Chinas Floating Population: An Analysis of Spatial Structure

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Chinas Floating PopulationAn Analysis of
Spatial Structure

• GU Chaolin, YU Taofang
• Department of Urban Planning, School of
  Architecture, Tsinghua University, CHINA
• E-mailgucl_at_tsinghua.edu.cn
• Ian G. COOK
• Centre for Social Science, Liverpool John Moores
  University, UK
• E-mail I.G.Cook_at_Livjm.ac.uk
• ZHU Chuangeng, MA Ronghua
• School of Geography, Xuzhou Normal
  University,CHINA

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Abstract

• This paper begins with a critical review of
  researches on the Chinese floating population.
  Then, based on floating population data in 1996
  from the Ministry of Public Security of China, it
  moves on to analyze the factors underlying the
  spatial transformation and spatial structure. The
  authors discover that two factors in particular,
  economic growth and city investment, underpin the
  spatial transformation of the urban floating
  population..
• Keywords Chinas Floating Population, Spatial
  Transformation, Influential Factors, Spatial
  Structure, GIS analysis, Spatial Divisions.

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• I. Introduction
• 1. Definition of Floating Population
• 2. Overview of researches on the Chinese floating
  population
• II. Critical Literatures Review on Migration
• 1. Geographical approaches
• 2. Economic approaches
• 3. Sociological and psychological approaches
• 4. Quantitative approaches
• III. Research Assumption and Data Availability
• 1. Research assumption
• 2. Data availability
• IV. Analysis of Influencing Factors
• 1. Three-dimensional Spatial Model
• 2. Spatial auto-correlation analysis
• V. Spatial Division and Fundamental
  Characteristics
• VI. Discussion and Conclusions

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Introduction

• The Peoples Republic of China has witnessed big
  changes in the last two decades. Spatial
  transformation has been wide-scale and
  far-reaching, with economic growth in Chinas
  Gold Coast reaching unprecedented levels,
  especially in the cities. An important feature
  of this spatial transformation has been the
  freeing up of previous restrictions on population
  mobility (Scharping, 1997), to the extent that
  Chinas floating population has become one of the
  most remarkable phenomena to bear witness to the
  changing nature of Chinas population structure.
  Perhaps an inevitable outcome of the shift to a
  market economy, this phenomenon of the floating
  population significantly affects the progress of
  social and economic development.

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Definition of Floating Population

• Operational definitions of migration are tedious
  affairs comprising five dimensions legal status,
  time, space, activity and actor.
• In China, whereas it was used in the nation-wide
  establishment of the household registration(HUKOU)
  system after 1958 and the tightening of policy
  in the early 1960s limited the meaning of
  migration to persons moving with permission to
  change their place of permanent household
  registration.
• Floating population (Liudong renkou) is a very
  broad category that covers a diverse bundle of
  people such as tourists, people on business
  trips, traders, sojourners, and peasants in the
  cities, both employed and unemployed (Chan,
  2001). It refers to population moving to or
  staying in cities, towns or townships other than
  the place of permanent household registration.
  These people could account for as much as 20-25
  of Chinese population.

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II. Critical Literatures Review on Migration
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• There are too many literatures on migration since
  human being has a long history of movement and
  migration. With his Laws of Migration
  published in 1885 and 1889, Ernst Georg
  Ravenstein is the ancestor of all attempts at
  migration model building.
• Although his rough sketch of general trends in
  migrant behavior does not justify the claim to
  elaborate universally valid laws of migration,
  it provides some applicable points today, such
  as, migration decreasing with the distance
  between two places. Geographical, economic,
  sociological and psychological, quantitative
  approaches have focused on different aspects of
  migration.

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1. Geographical approaches

• Economic geographers Walter Christaller and
  August Losch with their theories of central
  places and standard market areas have broken
  ground for an understanding of rural-urban
  linkages and movement caused by the availability
  of crucial goods in a hierarchically ordered
  system of urban settlements. Other geographical
  approaches in migration studies are represented
  by the gravity models developed by Zipf,
  Stouffer and Lowry, which have been elaborating
  on the function of spatial distance and city size
  in population movement.
• William Skinner had got his inspire by his work
  and described the market areas in rural Sichuan,
  China in 1940s, and then his research on the role
  of regional systems extended to the whole of
  China.

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• Urban hierarchies are the major sources of
  hampering forces of migration in China. Migration
  is not only a horizontal occupational mobility,
  but also a hierarchical movement desired by most
  would-be migrants. Geographical and occupational
  migration is a market driving practice in which
  people migrate in search of better paid jobs,
  whereas hierarchical migration is rent-seeking
  practice by which people migrate to change their
  entitlements of access to a set of welfare
  provision. Here, we can list a host of
  differentials in welfare provisions between rural
  and urban areas and between smaller and larger
  cities (housing subsidy, pension provision,
  health care, job security, price subsidy etc.).
  Therefore, current migration in China is a
  two-goal practice. People move to search both
  market-determined betterment and hierarchy
  related benefits.

