In China, Urbanization Leads to Mass Migration

By Thomas Gaffney

April 1, 2015

For most of its history, Luoxi, a small rural village nestled in the northeast of Sichuan Province, was a rapeseed farming community much like any other agricultural village in China’s countryside. People who were born in the town worked, married and spent most of their lives there, much as their ancestors had done before them.

But by 2009, over 70% of villagers between the ages of 18 and 40 had left home to move to nearby cities. As a result, Luoxi today is mostly home to the very old and the very young. An entire generation has disappeared from the village to seek a better life as migrant workers.

This mass exodus is the result of a highly visible effort by the government to encourage villagers to leave, according to David Borenstein, a Fulbright Scholar who lived in Luoxi to conduct an anthropological research project.

“There was propaganda everywhere that said things like ‘improve your suzhi,’ improve your quality, go move to the cities,” said Mr. Borenstein. He added that the busiest building in town was a government-run migrant worker training center, which taught villagers skills they would need to live in a city such as how to buy train tickets and how to sew garments for a factory job.

“The government was clearly trying to get people to migrate,” he said.

China’s government has made it a target to send 250 million people from rural areas to cities in the next fifteen years. If this goal is met, China will have one billion urban residents by 2030.

Over 758 million people already live in cities in China, or roughly 54% of the population, and the United Nations estimates that this will climb as high as 76% by the year 2050.

China’s urban population is surging for a variety of reasons: over 10 million children are born in cities each year and the older generations are living longer. But by far the biggest reason is the influx of migrants, who account for 70% of urban population growth. This mass migration out of the countryside will have profound effects on China’s cities and the future of the nation.

China’s leaders hope that creating a primarily urban populace will modernize the national economy as more people work in productive jobs, boosting GDP per capita and fostering an increase in consumption.

 But this project also comes with huge challenges. Cities with ballooning populations must keep up with increasing demands on their infrastructure and their social services, and rural areas must cope with a declining number of residents. The government must pay attention to the assimilation of migrant workers, lest cities become full of unemployed and disenchanted young men. Through it all, the ruling party’s top concern will be to maintain stability despite this incredible change.

ECONOMIC FACTORS 

Currently, three quarters of China’s economic activity occurs in cities. City residents earn and spend much more than their compatriots in the countryside, primarily because of better work opportunities.

Experts say that the quest for better jobs is strongest force behind migration. Rural laborers have an incentive to leave their villages because living in a city offers access to higher-paying jobs. But this migration damages the rural economy because factories and mills in small villages close down as the local population declines.

“The party is trying to accelerate the pace of what might happen anyway if society were left to its own devices,” said Andrew J. Nathan, a professor of political science at Columbia University and a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.

“The leadership believes that the rural population is not sufficiently productive, partly because landholdings are too small. They want to move people off the land to allow some degree of consolidation of holdings. And they want people in cities so the people can enter more productive occupations,” Mr. Nathan said.

He also cautioned about the risks inherent to this effort. “If the newly growing cities are badly managed, there’s a potential for unrest, and unrest in cities is more challenging to the regime than unrest in the countryside because populations are more concentrated in cities. 

Jonathan Woetzel, a director in the Shanghai offices of McKinsey & Company, pays close attention how China is managing the rapid growth of its cities. He says that China’s leaders need to pay attention to where migrant workers are falling out of the system – for instance, a lack of financial inclusion.

“There is still a massive undersupply of affordable housing in most Chinese cities,” he said, adding that cities need to create “a ladder for people to buy their apartment.”

A dearth affordable housing is a significant obstacle for migrant workers trying to improve their socioeconomic status.

“It takes 20 to 30 years before an average migrant becomes a middle class urban resident,” Mr. Woetzel said.

INTEGRATING MIGRANT WORKERS

The mistreatment of migrants has become a major issue as workers flock to low-skilled jobs in construction that are dangerous but offer little pay. Many construction companies do not offer accident insurance, pensions or housing for their employees, and some workers who come into cities for short-term construction projects share hotel rooms with up to seven other people.

William Nee spent five years working for China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based organization that works with labor groups in the mainland to promote collective bargaining rights. According to Mr. Nee, common labor problems include non-payment of wages to migrant workers, and companies’ low compliance rate of paying social insurance for their employees, even though this payment is required. Mr. Nee cites these two abuses as the reason for many of the growing number of strikes occurring throughout China.

“Labor is the main form of social unrest and mass disturbances now,” said Mr. Nee, who is now a researcher with Amnesty International. “Strikes doubled roughly nationwide last year.”

Another looming problem is the growing number of older migrants. Jennifer Zhang has noticed this issue as part of her work as the China coordinator for Union Solidarity International, also a labor activist group based in Hong Kong.

“There is a serious problem in tens of millions of old migrant workers who are in their late 50s. They don’t have social security insurance, sufficient money and solid family relationships,” Ms. Zhang said. “They’ve missed the opportunities of advancing their skills to get higher-pay like other young migrant workers.”

PERSONAL TOLL

Urbanization is affecting the personal lives of rural residents in ways that do not come across in statistics. It is redefining family life, as many young parents leave their children behind in their home village to be raised by their grandparents.

An estimated 58 million children have been left behind as their parents have migrated to cities. Low wages and demanding work schedules keep many workers from returning home often, so a generation of children is growing up with only occasional visits from their parents.

Another personal toll is the effect on marriage and courtship.

Yan Cong, a photojournalist based in Beijing, has been documenting the personal lives of residents in Fenggang, a small village in Jiangxi Province. Her latest project highlights the trend of young men in China marrying women from Cambodia. 

“Parents want their children to get married as soon as possible,” she said. Young men who leave the village after high school do not have many opportunities to meet young women while working in the city. As a result, many parents try to find brides for their sons.

“The only method is to pay a lot of money ‘buy’ wives outside China,” Ms. Yan said.

“The routine of marriage is that parents ‘pick up’ Cambodian wives they are satisfied with, then they send the Cambodian woman with their son to the city to work together.”

MOVING FORWARD

Some cities are adjusting to population changes better than others, according to Zhan Guo, a professor at New York University who teaches a course about sustainable development in China’s cities.

“Small cities are doing much better in accepting migrant workers to be part of the community, not excluding them,” Dr. Guo said, explaining that swelling migrant population in large cities present a huge challenge, and most importantly, a huge expense.

“Think about health care. Think about affordable housing. Think about all the social welfare provided by the government. If you make it available to all the residents, that’s a big step.”

Dr. Guo said that urban planners in Chinese cities should come up with original policy ideas to deal with their own unique challenges. He says that Shanghai has done exceptionally well with this – for example, by introducing a license plate auction that has succeeded in slowing the growing number of cars in the city.

But he lamented the fact that urban planners in most other Chinese cities are reluctant to introduce original public policy ideas.

“Most cities will look to Beijing for their policy innovation, but unfortunately, Beijing is a bad example in making such policies,” he said. “All the local governments are looking to the worst example as the model.”