ABSTRACT

The impact of these earlier migrations on the current movements has not adequately been assessed, and yet it must be there. There are two sets of antecedents to the present migrations. In terms of labour migration, present migration is a return to interrupted internal migration flows, which started in the late Qing, to the coastal cities and to Manchuria. The most visible migrations were driven less by pragmatic economic concerns than by the China's leaders and the policies that those beliefs produced. China's international export of coolie labour had come to be seen as a deep humiliation, which had to end. According to People's Republic of China statistics, in the period from 1949 to 1978 twenty-five to thirty million people moved between provinces and changed their hukou. One of the dominant forms of migration promoted by the Communist government was relocation to the border regions, the strengthening of the borders.