Rural Migrants in Urban China

Enclaves and Transient Urbanism

Fulong Wu, Fangzhu Zhang, Chris Webster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135095345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

After millions of migrants moved from China's countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of 'informal' urban enclave was born – 'villages in the city'. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China's economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and landlords who rent shockingly high-density rooms to rural migrants, who can outnumber their landlord villagers. A strong state, matched with well-organised landlords collectively represented through joint-stock companies, has meant that it has been relatively easy to grow the city through demolition of these soft migrant enclaves. The lives of the displaced migrants then enter a transient phase from an informal to a formal urbanity. This book looks at migrants and their enclave 'villages in the city' and reveals the characteristics and changes in migrants' livelihoods and living places.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book analyses how living in the city transforms and changes rural migrant households, and explores the social lives and micro economies of migrant neighbourhoods. It goes on to discuss changing housing and social conditions and spatial changes in the urban villages of major Chinese cities, as well as looking into transient urbanism and examining the consequences of redevelopment and upgrading of the 'villages in the city'; in particular, the planning, regeneration, politics of development, and socio-economic implications of these immense social, economic and physical upheavals.

1 Migrants’ transient urbanism in urban China

An introduction

Fulong Wu and Fangzhu Zhang

Introduction

China’s rural-to-urban migration and rapid urbanization have produced profound impacts on Chinese cities. The pace of urbanization has accelerated since China joined the WTO in 2001 and became the ‘world factory’. In 2011, China reached a remarkable milestone: more than half of its population became an urban population living in cities. Therefore, we need to understand this growing population, especially these new migrants in the cities. Despite earlier studies on rural migrants and discrimination against migrants in cities (e.g. Solinger 1999; Zhang 2001), recent research has paid more attention to rural-to-urban migration (Fan 2008; Murphy 2009) and the division between rural and urban societies (Whyte 2010). Recently, Chan (2010) examined the impact of the global financial crisis on the unemployment situation of migrants. Apparently, attention has been paid to rural migrants, but there has been little systematic research on rural migrants in urban China, namely the contextual environment in which migrants stay in Chinese cities, in particular their habitat known as the ‘urban village’ or ‘villages in the city’ (chengzhongcun).

Earlier studies noted the formation of concentrated migrant enclaves. Ma and Xiang (1998) examined Beijing’s ‘migrant enclaves’ in the 1990s and highlighted the role of these enclaves in migrants’ entry into the city. Zhang et al. (2003) focused on housing conditions in urban villages in Guangzhou. Xiang (2004) provides a detailed study of Zhejiangcun in Beijing in the 1990s, focusing on the production and living spaces of migrants. More recently, there has been a burgeoning literature on the development of urban villages and their impacts on the cities (Tian 2008; Wang et al. 2009; Liu et al. 2010; He et al. 2010; Lin et al. 2011; Hao et al. 2011). This book brings together recent studies on rural migrants and focuses particularly on the habitat of migrants in the cities. It aims to provide a synthetic account of Chinese urban villages. The research is timely, as Chinese cities have initiated a movement to redevelop urban villages. In Guangdong, new policies of redevelopment have been formulated and new redevelopment offices were set up; Beijing has listed 50 villages as a priority for redevelopment, and Shanghai has surveyed its residual villages for the next phase of urban regeneration (Wu et al. forthcoming).

The remainder of this chapter will introduce the content of this book, while at the same time rearticulating the individual studies to contextualize them in the framework of migrants’ ‘transient urbanism’. Here we attempt to summarize one sentence from each chapter from this perspective: old migrants have returned to the countryside and new-generation migrants are coming. Migrants’ livelihoods have high mobility, high vulnerability and high risk. They drift as tenants, and do not manage to establish a path towards becoming homeowners in the cities. Social networks possessed by migrants help them find jobs, but these jobs are much inferior to the job market. Still, migrants use their spaces adaptively through a trans-local approach. The social space of migrants is not confined within their neighbourhoods. Along with the length of their stay, they are less constrained by hukou as they are forging their way socially in the city. The development of urban illages represents an effort made by rural migrants themselves to break out of the factory dormitory style of management, although they may not all be successful. Despite insufficient infrastructure, urban villages provide affordable housing as well as jobs to migrants. The habitat of rural migrants grows in a spontaneous way at locations accessible to jobs. Nevertheless, their newly forged urbanism is quite transient, facing aggressive policies of village redevelopment. These redevelopment strategies disregard the urban village as an integral part of the city. The planning of redevelopment is very much aimed at consolidating municipal power. Now, we turn to a more detailed account of these studies.

