By Andrew Kipnis
This article examines the diverse challenges faced by migrants to one small city in Shandong province and examines how these challenges vary by age, place of origin, and social class.
Chinese urbanisation comes in many shapes and sizes. Large cities have become global, small cities have become large, towns cities and villages towns. Discussion of the difficulties that new urban migrants face has focused on the experience of rural migrants in the largest urban areas – the Pearl River Delta, Beijing, and Shanghai – and tends to portray these difficulties in a generic form. But much urbanisation has occurred in smaller Chinese cities and the experience of urbanisation in such places can differ from that in China’s major urban conglomerates. Moreover, even in, or perhaps – especially in smaller cities, different types of migrants face different types of problems.
Two factors make migrating to a smaller city more comfortable for many. First, real estate prices are lower. While it would be impossible for a migrant service or factory worker to buy an apartment in Beijing, Shanghai or Shenzhen, many can do so in China’s smaller cities. Second, in some provinces, smaller cities have less stringent household registration regimes. The relaxation of household registration makes it easier for migrants to enrol their children in local schools and in some cases even allows migrant children to sit the University Entrance Exam in the city where migrants live. It also enables migrants to receive licences to run certain types of businesses and work in positions that are reserved for local household registration holders in larger urban areas. While the children of migrants to large cities like Shanghai also sometimes attend local schools, they find their advancement in the local school system blocked once they complete the compulsory nine years of education. They are also blocked from many of the more profitable blue – and pink – collar careers by licensing restrictions.
Between 1988 and 2013, I observed the Chinese county seat of Zouping (Shandong province) grow from a town of 30,000 people to a city of more than 350,000. I interviewed hundreds of this city’s residents. Though the new residents often bought their own apartments and sent their children to local schools, Zouping was not a utopia. New migrants still faced many problems. The types of problems they faced differed according to their place of origin, the type of job they took and their life stage.
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Local Migrants
Many of the migrants to Zouping came from villages within the same county or just over the border in neighbouring counties. Because of the excellent local road network, almost all of these villages were within a 60 minute commute to the county seat by car or motorcycle. While local migrants often purchased an apartment in the city, they did not entirely move out of their village homes. Because local kinship practice (as in most of China) is patrilocal, meaning that the wife moves to the husband’s home and village upon marriage, these village homes were largely in the husbands’ villages. So husbands often went back to their villages on weekends to help their parents and extended families farm the family’s land. Wives tended to work more shifts in the county seat factories as they did not go home on weekends. The husband’s parents also often visited the family in the city to help with childcare and children sometimes returned to their father’s village during school holidays. While these arrangements were efficient in many ways, they also resulted in a fair amount of time pressure. Both husbands and wives worked long hours and women rarely had the opportunity to visit their own natal families.
Distant Migrants
Zouping has also attracted migrants from more distant settings. These migrants came from both the most remote corners of Shandong province, generally a 10-12 hour bus trip from Zouping, and from more distant provinces like Gansu, Sichuan and Heilongjiang. Because of the access to local schools, most brought their children with them. But the migrant workers’ parents usually remained in their distant village homes. These migrants faced more difficulties than the local migrants. They were often poorer and had to rent for long periods before they could afford to buy an apartment. To save money, they often rented the least expensive accommodation possible, even if it meant living in a single room with their children without running water. Both parents in such families often worked extra shifts in the factories, and without grandparents to help, the children were often required to fend for themselves. Though hard work and frugal living made the purchase of local apartment possible, it required many years of sacrifice. Some distant migrants preferred to save their money and move back to their distant homes after retirement. They deeply felt the fact that they were outsiders with no local kinship network. During interviews, many expressed feelings of alienation – that people in general only cared about money, that life was unfair, or that work had little meaning.
