ABSTRACT
Using data collected in 1993 on 54,372 migrants from the Fifth Sampling Survey of the Floating Population of Shanghai, this paper isolates a group of 32,967 rural labor migrants who hold a rural household registration and whose previous occupation was in agriculture. The data analysis supports the conventional wisdom that labor migrants are most often young males who work in the ‘hard and dirty’ jobs of construction and manual labor – jobs left vacant by Shanghai’s educated and aging registered population. But there exists a significant sorting of rural labor migrants among occupations and sectors (state, collective, TVEs and private enterprises) by gender, age, marital status, education, and especially region of origin. Thus it appears that these characteristics and village-based networks are important in channeling migrants into particular occupations and destinations, undermining the notion of a ‘blind’ migration from rural areas to coastal cities during China’s rapid economic transition.
