Internal Migration in China

China’s “Floating Population”

In the weeks leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1999, Beijing police threw tens of thousands of the city’s ubiquitous rural migrants into detention centers. Countless others were forced to return to the countryside. Such treatment of the country’s rural migrants during a celebration marking the founding of an ostensibly egalitarian “New China” symbolizes the striking contradictions of China’s era of economic reform and the worrisome status of the country’s burgeoning ranks of internal migrants. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market, by Dr. Dorothy J. Solinger, is an incisive analysis of the issues surrounding China’s roughly one hundred million internal migrants. She explores the economic and social plight of this floating population and the role of government officials in dealing with the market-driven influx of rural labor into the cities. As the rough handling of the migrants by the Beijing police suggests, Solinger’s latest work is especially timely.

Twenty years of economic reform have dramatically improved the living standards of most of China’s population, but rapid economic progress has been geographically uneven. China’s dynamic coastal cities have prospered while much of the rural interior has been left behind. The reforms have also generated economic hardship and jarring social change for many Chinese. Moreover, economic reform has not been accompanied by a commensurate degree of political liberalization. To be sure, there has been significant political change in China over the past two decades, but Chinese leaders—ever fearful of any perceived threat to social and political stability—have moved cautiously on political change, retrenching at the slightest sign of challenge to the regime’s authority. This lack of political and institutional reform has exacerbated the problems of uneven development and social dislocation that have emerged as byproducts of market reforms.

Many scholars have studied the role of students and intellectuals, political dissidents, and China’s burgeoning ranks of laid-off workers in this ongoing drama of economic and social change. Comparatively little attention, however, has been focused on China’s floating population. As Solinger notes, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms allowed the members of this floating population to leave the countryside and gave them an incentive to head to the cities, but remnant political structures of the socialist era have made the situation of these migrants difficult. Once in the city, they have faced discrimination on the part of the urban populace and been exploited by rent-seeking city government officials.

Mirroring arguments against foreign immigration in many Western countries, Chinese city-dwellers aver that rural migrants take scarce jobs away from city residents and drive down local wages. Such concerns have grown as lay-offs from many of China’s moribund state owned enterprises have increased urban unemployment in recent years. ¹ City residents and officials also lament the burden that they believe the migrants place on China’s increasingly inadequate social services and public health system. In addition, security officials and city residents often perceive the floating population as the cause of rising urban crime rates. ² This in particular has cast the issue of rural migration as one of social stability and public order and prompted authorities to crack down on the migrant communities.

As Solinger’s study makes clear, the situation of China’s floating population thus contrasts sharply with many social science theories, which predict that market reform inexorably leads to enhanced political participation and increases the ease of gaining citizenship. Solinger shows that even when rural migrants are welcomed for their labor and contributions to economic development, they are “seldom considered suitable candidates for citizenship.” The members of the floating population, as Solinger contends, have thus been effectively excluded from the rights of citizenship within their own country.

Internal Migration and Citizenship in Urban China

Drawing on a...