Migrant workers and their children experience local folk customs in an activity to celebrate the upcoming Spring Festival in Hangzhou, capital of East China’s Zhejiang Province, on Feb. 8, 2018. Participating in social activities is a crucial channel by which migrants secure social capital. (XU YU/XINHUA)

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In the past two years, China’s migrant population has continued to decline. According to the Report on China’s Migrant Population Development 2017, the floating population stood at 247 and 245 million in 2015 and 2016, shrinking by 5.7 million and 1.7 million from the previous year, respectively.

Though it is held that the decrease of the migrant population is subject to such factors as the change in demographic structure, the rise of the central and western parts of China, and the slowdown in monthly income, the impact of migrants’ social integration cannot be ignored.
In light of the “new push and pull theory” on population movements put forward by E. S. Lee, the areas of origin and destination both have push and pull factors, but intervening obstacles are a third factor. Social integration is a typical intervening obstacle factor.

Scholars have generally concluded that Chinese migrants assimilate poorly based on different metrics. For example, a 2016 paper by Yang Juhua found that the degree of migrant assimilation is modest in terms of economic integration, social adaptation, cultural assimilation and identificational assimilation.

Through research, Chen Yunsong and Zhang Yi in 2015 discovered that “farmers working in the cities” fare significantly worse than “city people” in such areas as social security, cultural life, psychological acceptance and status identity.

Judging from research on migrant assimilation, the poor integration of migrants into cities can be explained by looking at three factors: institutions, human capital and social networks.

 

Institutional factors
Institution is a broad concept in sociology. It includes not only official rules, procedures and norms but also systems of symbols, cognitive patterns and morality that constitute the semiotic framework of human behaviors.

Regarding official rules, the hukou, or household registration, system has a substantive effect on migrant assimilation.

Chinese people are labeled as “agricultural” or “non-agricultural” in household registration, according to occupation categories established when the rule was set, since people from rural areas mostly engaged in agriculture at the time.

With the flood of rural migrants to cities, it is estimated on the basis of the Chinese Social Survey (CSS) of 2015 that only 41.87 percent of “agricultural” hukou holders are full-time farmers. Farmer is now more of an identity than an occupation.

The biggest obstacle posed by the hukou system to migrants’ assimilation is that they cannot enjoy a range of hukou-related social benefits because of their identity in cities.

Moreover, the production and social security systems are unfavorable to their assimilation as well. Migrants have made huge contributions to the development of cities. Since most of them are manual workers, the entire production environment is harsh on them.

According to the dynamic monitoring of migrants by the National Health and Family Planning Commission in 2014, 75.13 percent of the migrant population worked for 6 or 7 days per week, and the workweek reached 58.26 hours, much longer than the legitimate 40 hours.

The social security system is likewise undesirable. Data shows that only around 30 percent of migrants had work-related injury insurance, while the insurance rate is more than 80 percent in public institutions, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

In addition, institutional hindrance is manifested in cognitive patterns. In a survey, 64.65 percent of the respondents, when asked how the registered population views those from other places, agreed that natives disliked outsiders, and 54.66 percent concurred that the former looked down upon the latter, which indicates extensive exclusion of migrants in the place of immigration.

 

Lack of human capital
Foreign studies on migrants’ assimilation largely acknowledge the positive role of human capital accumulation in social integration. By examining new immigrants in the United States, Barry Chiswick and George Borjas found that education, training and work experience are important ways for migrants to build up their human capital. Especially, education and training are quite significant to their assimilation.

In China, human capital has equally remarkable effects on the social integration of migrants. According to the dynamic monitoring data of 2014, more than 86 percent of migrants flowed from rural areas to cities. Nearly 76 percent of them only finished secondary school. Training and self-learning are crucial to improving their human capital.

In recent years, the government has also carried out occupational training activities for migrants, but data shows that only 29.64 percent of the migrant population participated in government-sponsored free training in the past three years. Meanwhile, merely 3.42 percent read books, newspapers or learned in their spare time. It can be seen that migrants have a weak interest in improving their human capital and lack initiative to learn. On the other side, the measures taken by the government were not effective.

