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China has been undergoing profound social and economic changes. Accompanying these is an increase in the rate of population mobility. The household registration system is still in force, however, and acts as an important regulator of population movement, but this basically applies to a segment of population which is formally attached to the state sector. Against this is the country"s growing floating population, which is guided in the main by the availability of economic opportunities. We may term migrants in the de jure sense ‘permanent migrants’ and migrants only in the de facto sense ‘temporary migrants’. The constraints they face and the opportunities open to them are very much different from each other. While the latter are found mostly in the more prosperous regions of the country, the former tend to have a more even geographical spread. Lagging areas, as well as the more economically advanced regions, can be important destinations. This paper reports the findings of a field survey conducted in Dongguan and Meizhou, two cities in Guangdong Province with contrasting economic characteristics. The data clearly demonstrate that the permanent migrants and the temporary migrants belong to two very different segments of the population. Striking similarities are revealed for the permanent migrants in very different settings. However, there are signs that even in this tightly controlled sector, economics will soon take precedence over politics as the main driving force underlying migration. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Li et al. (Sat,) studied this question.