Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics DOMESTIC MIGRATION and URBAN GROWTH in CONTEMPORARY CHINA
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Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics DOMESTIC MIGRATION AND URBAN GROWTH IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA Nicholas Eberstadt and Alex Coblin, with Cecilia Joy-Pérez and Kangyu Mark Wang OCTOBER 2019 AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics DOMESTIC MIGRATION AND URBAN GROWTH IN CONTEMPORARY CHINA Nicholas Eberstadt and Alex Coblin, with Cecilia Joy-Pérez and Kangyu Mark Wang OCTOBER 2019 AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE © 2019 by the American Enterprise Institute. All rights reserved. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational organization and does not take institutional positions on any issues. The views expressed here are those of the author(s). Contents Executive Summary .................................................................................................... 1 I. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 3 II. Background .......................................................................................................... 6 III. Data on Population and Urbanization in Contemporary China: Availability and Reliability ......................................................................................... 9 IV. The Geography and Demography of Migration in China 2010 .................................... 27 V. Chinese Urbanization in International Perspective .................................................... 40 VI. The Arithmetic (and Politics) of Migration and Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics ...................................................................................... 51 VII. Educational Attainment: The Urban-Rural Divide, Migration, and Development .......... 66 VIII. Concluding Observations ................................................................................... 79 Notes .................................................................................................................... 84 Appendix A. China’s Population Policy U-Turn: A Tougher New Battle Ahead ..................... 91 Appendix B. Changes in the Classification of Urban and Rural Population in China’s National Statistics .................................................................................... 102 Appendix C. The Political Economy of China’s Evolving Hukou Regime ........................... 112 Appendix D. Explaining the Migration Patterns of Tertiary-Educated Migrants: Higher Education Overcapacity and the Economics of Labor ......................................... 120 About the Authors .................................................................................................. 137 iii Executive Summary n this report, we use data from China’s 2010 census a national labor market and that a large portion of I to examine China’s urbanization and migration the working-age population in cities is made up of patterns from an international perspective. First, we migrant labor. present an overview of the historical use of the city Despite the rise of populous and densely popu- as a means for control and administration across lated cities in China, a look at China’s urbanization Chinese history. Second, we examine the compara- in an international perspective suggests that China bility and reliability of official demographic data and is under-urbanized. Subsequently, we examine what find that definitions of urbanization change dramat- China’s human resource profile in urban and rural ically across China’s official censuses. Delving into areas portends for its ongoing urbanization drive. the contours of urbanization and internal migration Finally, we offer some concluding observations on during the post-Mao era, we find that, even within how modern technological advances may affect the constraints of the hukou system, China truly has migration and urbanization in China. 1 I. Introduction n the post–World War II era, the most basic demo- As a simple matter of arithmetic, this worldwide Igraphic rhythms of human existence have been fun- postwar rise of cities was fueled by migration—mainly damentally recast across the planet. For the global domestic migration. In fact, migration was the source population today, patterns of death, birth, and resi- of the overwhelming bulk of postwar urban popu- dence are radically different from those ever previ- lation growth if we include both migrants and their ously known. descendants. Migration and urbanization are insepa- With respect to death, worldwide mortality rates rable in the modern era: There would have been no have plunged and continue to fall to ever lower lev- great rise of cities without migration, and without els. At this writing, humanity’s overall life expectancy the rise of cities, postwar migration would have been at birth appears to be higher than the highest level vastly more limited in scope and scale. achieved in any country before World War II.1 With The conjoint trends of migration and urbanization, respect to birth, a worldwide revolution in childbear- furthermore, were integral to the economic develop- ing patterns halved fertility levels over the half cen- ment processes that almost quadrupled planetary per tury 1960/65 and 2010/15, with no end to these global capita output between 1950 and 2010 alone.4 Migra- declines in sight.2 And with respect to residence, tion and urbanization have been part and parcel of human beings are now, for the first time in our history, the great structural transformation of economies more likely to live in urban than rural communities. globally. This complex dynamic has generated sub- The emergence of urban life as the modal form of stantial and sustained increases in productivity and human existence is an epochal development, but it took living standards as the overall structure of production place in just six decades. In 1950, by UN Population and employment shifted from agriculture to indus- Division (UNPD) estimates, the share of the world’s try and then to the services and knowledge-intensive population in urban settlements was under 30 percent; undertakings.5 by 2010, it was more than half (51 percent).3 Humans’ There is reason to believe that urbanization is not sudden and rapid urbanization was due to an explosive only a handmaiden of modern economic growth but worldwide growth in cities. Between 1950 and 2010, the an engine of it as well. It is not just that cities trans- globe’s urban population nearly quintupled, surging form daily life, occupations, expectations, and ways from about three-quarters of a billion to over 3.5 billion of thinking. The urban environment affords potential and to nearly four billion by 2015. improvements in productivity through economies of Even more extraordinarily rapid than the overall scale based on population density; better “inputs” of growth of urban areas was the pace of growth for big health, education, and other facets of human capi- cities (or, as the UNPD calls them, “urban agglomera- tal that are characteristic of the “urban edge” over tions”)—locales with populations of 300,000 or more. rural localities; a setting inherently more conducive And the fastest-growing urban agglomerations were to knowledge production and rapid dissemination of the largest in size: the settlements with populations innovation and ideas; and other economic advantages of a million or more. Today, even as global population intrinsic to the very nature of the modern city itself.6 growth continues to decelerate from its postwar apo- In the broadest of terms, the postwar story of gee in the 1960s, these megacities’ populations (espe- migration and urbanization in China reads much like cially in low-income areas) continue to burgeon. that of the rest of the world. For one thing, China 3 URBANIZATION WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS experienced truly explosive postwar urban growth. By over a million and none with five million residents. official Chinese census figures, the proportion of the Sixty years later, in 2010, China had 85 cities with over population living in urbanized settlements rose from one million people, 14 with over five million, and four just 13 percent in 1953 to nearly 50 percent in 2010.7 with over 10 million—far more huge cities than any (We discuss the provenance and reliability of Chinese other nation. By 2015, according to UNPD estimates, urbanization data later.) China had more than a hundred million-plus cities, According to its official population sample survey, with a total of nearly 380 million inhabitants—seven China crossed the urban-majority threshold in 2011, times as many as resided in its 22 million-plus cit- and by 2015 China was 56 percent urban.8 By year-end ies back in 1985, just three decades earlier, and over 2017, that ratio was reportedly approaching 59 per- 25 times as many as in 1950.11 cent.9 All around the world, urban growth has been But it is not just the quantitative—say, China’s especially explosive in the biggest cities—so, too, in sheer size or the spectacular speed of its structural China. transformation and economic growth over the past Just as elsewhere in the world, domestic migra- four decades—that distinguishes the processes of tion has played a major role in augmenting China’s urbanization and development in modern China from urban numbers. And just as elsewhere, urban growth those of other postwar societies. Scarcely less dra- in China not only accompanied overall national socio- matic are the qualitative differences—most notably, economic development but also played a major role