Responses to Migration and the Prospects for the Future

Abstract

The great increase in population mobility since the beginning of the reforms has given rise to a variety of responses. Policy changes made to deal with large-scale migration have already been reviewed in chapter 3. This final chapter looks at urban responses to migration expressed in the press. It focuses on the reaction to young rural people in the cities because neither rural to rural, nor rural to small town movements have inspired the same level or type of attention or anxiety. The reaction is considered in the context of the rural/urban divide that underpins social stratification in China and sets up the agricultural and non-agricultural populations as sharply divided interest groups. Chinese attempts to control population movement are compared to those once made elsewhere in the world. Finally, this chapter considers the prospects for migration and migration policy in China.

Immigrants rarely catch buses or trains; they ‘flood’, ‘flux’, ‘flow’, ‘surge’, ‘pour’, ‘drain’; they are … not just a ‘tide‘ but a ‘rising‘ one, and one flowing into areas which are ‘saturated’. Water imagery appears irresistible.

(Nigel Harris, The New Untouchables, 1997, p. 186)