ABSTRACT
Since the 1980s, and increasingly during the 1990s, the attention of national and international policymakers and media has focused on the phenomenon of China’s rural-to-urban labour migration (Gao, 1999: 200; Murphy, 2002; Goodkind and West, 2002; Zhu, 2003: 25). Much of this media and academic interest has been monopolised by the large manufacturing industry that has emerged in Guangdong (Guldin, 1992; Lee, 1995, 1998; Pun, 2003, 2005; Siu, 2007; Zhu, 2003). The phenomenon of labour migration, however, has noticeably affected most of the country’s provinces, involving an always-growing number of employment sectors (Roulleau-Berger and Lu, 2005). In China’s cities, large numbers of migrant labourers find employment in the increasingly privatised service industry (Gaetano, 2004; Yan, 2003a, 2003b, 2008; Sun, 2004, 2008, 2009a, 2009b). The recurrence of rural-to-urban migration in academic and media discussions around social inequality convey the idea that Chinese society may be divided in two castes: urban versus rural population (Whyte, 2010). This chapter gives an outline of the main issues related to the presence of rural-to-urban migrants in the cities of Mainland China and attempts to paint a more nuanced picture of China’s urban landscape.
