Working Paper Series on Rural-Urban Interactions and Livelihood Strategies WORKING PAPER 12 Rural-urban migration in China: policy options for economic growth, environmental sustainability and equity

In China, as in many other countries undergoing rapid economic growth, increasing socio-economic inequalities and environmental damage are the main threats to sustainable urbanization. Drawing on international experiences, this paper describes the key issues in urban change in China and identifies the types of policy approaches that could support more sustainable urbanization. Urbanization and urban growth in China are closely linked to economic growth strategies and their uneven spatial dimension. Hence, despite the fact that China is one of the few countries in the world implementing a household registration system with the explicit aim of directly managing population distribution, rural-urban migration, much of it temporary or unregistered, is currently the main factor contributing to urbanization. In the 1980s, small towns in China played a major role in ‘in-situ’ urbanization and industrialization, developing a relatively balanced distribution of urban centres with strong functional and administrative links with their surrounding rural region. Since the mid-1990s, however, economic liberalisation has exacerbated differences between remote regions and the mainly coastal emerging extended metropolitan regions. Whilst rural poverty has been steadily decreasing since the 1980s, urban poverty is increasing and includes three distinct groups: temporary or unregistered rural migrants, urban residents made redundant from state-owned enterprises following economic reform, and residents of peri-urban areas who have lost their land to urban expansion. The paper presents a number of policy options, the first of which would bring economic benefits, the second environmental benefits and the last three equity benefits. None of these options involve prohibiting or promoting migration; rather, they aim to improve the quality of migration for the migrants themselves, their home areas, the environment and the economy. Table of