THE RURAL, THE URBAN AND THE GREAT MIGRATION

CHINAS MIGRATING PEASANT AND THE RISE OF THE URBAN VILLAGE

The year 1978 marked the turning point in Chinas

history, when Deng Xiaoping announced the need for
economic reform; from this moment on, the nation
has set unprecedented global records in such areas
as rate of urban development and rate and scale of
rural-to-urban human migration. In its singular drive
for economic growth and development, which this
country has undoubtedly managed to achieve, China
has simultaneously undermined and undeveloped
its social aspects and human rights. It is an inverse
relationship that has had its most brutal effects on the
rural, peasant population. It is their plight that will
be followed here, as well as an examination into the
idea of marginalization as it relates to this population,
and discussions on possible forces and mechanisms by
which this has occurred.

was in the midst of the largest mass migration the

world has ever seen, with 114 million migrant workers
who have left rural areas, temporarily or for good, to
work in cities and the number was expected to rise
to 300 million by 2020, eventually to 500 million
(Yardley, 2004).
The unprecedented rate of movement of rural peasants
to urban centres can be understood a number of
ways; one of which is to plainly look at the series of
economic reform-related events that had unfolded
with its introduction, leading up to the peasants needs
to confront new ways of living. In very broad terms,
at the time when Deng Xiaoping entered office,
economic reform was deemed a necessary step toward
greater stability and greater presence on the world
stage. As it stood, the agrarian sector was organized by
a communal system with targeted outputs and inputs
assigned, and whose workers welfare benefits were

The agrarian system, economic reform and the

beginning of mass migration

From 1958 onwards, rural to urban migration was

strictly limited by a residence registration or hukou
system; every person in the country is identified as a
member either of the agricultural (rural) population
or the non-agricultural (urban) population. Any
movement prior to 1985 from rural to urban areas must
have been approved by authorities. By 1985, Chinas
rate of urbanization was starting to accelerate and for
the first time, rural migrants were permitted to live in
urban areas as temporary residents. Migration has since
become an integral component to Chinas urbanization
process (Shen et al., 2002).
It was during this time that cities like Shenzhen
began its extraordinary urbanization and expansion
and migrants have been an essential and requisite
component to this process. With the Chinese
government designating Shenzhen, among other coastal
cities, as an open economic region for direct foreign
investment from Hong Kong and other countries,
migrants from all over the country flooded into the city
in search of labour opportunities found in processing
plants, industrial workshops and factories (Wang et al.,
2009). By the approach of the millennium, the country

Public life has a greater

presence in urban villages in
Shenzhen, China, where
highrises are informally built
by landowners in high density
settlement patterns with
pockets of public space

New highways and highrises

rapidly populating urban centres
like Shenzhen, China
A study in contrast: new
highrises, in the background,
have developed around the
informally built urban villages,
in the foreground

in comparison to their urban counterparts), and rural

dwellers who wished to access them once more, were
now forced to pay a fee (Harvey, 2005). This lack of
social protection, coupled with the decline in income
and little to no ownership of land or property, had left
this immense population with no means of livelihoods
in their rural homesteads; instead, staying in their
rural homestead meant increasing the risk of living in
growing poverty.
The new labour force and capitalist class power

These dire rural conditions, however, seemed to

conveniently work in favour of Dengs party, as they
now had in their back pockets a huge surplus of
labourers at a time when urbanization and the real
estate market was in a state of rapid growth. In 1985,
the lowering of urban flood gates to migrant workers,
and the few alternatives peasants were faced with other
than to seek wage labour in the more productive urban
sector inevitably led to the great rural-urban movement
of human resources (Webster & Zhao, 2010). It is
plain to see that although the state did not necessarily
plan for the peasants trajectory to fall right into their
open arms, this population was still in many ways
involuntarily cornered into this new labour force.
While the state reaps the benefits from this immense
labour resourceone that in conjunction with the
growingly neoliberal market reforms, has provided
China with a competitive edge in the global market
(Harvey, 2005) it appears the party not only fails
to protect and provide basic standards of living for
this population, it furthermore takes advantage of this
increasingly deprived population. This is a a tale of a
nations numerous structural reformations occurring
at multiple scales, and a driving force so powerful that
its founding values were all but seemingly forgotten.
Harvey (2005) persuasively describes in succinct detail
such events and as such, will not be further discussed
in depth here. What shall be considered instead are
particular socio-economic repercussions of such
transformations facing China today and an exploration
of the means by which these transformations have
resulted in such disparities.

