How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China (Cambridge Modern China Series)

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Summary: migration and rural development
Review: Rachel Murphy's important and well written volume greatly expands our understanding of the major changes in rural China from 1996-2001 that were induced by rapidly expanding rural-to-urban migration. Other scholars have analyzed experiences in the cities (ex: Dorothy Solinger, Delia Davin, Li Zhang), but Murphy shines the light on the impact of migration on the socio-economic life of the migrant's home village, both during the away-from-home period and after return. She does this through interview-based case studies of several villages in Jiangxi province, an interior province in the southeast of China. Her well researched analysis of migration's impact is very balanced. She makes a convincing case that migration is, on net, a positive phenomena, facilitating rises in the standard of living, social mobility, and expanding horizons, but she also explores some of its negative sides.

There are 8 chapters (not counting the conclusion) in the book.

Chapter 1 is an overview of the literature on rural migrants in the developing world, mainly anthropology theories; "push" vs "pull", etc.

Chapter 2 lays out the background material for her case study area in Jiangxi.

In Chapter 3 Murphy investigates the impact of migration on intra-village inequality, household composition, local off-farm employment, agricultural investment, and land tenure patterns. She explains how migration, and the remittances and reallocation of labor responsibilities that result from it, increase family incomes substantially but also can enhance intra-family tensions and create inequities. She also discusses how the local state coordinates investment of agricultural remittances.

Chapter 4 is on the education, house-building, and marriage goals of migrants, and how migration alters the situation. Murphy finds migration has dual-edged impact on the desire for education by villagers, but on net a positive one. This chapter includes extensive discussion of gender issues, such as how womens' life choices can be expanded by migration and how it can improve the marriage prospects of both men and women.

Chapters 5, 6 and 7 form the heart of the book. These chapters discuss returning migrants, drawing from managerial or other skills they learned during their migrant experience, who become local entrepreneurs in the village or in the connected market towns.

Central to chapter 5 is discussion of the actions by local governments to try to encourage returnee entrepreneurship in order to create the pool of talent needed for rural industrialization, and how the successful return migrant entrepreneurship cases were usually from areas where the local government assists returnees. Chapter 6 discusses the nature of the returnee businesses. It also includes some interesting comments by peasant migrants on their work culture preferences. Many migrants return to gain relief from the extreme subordination to management in the wage-labor urban sector, and return to the relative autonomy of individual entrepreneurship. Related, Murphy mentions how returnee factory owners are increasingly bringing in labor from poorer villages that intensifies the working environment and reduces welfare benefits. This chapter has important analysis of gender discrimination related to returnee enterpreneurship and skill acquisition. Chapter 7 discusses attempts by government to create a good business environment, the contribution of returnee entrepreneurship to absorbing surplus unskilled labor (less than one would think it turns out), and the general modernizing impact (both economically and culturally) of returnees.

Chapter 8, titled "Returning Home with Heavy Hearts and Empty Pockets" examines the negative side of migration and the return experience.