IB History Rural-urban Divide and Regional Migration Notes

Internal Migration: Economic Growth Widened China's Rural-Urban Divide

1. The hukou household registration system was formalised in 1958, classifying every citizen as either a rural or urban resident and tying access to public services to that registered status rather than to actual place of residence.
2. Urban hukou holders received stronger access to grain rations, stable jobs, subsidised housing and health and education services under the planned economy, while rural residents were expected to be largely self-sufficient through collective farming.
3. The Household Responsibility System of the early 1980s released large amounts of labour from agriculture as farming became more efficient, creating a pool of rural workers available for the new factories opening in coastal cities and Special Economic Zones.
4. Because changing hukou status remained difficult, migrants who moved to cities for work formed a "floating population" living and working in urban areas without local registration; this population grew from roughly 30 million in 1990 to several hundred million by the 2010s.
5. Young women became especially prominent in the export-manufacturing workforce, particularly in electronics and textile factories in Guangdong and other coastal provinces, where employers often preferred young, unmarried female workers for assembly-line work.

1. Migrant children without local urban hukou often faced additional school fees, exclusion from local public schools, or enrolment in separate, lower-quality migrant schools, limiting their educational opportunities compared with urban-registered children.
2. Because many migrant workers could not bring their families or access affordable urban services, large numbers of children were left in home villages in the care of grandparents or other relatives, a phenomenon widely described as "left-behind children".
3. Coastal provinces benefited earliest and most from foreign trade, investment and infrastructure spending, while much of inland and western China developed more slowly, producing a persistent regional as well as a rural-urban divide.
4. Local governments increasingly relied on converting rural land for urban development and leasing it to developers, a practice known as "land finance", which funded local infrastructure but also generated disputes over compensation for displaced rural residents.
5. Migrant workers frequently faced wage arrears, dangerous working conditions and weak bargaining power, since official trade unions offered limited protection and workers without local hukou had restricted access to legal and social support in the cities where they worked.
6. From the 2000s, the government eased hukou restrictions more readily in smaller cities and towns than in major metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai, which retained strict entry controls to limit population pressure on already stretched urban services.