provided according to this system within the sector.

Productivity within this sector was falling behind and
reform was applied by way of dissolving the communes
to allow for participation in the competitive market
what Deng called a personal responsibility system,
in the early 1980s (Harvey, 2005). At the beginning,
this experiment markedly increased productivity
and income for peasants until the mid 1980s; while
peasants were allocated the right to lease or rent their
land, and sell their surpluses at market rates, they were
not given rights to own their land. After this initial
spike, however, rural productivity came to a standstill
and started a decline that marked the beginning of the
growing strife faced by the peasant population. The
de-collectivization of the agrarian system also saw with
it the banishment of the welfare provisions once linked
to the communes (however insignificant they were

One can only ever speculate on the authenticity of the

Chinese governments representations of such ideals,
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of the welfare state with shifts towards liberalized,

cost-saving market economies (Mingione, 1996;
Wacquant, 2008). In China, this phenomenon can
be characteristically observed as it made its socioeconomic transition from an internal market structure
towards a liberalized global market structure, while
maintaining its central state powers. Revisiting the
story of the changing conditions of the rural peasants
in the agrarian sector, these structural shifts, parallel
with the improvements in agricultural productivity,
certainly contributed to the downward trajectory of the
peasant labour force (Fan, 2002). With the loss of social
provisions, and little opportunity remaining in the
rural sector, this labour force began the great migration
to cities as low-cost wage labourers (primarily in
construction and industrial sectors) with the status of
temporary floating residents, as a means for the party
to continue to keep this population from gaining access
to the citys social resources.

pre- or post- reform, but the ease in which pre-reform

ideals were left in the midst for economic reform
suggests an unintended shift towards directly opposing
positions. The primary phenomenon of the growing
inequality between rural peasants and urban citizens
the spiraling rural-urban divideis currently at the
heart of the matter. It is a matter that Deng Xiaopings
leadership has undoubtedly recognized and even
played a role in its proliferation. This plight of the rural
labourer will be further examined in two parts: First, a
depiction of the current conditions of marginalization
they face in urban Chinathe dynamics of ruralurban migration, how it has become a main factor
in Chinas urbanization; second, an investigation into
some of the primary mechanismsnamely notions of
scarcity and bargaining power, that have opportunely
allowed the state to establish these conditions at such
an unprecedented scale, and how this, in turn, relates
to property rights as a significant determinant of
marginalization of migrants in processes of urbanization.

Accompanying this economic shift was the

privatization of these resources, specifically for this
population, which not only further contributed to
their condition of marginalization, but also suggests
a consciously planned means of social repression,
and as Harvey (2005) argues, may be considered as
a deliberate systemic reconstitution of capitalist class
power. Innumerable migrant workers have lived and
contributed to the growth of urban centres for upwards
of 20 years to this day, yet have unfailingly remained
temporary residents, living in the shadows of the cities
they cultivated. This classification will continue to
strip them of the basic welfare entitlementsrights to
education, health care and housingknown to existing
urban residents and those which are newly acquired by
peri-urban villagers (Fan, 2002; Fu & Ren, 2010). They
furthermore remain unprotected under labour laws,
allowing many unscrupulous owners and capitalists to
accumulate revenue through the exploitation of labour
and unpaid labour (Wu & Webster, 2010; Hussain &
Wang, 2010; Harvey, 2005). It should come to no
surprise then, that under all aforementioned sociopolitical and economic conditions, this labour force will
be unable to sustain itself in the urban economy; these
workers will be unable to reproduce their own labour
on their unsustainable incomes, and lack of health care
and education provisions for their children (Webster &
Zhao, 2010). This should be cause for great concern to

