Conclusion and Discussion

Abstract

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Chinese government started to introduce a series of policies explicitly aimed at farmers’ rural–urban migration. This research has sought to examine how migrant workers cope with problems under policy intervention. These different strategies are categorized into a typology of “coping” which includes administrative coping, political coping, and social coping, as well as the main corresponding coping resources: government policy, power of civil groups, and social networks, respectively. Empirical data show making a claim under migration policies is not commonly found among migrant workers, in other words, administrative coping is not widely adopted by migrant workers. Instead, social coping is the most adopted one by migrant workers; meanwhile, political coping is an emerging coping strategy in Chinese society. Therefore, there is still a long way to go and much to do in order to ensure migrant workers benefit from migration polices in China.