10 Special reportMigration The EconomistNovember 16th 2019
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n weicheng, avillage in Hebei province, a group of friends are
tucking into duck, broccoli and dumplings, flavoured with raw
garlic and lubricated with baijiuliquor. It is the Chinese new year,
and migrant workers have come home to see their families.
Nationwide, some 3bn journeys were undertaken during the holi-
day season this year, making it the biggest mass migration ever;
though next year’s will doubtless be even bigger.
Suddenly a loud phone interrupts. Two men pop outside to take
the call. When they come back, they both have new jobs: a three-
month contract on a building site in Taiyuan, a city neither man
has visited before. It pays 240 yuan ($34) a day, more than twice
what they could make in the village. They were recruited by word
of mouth—a former co-worker vouched that they were reliable.
Weicheng village is not rich. Women break the ice on a river to
hand-wash clothes. Toilets are holes in the ground. But villagers
have motorbikes, televisions and plenty to eat. That is a huge
blessing. Though no one dares talk about it, the elderly still re-
member mass starvation during the “Great Leap Forward” of
1958-61, when Mao Zedong forced peasants onto collective farms,
where tens of millions died of hunger and disease.
China is still a one-party state, but it owes much of its current
prosperity to an increase in liberty. Since Mao died, his former sub-
jects have won greater freedom to grow the crops they choose, to
set up businesses and keep the profits, to own property, and to
move around the country. The freedom to move, though far from
absolute, has been transformational. Under Mao, peasants were
banned from leaving their home area and, if they somehow made it
to a city, they were barred from buying food, notes Bradley Gardner
in “China’s Great Migration”. Now, there are more rural migrants in
China than there are cross-border migrants in the world.
By moving from unproductive paddyfields to better jobs in fac-
tories and shops, they have made themselves and China richer.
Somewhere between a fifth and a third of the country’s colossal
economic growth between the late 1970s and the current decade is
due to this great migration.
China’s population is now 60% urban,
up from 18% in 1978. Sub-Saharan Africa is
only 40% urban; India lags even further be-
hind, at 34%. Mahatma Gandhi, modern In-
dia’s founding father, thought the growth
of cities was “an evil thing, unfortunate for
mankind and the world”. He believed that
Indians would be spiritually more fulfilled
if they stayed in villages, growing their own
food and spinning their own clothes.
Really? Five farmers in Gandhi’s home
state of Gujarat showed your correspon-
dent how much wheat they had harvested
in three days, using hand-held sickles. A
combine harvester could have done the job
in a minute or two.
The farmers are sharecroppers. They are
always hungry at the start of the season, so
the landlord advances them grain. Asked
how much they currently owe him, they donot know: none of them can read or do sums. Asked how much
they typically receive at the end of the year, they say “nothing”. The
landlord always calculates that they have received their full share
of the crop. He does not want them to have spare food or cash; if
they did, they might quit. Aajeevika Bureau, a local charity, helps
illiterate farm workers draw up contracts, and keeps copies on
their behalf. But the quickest way to earn more is to move to a city.
“In the city we have money,” says Ratansinh, who moved from
rural Uttar Pradesh to Ahmedabad, the Gujarati commercial capi-
tal, when he was 18. “In the village we earned nothing. What we
grew, we ate. What was left, we bartered for clothes and tools.”
Now 52, he earns 24,000 rupees ($340) a month as a supervisor
in a small textiles factory. The machines rattle loudly in the back-
ground as he talks. Like many Indian men who move to a city, he
has left his family behind. His wife remains on the farm; his two
children are at college. He goes back to the village for two months a
year. He misses his wife, but “that’s the compromise you make. If I
go back to the village, I can’t pay for my children’s education.”
B.R. Ambedkar a contemporary of Gandhi’s who championed
dalits, called the Indian village “a den of ignorance, narrow-mind-
edness and communalism”. Many migrants agree. “In my village,
cutting someone’s tree down by mistake could lead to murder,” re-
calls Tawwaj Ali, a factory worker in Ahmedabad. “No one knows
who you are in the city,” he adds, “so there’s less conflict.” Indeed,
strict rules about “untouchability” are impossible to enforce in a
jam-packed Mumbai train, notes Chinmay Tumbe of the Indian In-
stitute of Management in Ahmedabad, author of “India Moving”.I know a boat you can get on
In rich countries 81% of people live in urban areas. Mechanised
farms produce enough food for all, while leaving plenty of space
for parks and wilderness. In the rest of the world half the popula-
tion still lives in the countryside. Many politicians, like Gandhi,
think they should stay there, either for romantic reasons (the
countryside is so beautiful!) or because they do not want peasants
building unsightly slums in their cities.
Under China’s hukou(household registration) system, rural mi-
grants who work in top-tier cities are treated as second-class citi-
zens. The aim is to discourage them from settling there. They are
barred from urban public services, and so must either leave their
kids with grandma in the village or scrape together the cash to put
them in shoddy urban private schools. Sometimes city authorities
bulldoze these schools. The hukousystem is one reason why rural
Chinese children are dramatically worse educated than urban
ones—and two-thirds of Chinese children are officially rural.
Several people from Weicheng village
work in Beijing. This means separation. “It
would be impossible to get our kids into a
public school there,” sighs a mother who
looks after them in the village while her
husband is away.
In India the obstacles to internal migra-
tion are more subtle. One is language—In-
dia has more than 100 of them. Another is
the difficulty of obtaining government
benefits after crossing a state line. A study
by Zovanga Kone of Oxford University and
others finds that migration between
neighbouring Indian districts is 50% high-
er if they are in the same state than if they
are separated by a state border.
Another problem is violence. Rape is
common and poorly policed. So although
many Indian women migrate to marry, few
migrate to work (unlike in China). And be-City air makes you free
To get richer, leave your villageDomestic migrationThe prosperous don’t ploughSource: World BankUrban population, % of total population02550751001969 80 90 2000 10 18ChinaIndiaLow-income countriesIndonesiaHigh-income countries