Resilience and Circularity: Revisiting the Role of Urban Village in Rural-Urban Migration in Beijing, China

Recent policies in China have encouraged rural-urban circular migration and an “amphibious” and flexible status of settlement, reacting against the recent risks of economic fluctuation in cities. Rural land, as a form of insurance and welfare, can handle random hazards, and the new Land Management Law guarantees that rural migrants who settle in the city can maintain their rights to farmland, homesteads, and a collective income distribution. Existing studies have pointed out that homeland tenure can reduce migrants’ urban settlement intentions (which is a self-reported subjective perception of city life). However, little is known about how the rural-urban circularity and rural tenure system (especially for those still holding hometown lands in the countryside) affect rural migrants’ temporary urban settlements (especially for those preferring to stay in informal communities in the host city). The existing studies on the urban villages in China have focused only on the side of the receiving cities, but have rarely mentioned the other side of this process, focusing on migrants’ rural land tenure issues in their hometowns. This study discusses the rationale of informality (the urban village) and attests to whether, and to what extent, rural migrants’ retention of their hometown lands can affect their tenure security choices (urban village or not) in Chinese metropolises such as Beijing. Binary logistic regression was conducted and the data analysis proved that rural migrants who kept their hometown lands, compared to their land-loss counterparts, were more likely to live in a Beijing urban village. This displays the resilience and circularity of rural-urban migration in China, wherein the rural migrant households demonstrate the “micro-family economy”, maintaining tenure security in their hometown and avoiding the dissipation of their family income in their destination. The Discussion and Conclusions sections of this paper refer to some policy implications related to maintaining the rural-urban dual system, protecting rural migrant land rights, and beefing up the “opportunity structure” (including maintaining the low-rent areas in metropolises such as Beijing) in the 14th Five Year Plan period.

Data Sources and Issues in Measurement

This chapter details the data sources deployed and the approaches to deriving measures from them. National definitions of urban settlements vary but are demonstrated to match satellite imagery surprisingly well. Most selected sources ask if the place of origin was rural or urban, though in several censuses this is imputed on the nature of the location of origin, rejecting instances where locations prove too diverse; significant contrasts are not found between the two approaches. Those sources that ask place of birth show significantly lower lifetime migration from urban to rural areas than those reporting only location during childhood; their rural-urban migration propensities do not differ. Measures of migrant flow rates, return migration, and other temporary moves require interim location information. Sources reporting the previous location and duration of residence prove more useful than those asking location five years before. A contention of symmetry between rural-urban and urban-rural migration propensities is rejected.

The Impermanence of Moves: Return and Onward Migration

Several, independent data analyses demonstrate that neither rural-urban nor urban-rural migrations are as permanent as one normally assumes; return is common within a few years. Return from rural-urban migration is more prevalent among men and the less-well-educated and is strongly associated with rejoining a spouse. Age of return to a rural area is bimodal, peaking around age 20 and among children; no evidence of return upon retirement is apparent. Across countries, more than half return to a district other than their origin. Returned migrants’ rural incomes are greater than those of people who remained at home, both on average and among measurably equivalent groups. Upward mobility in income in towns is affirmed, particularly for the less-well-educated. Seasonal migration is more common among men and the better educated and by individuals, not joint families. Seasonal migration in India as well as step and onward migration elsewhere are not as common as is popularly claimed.

In Perspective: A Summing Up

The cumulative findings are summarized under five cross-cutting themes: rural-urban migration and urbanization; the role of rural-urban migration in economic development; the incidence and nature of temporary moves; the consequences of gender imbalance in migration; and implications for the structure and well-being of families. Also included are reflections on the complex range of policies that shape internal migration and the lack of coordination in planning. The desirability of intent to limit rural-urban migration is doubted, given the inexorability of structural transformation, potential gains to moving, and continuing threat from climate change. Planning for managed urban growth, which remains in its infancy in many developing countries, is vital. A closing postscript portrays populations as trapped between declining rural opportunities as climate change proceeds and COVID centered in cities. It is too early to predict how the dynamics of the pandemic will evolve, but climate change will not likely be contained.

Who Migrates, Who Stays?

This chapter provides a descriptive investigation into who migrates. Reasons for concern about the gender balance in migration are set out, including the empowerment of women. Gender differences in education are estimated to be an important contributor shaping this balance. Autonomous migration by women is broadly stigmatized but shown to vary widely across countries of Africa and Asia. The long-standing evidence of positive selection on education in rural-urban migration is reaffirmed, though the more recent depiction of negative selection on urban-rural migration is less uniform. Claims that migrations between the rural and urban zones result in sorting of labor by skills are not supported. Rural-urban migration is lowering education of the labor force in towns; urban-rural migration is raising that in the countryside. Minority ethnolinguistic groups typically undertake less rural-urban and more urban-rural migration. The context in which these communities live and the policies toward them contribute to these migration patterns and are detailed in the chapter.