Lone migrants: China's growing underclass.

In the 1980s, China's population of rural-to-urban migrants numbered around 2 million; today, the estimated number of internal migrants ranges from 150 to 200 million people--over one-tenth of China's 1.3 billion population--and growing. These rough estimates are only expected to rise, with some analysts predicting that the total number of such migrants will reach 300 million by the year 2015. Driven by the privatization of farming, increased urbanization, and rapid industrialization in China's cities, millions of people each year decide to leave their increasingly substandard livelihoods in the Chinese countryside to find work in the cities, mainly in factories or on construction projects. These migrants make up 40 percent of the urban labor force; however, due to China's strict regulation of social benefits that legally ties residents to one area of the country, the vast majority of these migrants are unregistered and therefore unable to claim either government benefits or protection from employer exploitation. Living alongside their urban counterparts, China's migrant workers face second-class treatment from employers and native city-dwellers alike, an attitude only reinforced by government restrictions on migration. As the need for more urban workers rises, government regulation of internal migration needs to adjust accordingly in order to fully support the workers who form the silent backbone of China's economic and internal development.

In the 1950s, the Chinese government implemented the hukou household registration system in an effort to regulate and allocate government-subsidized public services. The system determines government benefits by a citizen's place of residence; when the program was implemented, urban residents received social welfare benefits such as pensions, health care, and subsidized housing, while rural residents received land. The previous communist, government-controlled economy has given way to capitalism, resulting in agricultural privatization and urban industrialization. Consequently, the existing hukou system proved to be too rigid to accommodate the new system. Furthermore, the government benefits offered to rural residents tied them to their increasingly meager portions of land, providing peasants with much more limited options than their urban counterparts. Migration from the countryside to the city was only a logical consequence of the new economic climate; however, the hukou system continued to require rural residents to apply for a difficult-to-obtain change of residence in order to live in the cities and receive government benefits.

Because millions of Chinese migrants are living undocumented in the cities, they receive none of the benefits that registered city-dwellers are allocated by the Chinese government. All types of social benefits and insurance, including many pension programs, subsidized housing, and free health care, most importantly, are not available to city dwellers without hukou status. Pensions, for example, if offered, cannot be transferred if a migrant moves to another city or returns home. Education also comes at an often-prohibitive premium for children of unregistered migrants, who, unlike their urban-registered counterparts, must pay a fee to attend urban schools. Furthermore, since hukou status is inherited, these migrant children will face the same barriers as their parents if they attempt to obtain urban hukou status.

Workplace discrimination is also a problem. Employers are not accountable for their treatment of unregistered migrants, and workplace conditions are predictably substandard. According to a report by the Council on Foreign Relations, a migrant worker earns on average only 65 percent of what a native resident of the city earns. China's internal migrants face what appears to be a nearly insurmountable amount of discrimination, due to both the rigidity of the hukou system and the hostility of native city dwellers, who are unwilling to share their government benefits with the millions of new arrivals.

Though the Chinese government has taken small steps toward both reforming the hukou system and aiding its migrants, more drastic changes need to be made. In the 1980s, the government realized that migrants were necessary to provide the human capital that fueled economic development and thus increased the approval rate for rural-to-urban hukou transfers, especially in smaller urban areas. However, the hukou system, like much of China's bureaucracy, is prone to inefficiency and corruption, and often, only the wealthy and well-educated are able to obtain a transfer. In March 2007, Sheng Huaren, vice president of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, announced the creation of seats in the national legislature for representatives of the internal migrant population, declaring the migrants should have a voice to represent their rights and interests. This reform, however, will only prove to be a cosmetic change, as the unregistered status of millions of migrants will render the calculation of proportional representation impossible.

The Chinese government's failure to respond to the problems caused by internal migration can in part be traced to misgivings about the consequences of a more radical reform to the existing system. An immediate consequence of such a reform to the hukou system would be to put considerable strain on China's social welfare programs, such as subsidies, free healthcare, and pension programs, likely resulting in a reduction of benefits across the board. The government's larger fear is that to relax restrictions on hukou status would be equivalent to opening the floodgates of internal migration, resulting in even more millions of rural residents moving to the cities. Such a surge in migration could result in drastic consequences for China's population as a whole. Whatever the risks of change, however, drastic reform is nonetheless necessary in order to deal with a problem that is 200 million strong and rising. A more balanced reform would be ideal, one that appreciates China's difficulties with rampant rural poverty and extends more benefits to rural residents while simultaneously easing limits on hukou transfers, thus attending to both current migration issues and potential consequences of reforms.

A March 2007 Amnesty International report on China's internal migrants sharply criticized what it saw as the Chinese government's inadequate response to dealing with a rapidly growing urban underclass; the report wrote that "China's so-called economic miracle comes at a terrible human cost." Calling Amnesty's report biased, Beijing defended its economic policies and achievements, though admitting that more needed to be done to protect migrants' rights. However activists and politicians spin the issue, an effective solution must be found to the problem before China's rising internal migrant population and the resulting social unrest grow to unmanageable levels.

photo editor

FEIFEI JIANG