Abstract
In the past three decades, particularly since the early 1990s, Chinese government has gradually relaxed the restriction on population movement and allowed cities to absorb surplus rural labor in order to benefit urban development (Li 2000, 2003). Although the household registration system (hukou in Chinese) has not been adequately reformed, which makes it difficult for the rural migrants to access the government social welfare and services (e.g., education and medical care) equally in the city, the internal migration in mainland China has become predominantly a rural-to-urban population flow. The fifth National Population Census shows that the proportion of rural-to-urban migrant children under 14 years occupies 14 % of the overall rural migrant population in mainland China (Duan and Liang 2004), and, according to a more recent national census, Second National Agricultural Census (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2008), it is expected that there are approximately 18.2 million migrant children who are accompanying their parents and are living in the urban areas now. Living in city exerts an important influence on rural migrant children’s social development. The migration experiences may be highly challenging for migrant children, on the one hand, and it may provide opportunities for them to learn social skills valued in urban society, on the other.
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- 1.
The household registration system (hukou) in China is a state tool with multiple functions including providing population statistics, controlling population distribution control, and securing social and political order and other related objectives (Chan and Zhang 1999). Under household registration system, each citizen has to register in one regular residence place (i.e., urban or rural category) and one entitlement status (i.e., agricultural or nonagricultural type). A nonagricultural hukou is issued to urban citizens, whereas the agricultural hukou to rural citizens (For the detailed reviews of origins and changes of the household registration system, see Chan and Zhang 1999; Mackenzie 2002). The hukou registration is a “birth-subscribed” system (Potter 1983). The rural-to-urban migration involves both a geographical change in one’s residential place and a change in one’s entitlement status. However, there are few opportunities for rural migrants to be approved for nonagricultural hukou. Without the legally registered hukou of urban category and nonagricultural type, rural migrants in the cities are not eligible for state social welfare to which urban residents are entitled (Mackenzie 2002; Wong et al. 2007).
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Chen, BB. (2014). Rural-to-Urban Migrant Children’s Behaviors and Adaptation Within Migration Social Contexts in China. In: Dimitrova, R., Bender, M., van de Vijver, F. (eds) Global Perspectives on Well-Being in Immigrant Families. Advances in Immigrant Family Research, vol 1. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9129-3_5
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