulty earning a living there. Migrants may have a target level of savings to attain while working in the destination that they intend to consume in their rural home, either because the costs of that consumption are lower at home or because the utility they expect to receive from consumption there is higher (Orrenius, 1999). Alternatively, the “bright lights” of the city may lead migrants to change their minds and want to stay to enjoy the broad range of available consumption opportunities, and if they are young and better educated they can benefit from spillover learning opportunities as well (McCormick and Wahba, 2005).
The “new economics of labor migration” takes a different, but not inconsistent, approach to the issues of return and circulation. The target may be to accumulate savings for investment because of market failure at home, or the goal might be to diversify sources of household income across sectors and space to reduce risk. Remittances fit nicely into this model, not only for altruistic purposes or investment but as a form of coinsurance between persons at the origin and the destination, and should increase with the potential for investment there or the insecurity of employment in the destination (Taylor, 1999). Since remittances are monetary manifestations of the ties of the migrant to home, return migration should increase with the strength of the same factors that increase remittances.
3.B: Backing into Settlement: Cumulative Causation and Networks
An alternative formulation of staying versus returning looks not at intentions but at outcomes, for “settlement has a funny way of creeping up on immigrant workers who intend to stay only a short while” (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1995: 1). Not returning is conceptualized as a postponement, not as a change of heart: “the migrant workers who entered the various European destination countries, who were seen and saw themselves as temporary migrants, were in reality settling” (Ganga, 2006: 97). Dustmann (1996) examined return intentions of foreign workers in Europe and their realization over the subsequent nine years: 11 percent intended to return and had, 31 percent didn't intend to return and had not, and 55 percent intended to return but had not. The probability of actual return increased with age at entry and decreased with years of residence in the destination. These same results were found in a study of return migration from the United States, with each additional year of residence lowering the probability of return more than the previous (Reagan and Olsen, 2000).
Several factors have been found to be important in determining whether a strategy of circular migration turns into settlement, including gender, the presence of family, networks, and employment. Both men and women initially intend to return, but women’s preferences seem to change more: “women gain greater personal autonomy and independence, becoming more self-reliant as they participate in public life and gain access to both social and economic resources previously beyond their reach” (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1995: 146). While male labor migrants often face discrimination in the destination and seek to return home to regain status, “research shows consistently that gains in gender equity are central to women’s desires to settle, more or less permanently, to protect their advances” (Pessar, 2003: 29).
Family and networks interact to produce settlement. Generally, younger parents who bring their children find them to be a point of entry into the destination society; the presence of children “forces the parents to take into account the necessity of liaising, for the first time or in new ways, with services and institutions at the place of residence” and to develop new social networks (Ganga, 2006: 102). Their children are more exposed to the host population than are parents, and this assimilation has spillover effects, increasing the probability of their parents staying in the destination (Dustmann, 1996). A study of migrants who intended to return but had not found that three of the six principal reasons they gave for not returning were related to their children (Ganga, 2006).
A final reason for staying is connected with employment. “Return” is usually thought of by the migrant as going back to the place of origin, but that may not be an option if there are no jobs there except in low-return agriculture. If migrants move instead to a regional city – the solution envisioned by Chinese urban planners who promote the small-city policy – they may see no advantage of moving at all since “it is the same old factory work” (Ganga, 2006). Even so, it is unlikely that low-skill factory workers can stay in the destination indefinitely, either because they cannot continue to work so hard or because of employer preference for younger workers. The occupation that does seem to keep migrants in the destination is successful entrepreneurship (Moran-Taylor and Menjívar, 2005). Entrepreneurship provides independence, potentially higher income, control over work pace, and the opportunity for spouses and children to work together to earn income.
In sum, the major factors highlighted by theory affecting settlement, whether intentional or not, are the costs and benefits of consumption in the origin and destination, considerations related to family and children, the development of networks, employment opportunities (particularly self employment), and risk. The following section will apply this analysis to China.
3: Changing Patterns of Migration in China
For a country which once had one of the most restrictive migration policies on earth, China has developed a remarkably positive attitude toward urbanization during the last decade. At the 16th Party Congress in 2002, President Jiang Zemin said “all institutional and policy barriers to urbanization must be removed and the rational and orderly flow of rural labor guided” (Jacka and Gaetano, 2004: 48). His pronouncement was recognition of two realities, one urban and one rural. At the urban level, many scholars believe that China is under-urbanized and that economies of agglomeration are unexploited (Liu, Li and Zhang, 2003). At the rural level, the solution to poverty is increasingly seen to lie in the city – in permanent migration and urban citizenship – rather than in labor-intensive agriculture. This has been called the “the third liberation” of the Chinese peasants, after land reform and the household responsibility system (Sun, 2005).
China classified 36.2 percent of its population as urban in 2000, growing to 43 percent in 2005 (Li and Plachaud, 2006). While there is some confusion regarding urbanization levels as a result of urban sprawl and shifting administrative boundaries, the inescapable conclusion is that more than half of the Chinese population, some 870 million people, will be urban within a decade (United Nations, 2006).
