Small Works: Poverty and Economic Development in Southwestern China

4. Migration

78 4 Migration Go East, Young Man (and Woman) Move a tree and it dies. Move a man and he thrives. —Chinese proverb The livelihood of the Zhaos, a Miao family living in impoverished Leishan county (the name means “Thunder Mountain”) in Guizhou was greatly enhanced by the work of their indomitable daughter. At a relatively young age, this remarkable young woman made the arduous trek to Guangdong province, one of the wealthiest areas in China, to seek work. There, she was quite fortunate ; she found work in a small shop, helping with sales and stocking inventory. Her hard work earned her several hundred yuan per month, most of which she sent back home to support her parents and younger brother. In spite of her good fortune, however, this young woman faced many difficulties in Guangdong. For instance, she felt compelled to hide her minority status for fear that prejudiced employers might not hire her. Despite such hardships, she worked hard, and her wages helped to defray the costs of sending her younger brother to school. Migration in China has helped to reduce poverty for millions of families like the Zhaos. At the same time, however, the effects of migration on economic growth and poverty reduction are not straightforward. Rural-to-urban migration contributed to both poverty reduction without growth in Guizhou and growth without poverty reduction in Yunnan. Understanding the role of migration in the puzzle requires that we first examine the development of migration in these two provinces and in China as a whole, and the complex ways it has influenced the lives of the rural poor. Starting in the early 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s reforms sparked fresh waves of migration in China, flows that had previously been dammed by the strict controls over population movement established in the early years of the PRC.1 1. The 1949 revolution and the subsequent establishment of the communist regime did not end migration so much as suppress uncontrolled population movements. The government initiated much of the migration that occurred during that period. Migration 79 Directly after the reform, starting in 1978, the majority of rural-to-urban migrants were former urban residents who had been compelled to move to the countryside. This group included previously purged political leaders ; radical students who had been sent down to the countryside to bring revolution to the peasants; and others who had traveled, voluntarily or otherwise , to the countryside during the pre-reform era (Wu and Zhou 1996, 25). Migration for economic purposes was effectively prohibited during the early years of the reform period, although many thousands of people still migrated to cities in search of work between 1978 and 1985 (Wang 2002). After the government relaxed migration restrictions around 1984, the flows of rural residents migrating to cities, primarily of those seeking economic opportunities in the rapidly industrializing Chinese urban areas, increased rapidly (Du, Park, and Wang 2004, 1).2 Despite the rough life and discrimination that economic migrants experienced in cities, the opportunities for many young people working in construction or labor-intensive manufacturing were often far superior to staying in the country and supporting an overcrowded family by farming tiny plots of land. Other patterns of population movements were also seen during this era, such as international, rural-to-rural, urban-to-urban, and (rarely) urbanto -rural migration, but rural-to-urban migration dominated the mid-1980s onward as tens of millions of primarily young rural laborers brought inexpensive labor to cities of all sizes, further stimulating industrialization and construction in the Chinese coastal cities.3 Simultaneously, such flows reduced poverty in the countryside, both by reducing the number of mouths to feed and by the migrants’ contributing small but significant remittances back to their families. Many migrant families saved a portion of these remittances , accumulating the capital needed to start small businesses once the migrants, endowed with new experience and skills, returned to the countryside. Social scientists studying migration expect migration to be spurred by regional differences in wages and income. In his classic conception, W. A. Lewis 2. Before 1985, the majority of rural-to-urban migrants were students who had been sent out to “promote revolution” among the rural population and were returning to the urban areas from which they had originated. In contrast, after 1985 one survey revealed that more than one-third of all migrants listed finding employment as the primary motivation for moving (Wu and Zhou 1996). 3. Migrants are notoriously difficult to count. Fearing...