New trends in internal migration

A group of migrant workers helping to rebuild Baiyu :: © Josh Chin / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0

When I flipped through some of the most interesting news aggregators on China a few days ago, I was struck by the headline of The Contemporary Gold that was circulated via Danwei.

In my former life as a 'serious' inhabitant of the academic ivory tower, I was kind of a specialist on internal and return migration in the PR China. And I never lost touch with recent developments in the fields of rural and urban development, general development issues, international and internal migration, gender and migration, and so on.

At the end of the 1980s, when the latest mass exodus from Chinese villages and backwater towns in Central and West China started, many Chinese and international experts predicted that this 'greatest human migration in world history' would ultimately lead to urban chaos, high crime rates, social disintegration, the development of abject urban slums and rising inequality between different regions and classes.

Developments that had already reached alarming levels in other developing nations, such as India, Bangladesh, South Asian, or African states.

Today, cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Mumbay, Dhaka or Kinshasa, South African townships or still-growing mega-cities such as Bangkok are notorious for unregulated growth, high crime rates and a general sense of despair among its thousands and thousands of new and old inhabitants. Mega-cities in the 21st century are often crowded, chaotic and rather terrifying on first sight.

The PR China, in contrast, has mastered this enormous task remarkably well. There are still many many problems, that's for sure. Urban China and rural China are still separated by the notorious 'Great Wall' of the peculiar Chinese household registration or hukou system.

Whole families are split between rural origins and urban destinations for years to come. Children are often left with grandparents or other relatives in nearly empty villages (kongke cun), because rural parents cannot afford to bring them along to their new abodes at the East Coast where they earn a living.

Inequality between different classes and regions, between Central China, West China and the East Coast, is rising again and the disintegration of the whole social fabric in villages and cities seems to be an inevitable consequence of this kind of massive human migration.

Nevertheless, even if the 'Great Wall' still divides rural and urban China, the notorious household registration or hukou system is still intact and historically inherited problems abound, neither did the CCP disintegrate nor did the Chinese state collapse. Nor is a real challenge to the ruling party-state from the bottom of society in sight.

Many prophets of doom may be surprised that the PR China is still standing and even stronger than before.

China has met the challenges posed by this massive human movement alternatively with 'hard strikes (yan da)' against rising crime, more liberal policies to attract rural talent to growing cities in the East and South, and new initiatives and detailed directives from the top in Zhongnanhai in Beijing via the various provincial and city governments, to the bottom of the rural administrative apparatus and the village cadres (ganbu).

The PR China's adaptability to ever-changing domestic and global trends, be it economic, social or cultural, is really astonishing at times.

Smaller Chinese cities, at least, are often much more liveable than their counterparts in other developing nations, such as India or Bangladesh, to name just a few. And perhaps much more interesting, chaotic (in a positive sense) than many so-called experts in the German and international mainstream media, the global academic world or international TV stations would have it.

For more information on recent trends in internal migration, migrant communities in urban China and gender issues, see the article 'Migrant workers forming “temporary couples" in the cities' by Danwei.