Villagers-in-the-City
In the process of its expansion, Zouping gradually swallowed up the land of the villages on its outskirts. In this manner, urbanisation created what Chinese call villages-in-the-city (chengzhongcun). Such places are located on bits of land that originally belonged to the village in question, or in new apartment complexes built specifically for relocated communities. Villagers-in-the-city are not people who moved to the city; rather the city moved to them. In Zouping, the compensation for having land requisitioned by the expanding city has been quite good, and most villagers-in-the-city are better off than either the local or distant migrants. Moreover, even if their entire village was moved, they still tend to live in the same village grouping, so their communities remain. Nevertheless they face problems. First, some villagers-in-the-city have been able to start rental businesses by building galvanised steel shacks in and around their original housing compound. While this generates rental income, it also vastly increases population density, often without adequate public sanitation. Thus sometimes their living environment, like that of the distant migrants who rent their rooms, is quite crowded and dirty. Second, though villagers-in-the-city tend to be relatively well off, some of the older residents remain under-employed. Having lost their land and having few skills other than farming, they have trouble finding work. Finally, the compensation deals villages receive often create conflicts over how to divide the resources. Identifying who, exactly, belongs to a given village and deserves a share of the resources becomes a vexed issue.
Middle Classes
Middle class people may have been born in nearby or distant villages, or even a village-in-the-city, but are distinguished by the fact that they work in a white-collar job, usually in a school, a bank, a hospital or the county government itself. To get a white-collar job in Zouping requires a university degree. While being a white-collar worker in a factory town can give middle class residents a sense of superiority, this superiority itself generates forms of insecurity. While all of the Zouping residents I interviewed wanted their children to go to university, the middle-class residents desperately feared the consequences of their children not doing well enough in school to make it to university. The school system in Zouping and China more generally is quite competitive and middle-class residents of Zouping could not imagine a future for their children that did not include a university degree. Mothers in particular devoted much of their time to ensure that their child (for white-collar workers the one-child policy was strictly enforced for the period of my research) did as much homework and received as much outside tutoring as possible. Such efforts could introduce tension into mother-child relationships and led to much soul searching among the mothers themselves.
Youth
In Zouping, many unmarried young people work in factories and service positions. Most youth, even those that work in the factories, say that they do not like factory work, finding it too tiring, boring and physically uncomfortable. Many of those in service positions know that they could earn more in a factory but choose service work after a stint of working in manufacturing. While factory work is undeniably hard, older factory workers do not express the same degree of discomfort. If I pressed them on the issue they would just say that they were used to it. One problem for youth is the disconnection between school and work. School in Zouping prepares students for the university entrance exam. Students are constantly pressured to study hard by teachers who tell them that if they do poorly in their exam they will end up being factory workers. Close to 80% of students in Zouping live through 15 years of such education (including three years of preschool and three years of senior middle school in addition to the compulsory nine years of primary and junior middle school). But close to 80% of the jobs in Zouping are in factories, so the system seems designed to create dissatisfied youth. In addition, as a socially conservative small-town, Zouping’s social environment pressures youth to settle down and get married. As soon as youth settle into a job, well-meaning matchmakers, friends and relatives begin introducing them to potential partners of equivalent status. By refusing careers as factory workers, youth also resist marriage and thus the end of their status as “youth”.
More General Problems
Not all of the challenges faced by new migrants to Zouping differ according to social position. Some problems, such as air pollution and traffic jams, are suffered by all, though their effects no doubt differ individually. These problems, moreover, are common to rapidly modernising places in China and Asia more generally. In Zouping, car dealerships began to be established around the edges of the city in 2009 and by 2011 traffic jams (both before and after the work and during lunch breaks) became common. Not surprisingly the joys (such as family vacations in the car) and headaches of automobile ownership came together.
As Zouping has urbanised, a wide variety of formerly rural people have come to call the county seat their home. The difficulties they face vary according to age, place of origin and social class. Overall, I believe that new arrivals to cities like Zouping have more opportunities than migrants to China’s largest urban areas. Nevertheless, economic growth is never a panacea and the challenges they face can be daunting.
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About the Author
Andrew B. Kipnis is a Professor of Anthropology in the College of Asia and the Pacific at The Australian National University. His latest book is From Village to City: Social Transformation in a Chinese County Seat (University of California Press, 2016). For ten years he was co-editor of The China Journal.