 

Limited social capital
Social capital refers to connections between individuals and between groups: social networks, reciprocal norms and derived trust. American sociologist Alejandro Porters was the first to notice the meaning of social capital in migration studies. He contended that each link of migration, such as deciding whether to migrate, where to move, and how to assimilate into the immigration area when they have settled, is inseparable from their social capital.

Social networks are central to social capital, and the participation in various social organizations and groups is a key indicator.

According to the dynamic monitoring data of 2014, only 8.34 percent of migrants joined labor unions, 4.36 percent were part of volunteer association, 1.36 percent took part in mobile Party and Youth League branches, 9.26 percent in alumni associations, 1.26 percent in chambers of commerce of their hometowns, 1.02 percent in local Party and Youth League branches and 13.81 percent in townsman associations.

Except for townsman associations, the rates at which migrants joined social organizations or groups were all lower than 10 percent, with some only slightly higher than 1 percent. Hence migrant participation in social organizations and groups is low.

Participating in social activities is a crucial channel by which to secure social capital. Data shows that 25.39 percent of migrants have participated in community-level recreational and sports activities, 21.06 percent in social activities for public good, 3 percent in village, neighborhood or labor union elections, 4.69 percent in awards events, 2.03 percent in owner committee activities, and 9.96 percent in neighborhood committee management activities. Generally, migrants’ participation in social activities is not satisfactory either.

The living environment of migrants in cities can also be regarded as a form of social capital. According to the dynamic monitoring data of 2014, 28.19 percent of migrants resided in rural communities, 17.13 percent in villas and commercial residential buildings, 16.25 percent in suburban areas, 15.24 percent in yet-to-be-renewed older neighborhoods, 13.42 percent in urban villages or shanty towns, 4.25 percent in economically affordable houses, 3.04 percent in neighborhoods for industrial and mining enterprises and 1.67 percent in government agencies and public institutions.

The migrant residents in rural communities, suburban areas, yet-to-be-renewed older neighborhoods and shanty towns accounted for more than 73 percent, reflecting the gregariousness of the population. Most of them dwelled in peri-urban areas or urban villages with bad living conditions.

Their inhabitation type also determined the composition of their neighbors. According to the dynamic monitoring data of 2014, 43.46 percent of their neighbors were outsiders, 29.46 percent lived with both outsiders and locals, and almost 21 percent lived with locals only. On the whole, the residential segregation of migrants affected their assimilation to some extent.

 

People-oriented urbanization
The rate of urbanization in China was around 57 percent in 2016. Compared with the rate of more than 80 percent in developed countries, there is still a big gap. Promoting urbanization, particularly people-oriented urbanization, will remain an important task for China in the coming decades.

The assimilation of migrants has a great bearing on urbanization. Facilitating their integration into cities should not only refer to global experience and lessons but also consider China’s actual conditions.

First, it is essential to reform institutions related to the migrant population. Despite progress in hukou reform, the hukou system has still generated few positive effects on migrants. Fairness should be at the core of institutional design to promote the social integration of migrants, with priority given to ensuring equal rights to political participation, employment, education as well as access to basic public services.

Enhancing the cultivation of migrants’ human capital is necessary. With the robotics industry thriving, demand for unskilled labor is decreasing, underscoring the urgency of skill upgrading for migrants. As the migrant population has a lack of crisis awareness, the government should beef up efforts in skill training or strategic planning of reeducation for them.

Additionally, a social atmosphere should be created to respect manual labor. Low social reputation is a major reason for the inadequate social capital of migrants. It is highly difficult for them to build or expand their social networks. As demographic dividends diminish and labor costs rise, the income of manual workers has increased, but not their social reputation. Physical labor is unlikely to gain respect overnight. The government, social organizations and the public should join forces to change the social atmosphere in which manual labor is hardly respected.

 

Zhao Yufeng is from the School of Sociology and Population Studies at Renmin University of China.

(edited by CHEN MIRONG)