Migrants‘ Lives and Impacts in the Destination Areas

Abstract

The destination areas for internal migrants in China are as varied as the occupations they take up and the lives they live. Migrants go to great cities like Beijing and Shanghai and the new urban areas of the Special Economic Zones, but also to lesser urban settlements and to small towns and even villages. Some construction workers employed on dams, railways or roads do not live in permanent settlements at all. Their homes are shacks on the construction site and their long-term legacy is not a new community or one transformed by their presence, but simply the structure on which they were working. In other types of destination area, migrants have had a very significant impact on life. These include the big cities themselves, the small towns where the government would like urban growth to be concentrated, the Special Economic Zones and the agricultural belt around the great cities where migrant peasants have taken over much of the cultivation.

People here don’t like us because we come from outside. But we work hard here and they need us.

(interview with migrant from Guizhou Province, street labour market, fieldwork Beijing 1994)