Urbanization and Rural- Urban Migration in China since 1982

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the People's Republic of China has one of the world's most complex systems of defining population. As evidenced by the massive literature generated, China watchers in the West have expended an enormous amount of energy in trying to understand the Chinese system. About a decade ago, in one of the apparently futile quests, the size of the Chinese population was declared an insoluble enigma (Orleans and Burnham, 1984). Today we are, of course, better off: the baffling mysteries surrounding China's population size between 1949 and 1982 have since been cleared up through the assiduous work of many scholars (Chan and Xu, 1985; Ma and Cui, 1987). In rapidly changing China, however, recent developments in the definition of what is urban and boundaries since 1983 have, among other things, created many new problems for urbanists in their attempt to understand urbanization and migration in mainland China in the 1980s. As will be explained in detail later, two existing population series were in use between 1983 and 1989 (Table 1, cols. 2 and 8), but neither is satisfactory for any analytical purpose. Although almost all