ABSTRACT
Introduction There is no doubt that migrant workers are the backbone of the modernization and economic development of China. Ever since China entered “the age of migration” in the 1980s (Liang 2001), millions of migrants have flooded to the Chinese cities, especially the large cities (Liu et al. 2014). After 30 years this movement’s momentum still shows no sign of abating: in 1982, China’s migrant population was 6.57 million, less than 1 percent of the total population (Duan et al. 2013). In 2000, the migrant population surged to 79 million (Liang and Ma 2004). In another ten years its size almost tripled to over 221 million, accounting for 16.5 percent of the total Chinese population (NBS 2011). Obviously, the most prominent component of this phenomenal population movement are the people coming from rural areas to look for work in the cities: statistics show that in 2010 63 percent of the migrant population came from rural areas and their primary reason for migration was work and business (Zheng 2013). Such an upsurge in migration has, in turn, stimulated considerable interest among scholars and generated abundant research on the rural-urban migration movement, as well as the incorporation of migrants in Chinese cities. Some major strands of extant research include: general patterns and trends of migration over time (Chan 2013; Goodkind and West 2002; Liang 2001; Liang and Ma 2004); migrants’ adaptation in the urban labor market (Knight and Yueh 2004; Meng and Zhang 2001; Wang et al. 2002); migrants’ housing and settlement in destination cities (Wu 2002, 2005); and the experiences of migrant women (Fan 2004; Roberts 2002) and migrant children (Liang et al. 2008). However, any population movement is more than just the one-way process and outcome, and there is also the reverse movement. After all, temporary and circular migrations are a constant feature of internal migration (White and Lindstrom 2005). Indeed, empirical research shows that the size of the return migrant population in China is also substantial, in the millions at least, and is expected to expand further at times of economic downturn, just as happened in the 1990s during the reform of the state-owned enterprises and in the late 2000s in the context of the global financial crisis (Chunyu et al. 2013), yet the phenomenon of return migration is still an understudied area.