Most of the growth in cities has come from increasing rural to urban migration. The 2000 census and the 2005 One-percent Population Survey show the size of the “floating population” grew from 144 million to 147 million, and the interprovincial segment of this population grew even faster, from 42.4 million to 47.8 million (Wang, 2006). The annual migration survey of the Ministry of Agriculture shows an even greater proportional increase in interprovincial migration, from 21 to 40 million between 1999 and 2003 (Du, Park and Wang, 2005).
Despite the growing numbers of migrants in Chinese cities, the issue of migration is usually considered separately from urbanization because of the assumption that this migration is temporary. The popular image of Chinese migration is that it is dominated by men who leave their wives and children at home while they work in the cities. In fact, the 2005 One-percent Population Survey shows that 49 percent of the migrants are now women[2], and a longitudinal survey in nine provinces found that after 1996 the migration rate of young women exceeded that of young men (Mu and van de Walle, 2009). Even when the migration of women is acknowledged, the assumption is that most of these women are young and unmarried, and that they will return to the countryside after a few years to assume their adult status as wives and mothers.
This assumption no longer reflects the current reality of China’s rural to urban migration. Jacka (2006: 275) writes, “There are thousands of rural women living in Beijing and other cities who are older than the typical dagongmei (maiden workers), are married and have children, and are either self-employed or care for their children while their husband earns an income.” Survey research from the mid-1990’s already found that significant numbers of migrants came with their spouses. In Shanghai, analysis of surveys of the floating population yield estimates that one-fifth to one-third of migrants were accompanied by a spouse during the 1990s (Fudan University, 1997; Roberts, 2002; Wang and Shen, 2003). A 1995 survey of migrants in Beijing, Wuhan, Suzhou and Shenzhen found that one-third were accompanied by a spouse (Knight, Song and Jia, 1999), while a 1999 survey in Beijing and Shanghai found that 44 percent of migrants were with their spouse (Wu, 2004). A rural survey of returned migrant women in Sichuan and Anhui provinces found that two-thirds of their migration episodes had occurred after marriage, that four-fifths of married women had children by the time they took their first trip, and that half of the married women migrated with their spouse. Of these, about one fourth brought their children with them (Roberts, et al., 2004).
The presence of family in the city is conducive to long-term stays and settlement, but data on whether this is, in fact, occurring are difficult to obtain. Surveys of returned migrants in the late 1990s in Anhui and Sichuan (Bai and He, 2003), and in those two provinces plus Hebei, Hunan, Shaanxi and Zhejiang (Zhao, 2002), found average durations of stay in the destination were between three and four years. Rural surveys, however, miss those migrants who had not yet returned and so might understate settlement. A 2005 survey undertaken in urban areas of Zhejiang province found 45 percent of migrant households had been in the city for over three years, and that 72 percent of married migrants lived with a spouse (Qi and He, 2005). A study by People's University showed that the majority of the 3.5 million migrants in Beijing had been there an average of five years (Xinhua, 2007). Urban surveys, however, might also understate settlement by truncating duration, for it is impossible to know how much longer the long-term residents will stay. Most recently, the National Bureau of Statistics provided summary data from surveys of the floating population spanning a decade: the proportion staying less than a year fell from 51 percent to 23 percent between 1993 and 2003, while those staying more than five years rose from 6 percent to 40 percent by 2000 (Nielsen and Smyth, 2007).
Table 1 uses the 2000 Census and the 2005 One-percent Population Survey to compare the percent of male and female migrants who report being in their current destination for five or more years. In all but three provinces, the proportion of long-term migrants has increased during this five-year period. While the percent varies by province, from a low of 23 percent in Zhejiang to a high of 52 percent in Heilongjiang, on the average of about a third of both men and women are spending extended periods of time in their destinations.
There have been few studies of the intentions of migrants to stay in Chinese cities. A 2006 survey in Beijing found that nearly half of the 2,532 migrants surveyed expressed a strong desire to stay (Hu 2007). A Fujian survey found that, if given a choice, 46 percent of migrants planned to return home after earning enough money, 21 percent wanted to stay where they were, and the rest wished to move elsewhere or were undecided (Zhu, 2007).
As discussed above, costs and consumption opportunities emerge as important factors that both discourage and encourage potential settlement in Chinese cities. The gap between rich urban and poor rural is wide in China, and is expensive for a migrant to live in the city relative to their income. The average migrant wage nationally was 5,444 yuan in 2002, compared to average expenditure of urban residents of 6,930 yuan (Zhu, 2007). A survey by the National Bureau of Statistics found migrants earned a monthly average of 966 yuan and spent 463 yuan, two-thirds of it on food and accommodations (Xinhua, 2006c). In the Fujian survey, most migrants earned 500 to 800 yuan per month, and only 29 percent said they earned enough money to support their family in the city (Zhu, 2007).