In China, as one might expect of a country undergoing rapid market-driven economic growth and urbanization, two of the major threats to sustainable urbanization are increasing socio-economic inequalities and environmental damage. Rural-urban migration can help mitigate some of the inequalities resulting from uneven economic growth, but can also create new social, economic and environmental problems. Not only can China learn from international experience in this area, but China’s experience is increasingly represented in international research on economic change and rural-urban migration.

In absolute terms, China is undergoing the largest rural-urban transition any country has ever experienced. For over a decade,...

In demographic terms, a country’s level of urbanization is conventionally defined as the proportion of the total population living in settlements designated as urban. There is no internationally accepted means of identifying urban areas, and even within a country definitions change and there may be more than one definition in use at any given time. The criteria through which people are identified as living in an area also vary, and as described below this can have a major effect on the estimated level of urbanization.

Most governments define urban centres in one of four ways: through population size thresholds; through...

China does not have a particularly mobile population. The millions of people migrating annually from one part of China to another are only exceptional because of the size of the overall population. Between 1995 and 2000, for example, only about 3% of China’s population migrated between provinces, as compared to the 8% of the United States’ population that migrated between states over the same period (Fan, 2005). In China, however, there are far larger net migration flows, both from rural to urban areas, and from Western to Eastern parts of the country.

Rural-urban migration is a very simple term often...

Between 1990 and 2000, the main destinations of inter-provincial migrants without permanent registration have been Shanghai, Guangdong, Zhejiang and Beijing. The size of Guangdong’s migrant population nearly tripled during this period. In 2000 the province, which has less than 7 percent of China’s population, had 27 percent of the total interprovincial migrant population (Liang and Ma, 2004). More generally, rapid urban growth has been associated with economic reform (Anderson and Ge, 2004). Despite the government’s policy of encouraging development in western regions of the country, the coastal provinces still act as a magnet for interprovincial migrants.

These coastal destinations are...

Smaller urban centres can play an essential role in the economic development of their surrounding rural area, by providing goods and services to rural residents, and markets and processing of rural produce. As these activities develop, local non-farm employment opportunities increase. This encourages income diversification among residents of the urban peripheries, who can commute daily to the urban centre and still work on their farms. Perhaps more importantly in many nations, the expansion of the local urban labour market can also attract rural migrants from the surrounding rural region and decrease migration pressure on the large cities.

The development of...

Migration is best understood as a livelihood strategy that households and individuals undertake to ensure their survival, or to improve their situation. Any livelihood strategy is based on the assets available to the household or individual, and include social assets (for example, networks that facilitate migration or access to employment), human assets (people’s health, education and skills) and physical assets such as land and housing. In the rural areas, migration can also be seen as a form of income diversification that includes spatial mobility. Mobility has higher costs, including transport, initial accommodation, the acquisition of relevant skills and maintaining a...

Poverty in China is concentrated in rural areas. However, while rural poverty has declined since the early 1980s, urban poverty has been steadily increasing (Khan and Riskin, 2002). Nevertheless, poverty has only recently been recognised as an urban problem (Wang, 2004b; Wu, 2004a). In 2003, it was estimated that there were 100 million poor rural migrants in the cities, 20 million poor suburban farmers who lost their land as a result of urban expansion, and 20 million original urban residents who became poor as a result of industrial reorganisation (Wang, 2004b page 52).

Urban income inequality has increased, but so...

Rural-urban migration can increase or decrease pressures on the environment depending on who is moving from where to where, as part of what type of economic transformation. When people move from areas of rural environmental degradation and resource scarcity, local pressures on the rural environment are likely to decrease. But when urban enterprises are set up and migrants settle in urban centres, a new set of environmental pressures comes into play. The severity of these environmental pressures depends on both the environmental characteristics of the urban destination, and on the income levels and consumption patterns that the migrants attain.

Urban...

The policy options identified below are just a small subset of those implied by the preceding text. They are organized into three categories, depending on the principal goal of the policy: (1) economic growth, (2) environmental sustainability, or (3) socio-economic equity.

The barriers to migration built into the household registration system are being progressively undermined, not only by policy decisions, but by the increasing difficulty inherent in controlling population movements in a market economy. There are potentially large economic benefits associated with dismantling registration-based barriers to mobility, and creating a more unified labour market and harmonious society. There will also...