Liwen Zhang

• Gender

• China

Labor Migration within China: A Field Study in Xiangfu Township of Southwestern China

In the last thirty-five years, Chinese society has experienced a tremendous transformation and the population of China has maintained high-speed and large-scale mobility within the country under the context of globalization. In particular, more than 260 million rural labor forces have moved out from the traditional agricultural sector to the other socioeconomic sectors like the manufacture industry and the service sector. In the mean time, many rural residents have moved out of their home regions, and accordingly some of them have changed their social status in the process of mobility. Even, this huge-sized population mobility has been limited by a long-term urban-rural dualistic structure in China; however, the politics produced by mobility has gradually pushed the social, economic and political system to huge transformation. For instance, the establishment of old-age insurance system and medical care system, the current reform of agrarian land property right and the exploratory reform of households registration system all have reflected the power relations that have caused by population mobility in the last decades. To understand the shifting of labor-forces from the rural to the urban, to observe the changing of social structure in the process of mobility, and to analyze the power relationships among mobility are the starting points to comprehensively understand Chinese society in the past, the present and the future.

Prof. Dr. Jörg Blasius (Institut für Politische Wissenschaft und Soziologie, Universität Bonn)

Dr. Epifania Amoo-Adare