ABSTRACT
This is the big one! This is the chapter in which we try to describe and explain the greatest migration on Earth: internal migration in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). There is some dispute about the numbers, but if we were to say that around 120 million people living in the major cities of China (population about 500 million) were born in the countryside, we would give some idea of the scale of this migration. The two main forces producing this migration are: (i) the almost revolutionary capitalist modernization of a largely agricultural society; and (ii) prolonged rapid economic growth resulting from an urban-based manufacturing industrial success. Three broad stages of post-war development of internal migration can be
identified: (i) the period of modest urbanization from 1949 to the mid-1960s; (ii) the Cultural Revolution, when Maoist practice provoked a mass movement of urban youth into the countryside; and (iii) the Reform period since 1978, when the transition to a market economy unleashed the phenomenal rural-urban and interregional migration flows of recent years.
