The Poverty of China's Rural-to-Urban Migrants: A Case Study of Shanghai

Abstract

China's rural-to-urban migration has attracted a great deal of research attention since the late 1980s, but migrants' poverty has not been properly understood. Previous studies have mostly regarded China's rural-to-urban migrants as a disadvantaged or marginalized group in the city. However, despite showing obvious signs of poverty, such as poor living and working conditions, they have rarely been viewed as subjects for poverty research. A very limited number of studies have blamed rural migrants' poverty on their low incomes. However, the income of rural-to-urban migrants has been steadily increasing in recent decades. This increase can be seen in official data sources. Both my quantitative and qualitative data also indicate that rural-to-urban migrants on average have decent incomes.

This project thus sets out to resolve a paradox: Why do China's rural-to-urban migrants live in poverty despite having relatively high incomes? To resolve this puzzle, I develop a new framework of multidimensional poverty to advance a holistic and sophisticated theoretical understanding of poverty. Poverty is redefined as the multidimensional deprivation of material needs, non-material needs, individual capabilities and social capabilities. Its application to the analysis of China's rural-to-urban migrants provides an alternative to the Global Multidimensional Poverty Index developed by the University of Oxford and the United Nations.

Employing this framework, and using quantitative analysis, I find that the majority of China's rural-to-urban migrants suffer from multidimensional poverty. Indeed, the multidimensional poverty rate of migrant households is higher than that of households who receive dibao (a minimum livelihood guarantee payment) and are officially regarded as the poorest people in the city. This is despite the fact that migrant households' per capita income on average is significantly higher than that of dibao households. Through qualitative study, I find, furthermore, that the higher the income rural migrants have, the more severe the multidimensional poverty in which they live in the city.

Drawing on fieldwork in Shanghai and rural Anhui, I argue that rural debt, resulting from high marriage costs and, to a lesser extent, natural disasters and the abuse of power leads to a cross-generational poverty trap for rural migrants. Underpinning this poverty trap, I argue, lies a pursuit of family prosperity and happiness in rural China in which is embedded a cultural emphasis on the importance of individual sacrifices for the family. This familial cultural institution, which I explain in terms of the Chinese concept of xingfu (family-based happiness), significantly shapes rural migrants' choices and norms regarding employment, marriage, and the way to live in the city. I argue that it carries complex effects regarding cross-generational rural family prosperity and poverty. One the one hand, it traps individual rural-to-urban migrants in poverty. On the other hand, in the long term, it sustains the possibility for a rural family to climb out of poverty through permanent migration to the city, via either apartment purchase or educational success. Show more