Rural-urban migration and 'hollowed' villages

The Lewis Turning Point provides the backdrop to consideration of the huge rural-urban migration that has contributed to the dramatic explosion of population numbers in China’s cities, especially the mega-cities of eastern China. The Turning Point refers to the point at which the supply of surplus labour from agriculture starts to decline following a substantial shedding of labour by farming. That ‘shedding’ gave rise to the huge outmigration from the countryside and a gradual shift in national employment from a dominant position for agriculture to near parity between agriculture, services, and industry in the 2010s. Accompanying this were sustained annual levels of growth in GDP seen nowhere else in the world in recent times. The Turning Point suggests that the Chinese economy is entering a new phase in which flows of migrants into urban-based industry will become far less important. One of the backdrops to these dynamic economic and social changes was the one-child policy introduced in the late 1970s. In rural areas this increasingly meant that two sets of grandparents would be focused on the upbringing of a single child as parents migrated to the cities. That migration rarely meant a complete severing of ties with the land, as the elderly and young remained on the farm, and initially outmigration was dominated by men. In addition, downturns in urban employment produced return flows of people to the countryside, as occurred in 2008/9 (the Global Economic Crisis). The poor conditions under which many migrants live in the cities, without welfare benefits enjoyed by those with urban hukou, have led to calls for a reform of hukou to give rural migrants more rights in the cities.