From Rural Poverty to Urban Poverty: A Case Study in Shanxi

Abstract

In recent years there has been an enormous number of rural-urban migrants in China. In this study their social and economic status in destinations is studied based on a case study in Shanxi province of central China. Whilst rural-urban migration could bring the migrants out of the rural poverty, a key question is whether this will then bring them into urban poverty, from both social and economic viewpoints. A two-ended approach was used, namely, the studied migrants were followed from carefully sampled sending areas, so that their social and economic backgrounds were similar. The results show that rural-urban migrants in Shanxi are now generally in a position of urban poverty, and some key issues of improvements are then briefly discussed, (manuscript received July 26, 2006; accepted for publication January 30, 2007)