Rural-urban disparity and growing

marginalization

Rural residents who have once made the move to

urban areas as temporary residents, face a cycle of
institutionalized marginalization in contrast to the more
fortuitous conditions of peri-urban villagers as well as
their urban counterparts. The term marginalization is
used to emphasize a downwards social trajectory rather
than just current static living standards; it is defined by
Wu and Webster (2010) as the broad social processes
whereby particular social groups obtain lower status, and
are becoming more unequal, often involving external
and structural forces that influence the social status of
a group of people. It is often more specifically used
in the context of post-industrial western economies
in relation with changes in the organized labour in
production, and is usually accompanied by the retreat
3

a nation whose economic growth and stability has been

dependent on this massive resource.
While rural peasants faced declining incomes, the
eventual prospect of minimal wages when theyve made
the urban move, as well as the deprivation of rights to
rent public housing or to buy commercial housing,
the very opposite was experienced by the privileged
permanent urban residents. By 1995, urban residents
were granted real-estate ownership rights through the
passing of an urban real-estate law, thereby, granting
them the ability to speculate on and sell their property.
By 2004, the disparity in rural and urban incomes
was almost at a ratio of one-to-two in some cities. In
Shenzhen, rural migrants on average made a monthly
income of 1,149 RMB, while official urban residents
were making an average of 2,195 RMB per month
(Shenzhen Municipal Government Housing System
Reform Office et al., 2004). The disparity between the
two groups grew markedly in the period from 1985 to
2004, with migrant workers seeing a six-fold increase
in income from $50 to $300 USD, and their urban
counterparts seeing a twelve-fold increase from just $80
per year to over $1,000 USD a year, setting a record for
the greatest rural-urban differential in real incomes in
the world (Kahn & Yardley, 2004).

much ambiguity. The dissolution of rural collective

farmland in the late 1980s transferred land ownership
from the farmers collectives over to the authorities,
in exchange for the right to participate in the market
economy with their surplus output. Land ownership
by farmers that occurred in closer proximity to urban
centres, however, was subject to different forces and,
thus, to different measures. Farmers, whose plots of
land and properties subsided close to areas undergoing
urban development, were asked by the municipal
government to hand over their collectively owned land
in exchange for some compensation; it was expected of
farmers to support state developments. The transaction
between parties for the expropriation of collectively
owned crop land generally occurred without too much
protest; partially because the collective ownership
had become increasingly ambiguous, as well, perhaps
because of the overall stagnation in agrarian productivity.
Village leaders who were representative of both their
own village residents as well as acted as the lowestlevel government officials, also often sided with the
developers due to government pressures and sometimes
government corruption in the form of bribes (Wang et
al., 2009).

Land reforms and the rise of the urban village

While the differential treatment of the underprivileged

rural migrants and privileged urban residents had
generally been institutionalized from pre-reform
days, and exacerbated post-reform, there have been a
selection of rural villagers, who by sheer geographical
luck, were able to escape these social conditions; such
villagers were even able to prosper from the very
same forces causing the growing poverty and inequity
experienced by the majority of peasants. Much of
this fatefulness is based on and related to concepts of
scarcity, bargaining power and property rights.

