| From the experience of the developed countries, the flowing of surplus labor plays an essential role in the processes of industrialization, urbanization and modernization. In China, due to the specific context of dualistic economic systems in cities and countryside, the surplus rural labor moving into cities brings a large amount of low-paid workforce, which significantly contributes to the development of the urban areas.In contrast to the rural-to-urban labor flowing, the back-flowing of the peasant workers highlights the two opposite trends of the laboring migration. This situation is specified since the global economic crisis in 2008. In the Chinese southeast coastal areas, which are also the pioneers of Chinese economic reform, the industrial restructuring reduces the demand of the less-skilled workforce; the economic rise of Chinese central area, in particular the rise of the labor intensive industries, are attracting increasing number of people to work in local. Owing to these two external reasons, a large amount of rural workforce decided to stay in or move back to the countryside. This issue is named 'reverse trend of return' and widely discussed within the Chinese scholarly community.This reverse trend also raises questions towards the current status of people who moved back to the countryside and the identifiable factors behind of their decision of 'return'. Based on the large samples of peasant families in five representative provinces in China, this research reveals that young and middle-aged groups take greater proportion in this trend and most of them barely received the senior-high schooling; these groups prefer to work in the non-farming sectors after they moved back home and the specific situation differs both in time and in space. Positive analysis of the data indicates that reasons behind of this trend exist in multiple levels, in which the personal and domestic factors dramatically influenced their decision making. |
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