Migration in China after 1949

Abstract

The great increase in migration in China in recent years is not in itself extraordinary. Population movement and increased urbanisation have accompanied economic growth and industrialisation everywhere in the world and it was to be expected that this process would occur in China too. However, political and economic factors unique to China make the Chinese case especially dramatic and worthy of study. First, there is the sheer size of China’s internal migration since the economic reforms. Estimates of the numbers on the move in recent years vary greatly but are of magnitudes of 40 million, 80 million or even 100 million. Second, large-scale voluntary migration was a new phenomenon in the 1980s. The Chinese state in the Maoist period played a highly directive and interventionist role in relation to population movement. From the early 1950s to late 1978, there was little population mobility in China and, in effect, no labour market. The great majority of jobs were allocated by the state and migration was highly restricted by a system of population registration, with the result that by the time of the 1982 Census, China still had a very low level of urbanisation for a country at its level of development (Kirkby 1985; Chan 1994).

During the famine after the Great Leap Forward the first people who starved to death were put in thin coffins, then bodies were put in a couple of vats joined rim to rim. Later on, when everyone was so weak with hunger they couldn’t move, whole families died and were just left where they lay. That’s when I stopped being a cadre: I really wanted out. I wanted to go down a big pit near here as a miner. I wasn’t bothered about getting killed in a cave-in as long as I could get the money for off-ration grain, and that cost plenty. But they wouldn’t take me. They wouldn’t let anyone with a rural registration become a worker. I was a farmer so I was stuck scraping a living out of the soil.

(Interview with a peasant, 1983, Zhang and Sang, 1987, pp. 120–1)