Heated protestation and contentions with government

officials arose, instead, over the rights to and ownership
of village residential land. This was the land and these
were the properties that families had been living on well
before even the Cultural Revolution some families
had even maintained the pre-communist property
certificates to use in their battle against expropriation.
This time, village leaders were unwilling to sacrifice
their own properties for the government and developers.
At the same time, the municipal government found it
difficult to provide the necessary compensation in terms
of employment, housing and other social provisions they
required. It was simply easier for the officials, then, to
leapfrog these peripheral village residential lands, and

Land reforms in the 1950s of socialist China produced

two types of land ownership. In urban areas, land
was publicly owned, while in rural areas, land was
owned collectively by agrarian communes. Under
post-reform times, in the midst of steadfast focus on
rapidly developing urban centres for economic growth,
the rights to land and property became a matter of
4

Aerial view of an urban

village surrounded by new
development in Shenzhen
Close-up: the dense informal
settlement is left untouched
due to property rights and
landowners bargainig power
(Google Earth images)

Two destinies: scarcity and bargaining power

Overall, to what can we attribute the phenomenon of

one social group, that is, the rural peasants, ending up
with two such deviating destinies in this relatively short
period of time? While the actual series of occurrences
leading up to each groups respective present day
conditions have been explored, it may be beneficial to
determine whether there are ways to understand this
phenomenon through more ubiquitous socio-political
mechanisms; this may ultimately shed light on where
future intervention could be targeted. The real question
to ask is how the government was able to get away
with their degrading treatment of the less fortuitous
peasants, a group making up a huge portion of the
population. It has been suggested that mechanisms at
work involve notions of scarcity and bargaining power.
Webster and Zhao (2010) assert that the institutions
with the power to make social provisions are in an
advantageous bargaining position; this subsequently
allows them to get away with withholding welfare
provisions. The resource they require in labour is
readily available in the surplus peasant population,
which is infinitely elastic and in high supply; migrants
have little else to trade but their own labour and as it is
their only means of survival and it exists in abundance
(whereby withholding their individual resource would
have inconsequential effect) they end up with little to
no bargaining power, unless perhaps collective action
is organized. This, in turn, provides the state with little
incentive to share public property and social resources
with this massive population because it is an expense
they are simply unwilling to take. In other words, the
entitlements of migrant workers remain static due to
the lack of scarcity of low-cost wage labour. In great
contrast, urban villagers, those whose urban-peripheral
land is in fixed supply and highly demanded by the
state for development, have the bargaining power and
leverage to negotiate the terms of trade and who gain

to instead expropriate just the crop land around them

that they were willing to sacrifice. The government
would allow the villages to retain some non-residential
land as well for future expansion or industrial uses, in
hopes that they would eventually provide employment
opportunities for themselves (Wang et al., 2009). The
fortune of these peasant villagers would continue to
grow as urbanization spreading around them increased
their land values and they found themselves in positions
of great opportunity. With these villages now generally
beyond the administrative control of municipal
authorities, and as traditionally planning controls were
very limited in the first place, this marked the start of
the physical development of the village-in-the-city. A
great surge in illegal house building took off, often
instigated by village leaders, in order to make income
off of rental properties for the mass of ex-peasants
flooding the cities, who with their low-paying jobs,
were in need of extremely affordable housing (Wang
et al., 2009; Hao et al., 2011). These informal urban
villages offered the only option migrants were able to
afford. As villagers became landlords and continued
to build and accumulate great profits, migrants
simultaneously had access to urban housing, and so
began an urban symbiotic relationshipa dependency
that has become essential to the livelihoods of these
two groups.
5

the entitlements their more rural neighbours have little

means of accessing.
All in all, it is becoming clear that the role of property
rights, in relation to ideas of bargaining and scarcity,
is a significant determining factor in whether
or not a population will be vulnerable to social
marginalization in a country like China. Chinas
economy is undoubtedly making the progression
towards competitive, neoliberal western economies
those economies that have the state, it seems, in direct
competition with its own citizens, as what should be
public is becoming private. And so in such economies,
the significance of property rights as a means for social
leverage becomes very high. Ever since the agricultural
communes were dissolved, the only property migrants
had rights to was their own labour. And though this
resource was in high demand by the government,
the abundance of it weakened its value as a tool for
tradea trade for, in essence, a chance at a sustainable
way of life in the city.

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Text and images 1-3 by Olivia Cheung (Nov. 2011)