China's Major Cities, The Informal Population Migration

Since the end of 1970s, China's population movement has been experiencing the profound changes in terms of momentum mechanism and exterior forms, during economic transformation from planned economic system to market economic system. One of the most obvious facts is the number of informal migrants is climbing dramatically and eastern-coastal areas, also with other provincial capital cities have become the principle destinations for the floating population. Aside from large-scale internal migration China's population structure has also realized the changes from high birth rate, high death rate and low increasing rate into low birth rate, low death rate and low increasing rate. It has been found out that the total fertility rate has decreased under the replacement level. One problem of population change which needs to be noted is spatial unbalance. The demographical change is with different pace among rural-urban areas and different regions. When most of the rural areas are confronted with increasing burden from the population increment, the total fertility rate in large cities has decreased to extremely low level. This situation takes those cities much earlier into a stage of population aging and labor shortage.The combined action of unbalanced demographical change and large-scale population movement characterized informal migration in large cities with both pre and after industrialization's features. This migration process on the one hand provides good opportunity of transferring remaining laborers in rural and poor regions, on the other hand does create an opportunity window for large cities resulting from labor shortage. It can be a good way to co-ordinate the differential population structure.Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai with fastest population change are the most attractive metropolitan cities in China. The thesis takes the example of these three cities to analyze the population effect of informal migrants. It testifies that the informal migrants are typically on the structure of working age. They enhance the labor resources supply, reduce the race and extent of population aging and alleviate the population raising burden. Furthermore, the enterprise survey dataset proves increasing dependence on the inflowing laborers and urban labor market is experiencing a process from stratified and differential market to a more competitive and inclusive market.Though informal migration has much significance on the metropolitan development, its long term effects still rest on whether the informal migrants can be included into urban life. Otherwise large-scale informal migration will become much more a burden rather than the benefits. That's why the thesis also draws some interest on the study of social inclusion. Through the comparison of inflowing rural citizens and inflowing urban citizens, it's found out that the impact of rural-urban institutional division still exists after the migration, which can be testified from the aspects of migration motivation, education, training, employment, earning level, consumption, contract, labor rights, social security, social interaction, psychological identity and choice of permanent migration or temporary etc.Further research indicates the factors of sex, age, living period, training, aging insurance and city categories contribute significantly on the status identity; the factors of origins, education level, contract, training, migratory period, monthly salary, city categories, occupation and employer contribute significantly on the choice of continuous living in the cities. While the variables significantly contribute on the choice of status identity and continuous migration are different between rural migrants and urban migrants. The public policy making should consider these points and differences so as to make more flexible policy to impetus social inclusion.