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2. Economic approaches

• The great majority of migration studies have
  documented the overwhelming importance of
  economic factors. Basic among them is economic
  structure in regard to shares of the primary
  sector, the various branches of industry,
  construction and the tertiary sector. Market
  access can be a major determinant of living
  standards as well as a direct cause of population
  movement. Another important economic factor is
  the volume and distribution of investment.
• However, there are also sectors such as trade,
  transportation and a number of services that can
  generate employment without large outlays of
  capital. Following this kind of light, we
  discuss the migration theories in economic
  approaches as following three assumptions labor
  market, capital flow and human capital.

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• In China, the curve interrelated between inter
  province labor migration (1990's state census)
  and FDI (1979-1990) in each province showed the
  dynamic relationships between migration and FDI
  (Figure 1).

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3. Sociological and psychological approaches

• Economic approaches suffer from such defects as
  they operate with better defined and easier to
  quantify variables such as investment and growth
  rates in the non-agriculture sector, wage levels,
  employment figures and labor productivity. In
  particular, they were unable to explain why some
  people left their rural areas of origin while
  others stayed.
• Furthermore, regional population dynamics and
  structure are an indispensable element of
  understanding. Besides absolute numbers
  determining population density, man-land-ratios
  and land use, fertility levels, age structure and
  household composition seem to be of special
  significance.

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3. Sociological and psychological approaches

• They are intimately connected with social
  structure involving groups defined by family
  relationships, occupation, income and property.
  White-collar professions, specific household
  types and income groups seem to have a
  particularity great propensity for migration.
  Educational attainment has been shown to exert a
  clearly recognizable influence on migration
  behavior, too.
• One variable not mentioned by Lee but of
  paramount significance is the role of kinship
  ties. Stark and Bloom gave an interpretation of
  migration in the light of new economics.

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• In China, migrants tended to cluster in younger
  age groups entering the labor force and getting
  married. The majority of the qualification is
  most opportune for the Chinese case where
  political variable, legal regulations and
  information policies of the state have greatly
  influenced migration patterns, while personal
  networks have worked as a major force of
  circumvention and facilitation. In Lees list,
  only transportation costs can be discounted as a
  major of obstacles for migration in China.

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4. Quantitative approaches

• It is in recognition of this problem that more
  recent version of the migration theories and
  models have stretched many aspects such as
  differences in economic structure, labor market,
  social relationship, leisure time or housing
  conditions between places of out- and
  in-migration. A further question has been how to
  quantify and package a constant formulas group
  that has been worked into all factors and
  variables in order to express all parts of
  migration referred to above. Such factors would
  be important items as, for instance,
  geographical, economic and social structure, life
  cycles or different development level. Scharping
  (1997) gave a model which try to reconcile the
  analysis of macro-level data for the
  geographical, economic, demographic and social
  setting with the study of migration decisions on
  the micro-level of individual and household
  behavior.

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• Quite obviously, here the model would show great
  differences between various periods of Chinas
  history. Migration dynamics there resemble
  Western patterns much closer. They reflect the
  wide social distance that has developed as a
  result of different economic and political
  conditions.

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III. Research Assumption and Data Availability
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1. Research assumption

• However, these Western migration theories and
  Chinas real situation have been anything but
  consistent. China have smacked heavy does of
  ideology and preoccupation with the own
  historical record and have had to be constantly
  adapted to new developments. Many economic
  theories have started from the basic assumption
  of the homo-economics, simplified to a rational
  maximize of profit and utility, acting in an open
  political system and a free market framework of
  full information and equal chances.

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• It is these migration theories and models that
  need modification even more thought they
  accumulated so far stimulate an attempt at
  synthesis in a migration model for China. The
  increasing complexity of formulas, however, has
  been offset by their decreasing suitability to
  account for temporal change. At best, they can
  elegantly sum up cross-sectional analyses.

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2. Data availability

• Chinese censuses and micro-censuses have adopted
  compromise solutions for counting population and
  classifying it by places. Thus, floating
  population having left their permanent
  registration place for more than one year plus
  more recently departed persons with fixed new
  abodes were included among the inhabitants of
  their actual place of stay. The censuses of 1982
  and 1990 embrace either a permanent household
  registration independent of residence permanency
  or a minimum residence of one year with
  registration elsewhere. The micro-censuses of
  1987 and 1995 reduced the minimum time
  requirements for persons with registration
  elsewhere to 6 months. This category of people
  exclude holders of provisional registration
  status temporary registration population (Zanzhu
  Hukou), no matter how long their duration of
  stay.

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• Chinas regulations required for all persons
  staying outside their permanent home to register
  themselves again within three months. However,
  surveys of floating population in some major
  cities result in 30- 50 of the respondents
  without permanent registration there staying
  longer than one year. Some local surveys in rural
  areas have hinted at up to 80 of rural-urban
  migrant workers without provisional registration.
  Another problem is that numbers for provisional
  registration actually do not define persons but
  rather records.

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3 Floating population data in 1996

• Based on floating population data for 1996
  supplied by the Ministry of Public Security of
  China, we shall explore these influential factors
  at the national scale. Also, via use of the
  visualization technique of GIS and the integrated
  methods, deeper analysis will be made concerning
  the spatial structure of the floating population
  in China.