Migrants’ livelihoods in urban China

Not only has the population of rural migrants in urban China increased but their composition has also changed over time. In Chapter 2, Cindy Fan and Chen Chen pay particular attention to ‘new-generation’ migrant workers, given that second generation migrants now account for more than half of the migrant population. They review both recent Chinese rural-to-urban migration surveys and discuss the definition of this new term of ‘new-generation’ migrants – commonly referring to those born after 1980. They find that new-generation migrants have some distinctive characteristics; for example, they are better educated, have little experience of farm work and are more likely to start migrant work earlier than their parents. To them, migration and working in the cities are perhaps the norm rather than the exception. If married, they are more likely to bring their families to the city and also are more ready to settle down in the cities, which indicates that they are on a trajectory towards becoming urban residents. However, Fan and Chen point out two constraints besides the institutional hurdles for them to settle down: their social networks continue to rely on native-place ties and the jobs available in the cities require higher educational attainment and skill training. Compared with first generation migrants, new-generation migrants are more likely to work in manufacturing than other sectors, which suggests that their jobs are more formal than being self-employed in markets and low-rank social services. Because of this more formal employment, they have access to the dormitories provided by factories (see Daniel You-ren Yang in Chapter 9, on the dormitory as a way of exerting discipline and control). The study of new-generation migrants highlights the abrupt road towards becoming urban residents. Despite their improved attainments, new-generation migrants are not better accommodated by the host city compared with their parent generation. It can even be argued that compared with their parents, they are treated more like guest workers for industrial development. Desiring better housing and perhaps more normal family lives, the percentage of migrants in rental housing increases, but they cannot afford to purchase homes in the city (see Weiping Wu in Chapter 4, on migrant housing). The new-generation rural migrants have not been fully integrated in the host city, despite their effort towards adapting to urban lives.

Mobility is essentially the way of life for the migrant population, which brings risks to migrant workers. Heather Zhang in Chapter 3 describes the mobile livelihoods of rural migrants in the cities and argues that because of high mobility, migrants face higher risks. In rural areas, peasants bear the risk through their mutual help in local communities. However, in the cities, while the informal social network is still a source of social support, informality and the lack of social security institutions mean that rural migrants are particularly vulnerable in their pursuit of entrepreneurial activities in the cities. Existing institutional arrangements for migrants are insufficient to mitigate the impact of disastrous accidents. While not necessarily confined within urban villages, Zhang’s findings suggest various aspects of informality in coping with difficult situations in the cities. One may argue that relying on informal social networks as social support reflects the human agency in migration and the survival strategies of rural migrants in an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile urban society, while the obstacles towards integrating rural migrants into urban institutions (through collective consumption) reflects the ‘transient’ and ‘informal’ nature of urbanism for rural migrants. Their urbanism is not embedded and formalized into urban and social institutions leading to an established and formal urbanism. Zhang’s detailed ethnographic account of migrants reveals the insecurity of migrants in urban China and their heroic endeavour to survive in the cities. The history of migration is full of numerous decisions to move from one place to another, following new economic opportunities, developing trans-local social networks, suffering from various difficulties and risks in the city, receiving help from informal social support, and relocating or moving into new places. Such transient and unstable urbanism is perhaps not what migrants want – the question is then how to forge an institutional reform to help migrants eventually settle down in the city and mitigate the impacts of risk on them.

From the perspective of housing, Weiping Wu in Chapter 4 argues that migrants are still treated as the ‘outsiders of the city’. Migrant housing is almost exclusively restricted to informal rentals in urban villages, apart from factory dormitory housing. Unlike in other developing countries where squatter settlements are the norm, Chinese rural migrants are not able to build housing themselves. In this sense, there is no self-help housing in Chinese cities but only informally built housing for rental purposes. This informal housing, mostly in urban villages, does not necessarily follow a modern building code or city planning. It is developed through spontaneous construction to pursue the opportunities of rental markets due to rising demand for cheaper housing. Wu finds that migrants continue to change residential locations once they are in the city. She points out that ‘few migrants in urban China make the transition from bridgeheaders to consolidators even after years of living in the city’, unlike migrants in other developing countries. In essence, rural migrants are ‘getting stuck’ with informal private rentals, while it has become much easier for migrants to stay for extended time. Wu examined the spatial pattern of migrant housing, and most are found in peri-urban locations. The urban periphery has a particular attraction to rural migrants because of its lower cost of housing and accessible job markets. So, seen from the perspective of the geography of migrant housing, their urbanism is still transient, constantly moving further out when new opportunities for constructing rental housing emerge. In terms of residential mobility, in western market economies changing housing tenure is one of the major reasons for intra-urban residential relocation. But in Chinese cities, rural migrants may change residential location but just move from one urban village to another, without moving into a consolidated ‘housing career’. The strength of city planning to prevent squatting is part of the reason for the impossibility of becoming owners of informal housing, while lax rural land management gives opportunities to peri-urban farmers to build rental housing for rural migrants. Formally built housing in the market is unaffordable to rural migrants, because the design of the land leasing system targets the highest bids for land and thus, the higher end of the housing market. So from the housing perspective, migrants experience an urbanism that is ‘transient’.

