With China’s sky-rocketing economic growth since the late 1980’s, the mobility of its labor force has increased tremendously. In the early 21st century the number of internal migrants is approaching 300 million, corresponding to more than 20% of the country’s population. This development has become a cause for political concern, highlighting significant issues in the social relations between settled communities and new migrants. This book examines in depth how institutional arrangements, in particular, the Hukou (Household Registration) system, influence the integration of migrants at their destinations. Under this unique Chinese settlement system, migrants are defined by their Hukou location to which they are allocated by birth or by later official permissions if they fulfill certain requirements. The primary research questions approached concern the economic, social, political and psychological integration of migrants in cities. They are answered on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative original primary data. The findings are impressive. Migrants show strong performances with regard to their integration into labor markets and their income levels. Nevertheless, they display significantly weaker performances in the area of social integration and political integration. Surprisingly no difference in integration at the psychological level could be found.

This book examines rural-urban migration policies in China, and considers how Chinese workers cope with migration events in the context of these policies. It explores the contribution of migrant workers to the Chinese economy, the impact of changes within the ‘hukou’ system (household registration) and the impact of recent migration policies promoting rural-urban migration and targeting key events during migrant workers’ migration trajectories - job-seeking, wage exploitation, work injuries and illness - namely the corresponding ‘Skills Training Program for Migrant Workers’, the ‘Circular on Managing Wage Payment to Migrant Workers’, the ‘Circular on Migrant Workers Participating in Work-Related Injury Insurance’, and the ‘New Rural Medical Cooperative Scheme’ (Health Insurance). Through in-depth interviews, it examines how when facing such challenges, migrant workers choose to either make a claim under existing policies, or use other coping strategies. The book notably proposes a typology of “coping” which includes a variety of administrative coping, political coping and social coping, and considers how workers in China harness the power of civil groups and social networks.

A new understanding of rural-urban migration and inequality in contemporary China Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are—contrary to state policy and media portrayals—diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China’s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that—more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform—class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China.

A dialectical relationship between freedom and resignation, I argue, mirrors the tension between strong economic growth and tightening political control in China. I explore this relationship in migrants’ extended identities in the space of suspension, in their endeavor to build a community on bandit land, in the furnished but empty houses, in the reconciliation between migrant desire and the institutional barriers, and, lastly, in migrant aspirations for living at the center of the country yet in conflict with the state’s population control. Becoming urban is a process in which migrant workers come to terms with the bitter reality of society through strength and freedom.

Based on in-depth ethnographic research--and using an approach that seeks to understand how migration is experienced by the migrants themselves--this is a fascinating study of the experiences of women in rural China who joined the vast migration to Beijing and other cities at the end of the twentieth century. It focuses on the experiences of rural-urban migrants, the particular ways in which they talk about those experiences, and how those experiences affect their sense of identity. Through first-hand accounts of actual migrant workers the author provides valuable insights into how rural women negotiate rural/urban experiences; how they respond to migration and life in the city; and how that experience shapes their world view, values, and relations with others. The book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between gender and social change, and of the ways in which globalization and modernity are experienced at the most personal level.

Through interviews with city residents, Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish provide a unique survey of urban life in the last decade of Mao Zedong's rule. They conclude that changes in society produced under communism were truly revolutionary and that, in the decade under scrutiny, the Chinese avoided ostensibly universal evils of urbanism with considerable success. At the same time, however, they find that this successful effort spawned new and equally serious urban problems—bureaucratic rigidity, low production, and more.

As China moves from a society controlling all aspects of life, including population movement, to something nearer a market economy, migration has become a live issue. Tens of millions of rural migrants have entered China's cities, meeting discrimination similar to that experienced by economic migrants in the West. This book looks to the reasons why people leave certain areas, the lives of migrants and government policy towards them. It distinguishes different types of migration and looks particularly at marriage migration and the effects of migration on the lives of women.