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.

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.

Rural-urban migration has been going on in China since the early 1980s, resulting in complicated sociolinguistic environments. Migrant workers are the backbone of China's fast growing economy, and yet little is known about their and their children’s identities – who they are, who they think they are, and who they are becoming. The study of their linguistic practice can reveal a lot about their identity construction as well as about transitions in Chinese society and the (re)formation of social structure at the macro level. In this book, Dong Jie presents a wide range of ethnographic data which are organised around a scalar framework. She argues that three scales – linguistic communication, metapragmatic discourse, and public discourse – interact in complex and multiple ways.

This book offers a sociological analysis as well as a theological discussion of China’s internal migration since the marketization reform in 1978. It documents the social and political processes that encompass the experiences of internal migrants from the countryside to the city during China’s integration into the global economy. Informed by sociological analysis and narratives of the urban poor, this volume reconstructs the political, economic, social and spiritual dimensions of this urban underclass in China who made up the economic backbone of the Asian superpower.

This book explores how population mobility varies among the countries of Asia. While much attention has been given to international migration, movement within countries is numerically much more significant. Coupling innovative methods developed in the global IMAGE project with the contextual knowledge of experts on 15 Asian countries, the book measures and explains how people across Asia differ in the probability of changing residence, the ages at which they move, and the impact of these migrations on the distribution of human settlement within each country. It demonstrates how stage of economic development, coupled with historical events, local contingencies, cultural norms, political frameworks, and the physical environment shape human migration. By using rigorous statistics in a robust comparative framework, this book provides a clear understanding of contemporary migration in Asia for students and academics, and a valuable resource for policy-makers and planners in Asia and beyond.

Nyiri explores recent challenges to state authority as Chinese citizens become increasingly mobile as migrant workers, tourists, and students, both inside China and abroad.--Pal Nyiri is professor of global history from an anthropological perspective at the Vrije Universitiet, Amsterdam.

The recent unprecedented scale of Chinese migration has had far-reaching consequences. Within China, many villages have been drained of their young and most able workers, cities have been swamped by the ‘floating population’, and many rural migrants have been unable to integrate into urban society. Internationally, the Chinese have become increasingly more mobile. This Handbook provides a unique collection of new and original research on internal and international Chinese migration and its effects on the sense of belonging of migrants.