Overall, the first part on migrants and their livelihoods in cities shows a picture of changing composition towards new-generation migrants, self-reliance on themselves and their families to cope with difficulty and risk in the city, and higher mobility in spatial terms although remaining in the rental sector. Their experience of urban lives, or their urbanism, is transient and short-lived – simply disappearing when they return to the countryside.

Migrants’ social lives in urban China

Migrants experience hard lives in the city. Their social integration with the host society is becoming a burning issue in China. In the second part, four chapters are devoted specifically to their social lives and networks in the city. In Chapter 5, Yu Chen and Gwilym Pryce aim to identify the role of social networks in migrants’ job finding. They distinguish informal ways of job finding through social networks and the formal labour market. Consistently with other studies in the UK, the USA and India, and earlier studies on guanxi (relation) in China and the understanding that social networks play a vital role in migrants’ initial moves, they find that the social network is very important in migrants’ job search. What is interesting in their findings is that the strength of the social network is not the same across migrants of different socioeconomic status. The method of job search is influenced by, for example, educational attainments. More educated migrants are more likely to find jobs through formal job advertisements. They also find the limitations of social networks for job finding, because jobs found through social networks are lower paid. They explain this because migrants tend to make friends with other migrants rather than with established local urban residents. Therefore, because of similar backgrounds among migrants, the information is more constrained to certain jobs, particularly for rural migrants. Many of these jobs are low paid, difficult, dirty and dangerous. The finding is revealing because it indicates the constraints faced by rural migrants. Although migrants develop social networks which are not confined to the local community (see the measure in Chapter 7 by Wissink et al.), their social networks bring them fewer economic opportunities and rewards. From the job search perspective, migrants’ entry into lower job markets (with lower pay) is not only driven by their lower educational attainment compared with urban households, but also conditioned by their social networks.

While the social network approach seems to suggest that migrants are confined within their social activities, face more restricted social interaction with nonmigrants, and hence do not benefit to a greater extent from higher pay jobs, Cecilie Andersson in Chapter 6 investigates the experience of migrants’ trans-locality through detailed ethnographic observations. She asks whether urban villages are ‘isolated’ from the rest of the city (see Chapter 14 by Lin et al., on the ‘spatial’ relation between urban villages and the city). The question is profound: to what extent can places with migrant concentration be seen as ‘migrant enclaves’? By observing everyday practices and interviewing migrants, Andersson argues that rural migrants are ‘situated’ in the urban context and ‘occupy’ and use other parts of the city. For example, she observed that the tricycles run by migrants linked the narrow streets of urban villages to the rest of the city. To understand ‘urban villages’, she argues, we must go beyond urban villages themselves as physically bounded space and look at multi-scalar urban spaces. In the physical landscape, urban villages are crowded and packed, easily distinguishable from the modern high-rises in the rest of the city. But when considering everyday practices, urban villages are part of the city. In contrast to the view that urban villages prevent social integration, Andersson’s argument is that they may provide a place to receive rural migrants and later on help them to become integrated into the urban sphere. From this trans-local perspective, migrants’ urbanism is under formation.

The notion of trans-locality leads to the need to understand better the social networks of migrants. Bart Wissink, Arjan Hazelzet and Werner Breitung in Chapter 7 examine the social networks of migrants in Guangzhou. In general, in terms of social networks, the role of neighbourhood ties has been decreasing. That is, the neighbourhood is losing its function in organizing social networks. In the city of Guangzhou where they conducted a neighbourhood survey, migrants’ social networks diffuse beyond the boundaries of neighbourhoods. They argue that most migrants begin to ‘integrate’ with the city, although they may have weaker ties with local residents in their neighbourhood. The purpose behind their research on social networks is to ask to what extent migrants are integrated with the city and how they are integrated. They review classical social assimilation theory and its critique, which led to the racially disadvantaged model and segmented assimilation, both emphasizing the institutional barriers to assimilation and viewing assimilation within the same social or racial group. From this perspective, they suggest that new and more established or permanent migrants may have different social networks. They classify migrants according to the characteristics of their social networks, namely composition, dispersion and dominant source of social networks. They find that mig...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Migrants' transient urbanism in urban China An introduction
• Part 1 Migrants' livelihoods in urban China
• Part 2 Migrants' social lives in urban China
• Part3 Migrants' habitat in urban China
• Part4 Migrants' transient urbanism Village redevelopment
• Index