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• The data in 1996 contains the national
  distribution of floating population for all 3406
  counties, cities and districts in metropolis. The
  data provides the total number of floating
  population, the male/female sex ratio, the length
  of dwelling time in the new location, and living
  conditions of the floating population. The data
  set also provides reasons for migration, the
  occupation of floating population as workers,
  farmers, in commerce, services, on official
  business, temporary studying and training,
  housekeeper or baby-sitter, visiting relatives,
  or tourists, meetings and other activities.

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• In order to analysis the data-set was reorganized
  as follows (1) Data in the urban areas (their
  boroughs or counties included). Based on these
  statistics, the outcome is a general table of 146
  city areas where the floating population exceeds
  50 thousand persons. (2) Full data-set of
  counties or the central city The first rows of
  each questionnaire for the more than 3000
  counties and central city is picked up, and then
  comes the general table of the floating
  population in the counties and central cities
  nationwide.

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IV. Analysis of Influencing Factors
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• Statistics show that the floating populace in
  1996 was 28.8 of the total population in China.
  The cities are the concentration highlands both
  for the economy and for the floating population.

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Table 1 Principal component-loading matrix
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Table 2 Correlation analysis between size and
factors
Note(1) In the column of the testing result, the
symbol represents significant correlation at
the 0.01 level. (2) Size means the size of the
urban floating population and factors are urban
integrated factors
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• Table 2 shows that the urban economic growth and
  the urban investment are two main factors
  influencing the urban floating population in
  China. The migration of the floating population
  to urban areas mainly depends on the conditions
  of the economic growth and the investment level,
  i.e., the growth of new jobs.
• Another two dimensions, the urban social
  development and the urban consumption for the
  population floating, are remarkable.

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• At first, the roles played by urban social
  development are relatively small, which
  illustrates that the movement of Chinese floating
  population is still in its elementary stage,
  i.e., survive strategy stage.
• Secondly, that urban consumption plays only a
  minor role in the process of the population
  floating.
• These mean that the most important things for
  Chinese urban floating population are to get jobs
  and have some work opportunities while they enter
  the cities. It is not pressing goals for these
  migrants to improve their present living
  standard.
• From the consumption pulling perspective we
  can see, the population floating has not become a
  force for the development of the cities.

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1. Three-dimensional Spatial Model
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• We extracted data of the layer for the
  administrative unit such as the county and the
  city in the Database of the Chinese Resources and
  Environments (14,000,000 series), and this is
  then used as the graphics data for the study of
  the Chinese floating population.

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Figure 3 Three-dimensional model of the floating
population in China Note To increase the visual
effects and to avoid the blocking impact of the
Pearl River delta area, the observation angle is
adjusted correspondingly.
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Figure 4 Isograms of the floating population in
China
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2. Spatial auto-correlation analysis
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The model of the spatial auto-correlation
analysis
(1) Moran I the model of the whole spatial auto-
correlation analysis
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Figure 5 Analysis of spatial auto-correlation on
the floating population in China
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V. Spatial Division and Fundamental
Characteristics
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• In order to depict the spatial structure of the
  Chinese floating population macroscopically, we
  extend further the studied unit of the floating
  population into the provincial level. Based on
  the outcomes of Figure 5, the spatial
  auto-correlation on the county level is
  classified and reassembled to the provincial
  level as Table 3 demonstrates.

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Table 3 Classified Areas of the Spatial
Auto-correlation of the Floating Population in
Chinas Provincial Level ()
Note (1) Counted by area proportion of
provincial-level units (2)The bold italic
numbers in the table represent that province,
city or borough area where the area is bigger
than the average of its correspondence in the
country as a whole.
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According to this interpretation, the Chinese
national floating population 1996 can be divided
into three clusters and five areas, illustrated
in Figure 6.
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VI. Discussion and Conclusions
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• The spatial transformation factors of the urban
  economic growth and the urban investment are the
  main driving forces for the movement of the
  floating population of China. The locations
  where rapid economic development and associated
  investment continue apace are a great attraction
  to migrants from within the rural areas of these
  provinces as well as to those from other parts of
  China.

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• The cities, especially in eastern China, are the
  concentration areas of the floating population.
  In these areas, as the most urbanized area in
  China, the Pearl River delta and the Yangtze
  River delta are also the concentrated highlands
  of Chinese floating population. The second
  structural element is the existence of an
  outstanding tripartite structure between the
  east, the middle and the west of China. The east
  displays the concentration areas for the floating
  population, the middle a less dense area and the
  west a sparse area, while the frontier regions
  have relatively more floating population.

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• In all, the Chinese floating population makes
  both a significant contribution to, and is itself
  affected by, the massive spatial transformation
  that China is undergoing. The resultant
  structural change is still in its infancy, but
  will develop further to pose new questions for
  researchers and policy-makers alike, as China
  strives to incorporate this huge movement of
  people into its burgeoning cities.

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Thanks!