Theoretical And Empirical Research On Population Migration At Rural Community Level In The Minqin Oasis

It is well recognized that population migration occurred in arid oases, a common phenomenon in the evolution of these sporadically dispersed ones in arid environments, has had a profound impact on the economic development and social progress and environmental transition in these places which has already became focal points in the field of arid climates research in recent years typically for Minqin Oasis, one major agricultural region in the lower reaches of the Shiyang River located in the middle part of the Gansu Corridor. Minqin Oasis, due to an over-exploitation of soil and water resources by local residents in the past, has presented a series of ecological crises such as desertification and water shortages, resulting in a continued population decline and labor loss in the rural areas, a major threat to the existence and sustainable development of the villages and communities, specifically the composition of households, the prosperity of settlements, the improvement of cultivation and the amelioration of environment.According to the organizational structure of this treatise, mainly divided into three parts, I need to cross the thresholds, in the first step, by tracing back to general characteristics of residents’ distribution and its evolution of the entire oasis in the past25years through relational literatures reviews and some participatory interviews to the randomly collected peasants, especially for the distribution of settlements, the migration patterns of inhabitants, the driving factors of relocations and the inevitably significant influence on local social conditions and ecological environments over the past decade. Then, five case studies about patterns and scales of people movements in the Minqin Oasis are carried out by investigations to local socio-economic status and labor losses of the five typically chosen villages, named Caiqi, Dengcha, Waixi, Huanghui and Zhengxin, which are respectively distributed in the oasis and are purposely selected from the list of Typical Communities proposed by local government.The results show that:(1) the population migration that have occurred in Minqin Oasis was significantly dominated by relocation, with its proportion approximately reached to90per cent, and people aged from20to30have accounted the largest proportion especially for male that the sex ratio gradually changed with age has clearly appeared a S-curved trend. Furthermore, most of the migrants, specifically72.83per cent, have an educational background of senior middle school at least, and for those residents relocated to other places, almost40.58per cent of them have chosen to work away from their new hometowns.(2) There exists an apparently spatial differentiation for quality of migrants in single families ranging from the upstream to the downstream areas, with the smallest scale in the central region of the oasis. In the other hand, most of the migrants have moved to adjacent areas in Gansu province such as the county seat of Minqin, Jinchang, Wuwei, Lanzhou, Jiuquan and several other adjacent provinces such as Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang.(3) Among the group of migrants, more than half have relocated outward autonomously, comparing to several other patterns such as university admissions, business recruitments and offsite marriages, and there were mainly five aspects of driving forces, that is the economic, ecological, political, domestic and historical factors.In the next step, the specific modes and its regular patterns of rural population movements in arid oases will be argued in depth from the point of households, namely the Nest Theories, providing a comprehensive and rigorous induction of features and defects about the patterns which are mainly divided into five different categories (i. e. the abandoned nests, the departed nests, the separated nests, the accompanied nests and the returned nests). Finally, problems and their negative affects on local society that emerged in the process of migration are dissected, including imbalance of local population structure, inconvenience of household registration, uneven distribution of land and water, lack of education for children and lack of labor force seasonally, and accordingly, some suggestions and useful measures are proposed such as the establishment of more innovative mechanisms of eco-compensation and population migration, the providing of more political and cash supports to local migrants and schools, and most importantly, the combination of migration policies and urbanization in poor environments.