ABSTRACT
China is becoming a country of migrants. Millions of rural migrants have resettled in large coastal cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in the last three decades. This chapter reviews the theory of migrant integration and assimilation together with the study of rural migrant integration in urban China. Integration and assimilation are two words mainly used by scholars to address the host-migrant relationship. Migrant integration is also spatially contingent. The social integration of migrants contains an important spatial dimension. In the last three decades, urban China scholars have produced abundant knowledge to aid in understanding the situation of informal settlements such as urban villages as well as migrants in Chinese cities. Urban villages have been transformed into functional but unregulated migrant enclaves.
