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14. The Floating Population in the Cities: Markets, Migration, and the Prospects for Citizenship
- University of Hawai'i Press
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The liudong renkou, or “floating population,” offers one of several key windows on the adverse unintended consequences of the dismantling of China’s collectivist social system and rural household registration, coupled with the exaggerated economic advantage of urban versus rural life. China’s “migrant laborer” population has been officially estimated at about 100 million, although estimates by scholars in the field suggest that the figure is 150 million —about two-thirds the U.S. population! Many of these people are uneducated male peasants who flock to urban centers seeking the livelihood that the new economy of China promises, although increasingly entire families leave their natal homes in the provinces to attempt life in the city. And, most recently, a growing number of younger women and girls have abandoned the poorly paying light industrial work of township enterprises in the country to ply their bodies in the more profitable sex trade of most cities. Dorothy Solinger, a political scientist whose work on China’s migrant population has merited national recognition, describes and analyzes the features of the migrants themselves and of the “receiving society” in which they hope to make their place. She discusses the gender imbalance among the migrants and what consequences this may have on their plans to remain in the cities (most are unmarried). One of the most important aspects of the situation is the fact that employment in contemporary China often depends on patronage. Migrants without some preestablished connection may be relegated to the least desirable occupations. This troubling demographic aspect of China’s “modernizing” economy must be understood as one of its enduring cultural features. Readers are asked to keep in mind that China is currently in the process of forcing its “state-owned enterprises” in the cities to become profitable and self-supporting, which will result in coming years in the unemployment of many millions of urban residents. The competition between urban residents and rural migrants is intensified under conditions of rapid economic development and has in recent years led to significant unrest. The principal portion of this movement is from the countryside to the city. Rural labor migrants are known, somewhat dismissively, as mingong, and, 273 DOROTHY J. SOLINGER 14 The Floating Population in the Cities Markets, Migration, and the Prospects for Citizenship as their number has escalated in the last decade (there are 3 million migrant residents of Beijing alone), they are officially referred to as mingong chao, or “rural laborer tide.” The tide is moving across China and is especially pronounced in larger cities, where such wanderers take up residence on the floors of unfinished multistory buildings, hang around transit stations, or eke out a life on the street in makeshift housing fashioned from cardboard and scraps of wood and metal (see figs. 14.1 and 14.2). Given their primitive education and skills as well as a marginal awareness of public-health risk, the latest threat to the precarious existence of mingong is, not political repression, but the enhanced transmissibility of the HIV/AIDS virus.—Eds. INTRODUCTION The waves of internal migration pulsing through China over the past decade provide us with a window on a major transformation going on. The migration represents one crucial form of the human dimensions of the nation’s Dorothy J. Solinger 274 figure 14.1 Squatters’ shacks. (Photograph by Susan D. Blum.) figure 14.2 Temporary housing. (Photograph by Susan D. Blum.) [54.243.2.41] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:16 GMT) change from plan to market. This movement of peoples can be both a symbol and a measure of the decline of the Communist regime’s institutional structures and of its social system. It also suggests the possibility of the demolition of long-standing barriers erected by the post-1949 government between city and countryside, in contrast to the lack of labor mobility before the reform era. Those involved in the movement are members of a new urban grouping, the floating population, chiefly peasants no longer domiciled where they were initially registered to live and estimated in the range of 50 million to 70 million persons.1 Some observers seize on this flow as an emblem of an imminent demise of the Party’s previous pattern of rule where class structure is concerned. They adopt a positive outlook, alleging that this human tide stands for freedom , for peasants unbound from the sometime shackles of the commune, released from the countryside. Farmers venturing into the cities and towns can hope for the enrichment...