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COPYRIGHT 2004 The Institute Inc.
Since economic liberalization began in 1978, a tsunami of off-shore capital has flooded China's coastal provinces. The new wealth draws a rising tide of migrants from the interior, eager to sell their labor to a better master than a third-world neighbor. Female long-distance migrants from Sichuan are conspicuous among them, if only because that province has China's largest population and, as yet, only a modest degree of industrialization. At the end of the 1994 Spring Festival holiday, I gaped at tens of thousands of them waiting at Chengdu's railway station for transport to coastal factories, construction sites, nurseries, restaurants, and brothels. Dozing on bundles of bedding, bright with suppressed excitement or teary about babies left behind, more waited at Sichuan's lesser rail stops, bus depots, and wharves.
Post-reform migration out of Sichuan has been dwarfed, however, by the re-shuffling of work-seekers within the province itself. Most of them have proceeded prudently, moving short distances along known roads and rivers, taking few risks, and often gaining opportunities not open to strangers. Those taking the local path thus remained in a denser network of connections, a safety net that though flimsy is better than the social vacuum of an unknown factory suburb. They relied on the intense sociality and expectations of long-term reciprocity to soften local transactions: "Within certain limits, a man is glad to be useful to his neighbor" (Fei 1939: 241-242).
Short-distance migrants see their quest as less glamorous than an adventurous "leap into the sea" that might, somehow, lead to uncounted riches and perfect marriages. For researchers too, local travelers are less visible and perhaps less attractive as subjects than their long-distance peers. A Sichuan woman assembling microchips in Shanghai is the future embodied; a girl hired from a nearby village to chop restaurant vegetables has no obvious role in China's political-economic transformation. Local migration is an ancient Chinese tradition, especially for women, who generally migrated away from their home village for marriage. The fun (and profit) of economic analysis is to spot what comes next, not to tally up what has persisted for decades, or centuries.
Viewing local migration, especially of women as, unimportant is shortsighted, and misses much of China's present and its probable immediate future. To see why this is so, it is useful to sketch the structure of China's political economy since liberalizing reforms began in 1978. This structure defines the choices available to the largely rural, small-town, and periurban population with which this paper deals. Accessible opportunities and their indigenous rankings sharply constrain individual agency, leaving small room for expansive hopes and dreams. Yet the modest successes of short-distance rural migrants contribute much to China's economic improvement. This is, perhaps, because so many of them invest their labor in distinctly local production, where accumulated capital is likely to be reinvested locally, rather than in the better-known, large-scale private sector that employs only a minuscule proportion of China's workforce and exports much of its capital gains. In this paper, I describe patterns of migration in Sichuan Province since liberalization of property rights began in 1978. I focus on women, who migrate not only for paid work but into marriages where they naturally become part of the local labor force.
The Sichuan Sample
The individual interests of young rural and small-town Chinese, whether in education, work, or marriage, are still subordinated to those of the larger family, and the responsibilities of household heads for their juniors are backed by the requirements of the state (v. Gui and Liu 1992: 533). Under high Maoism, institutional controls strongly shaped family and individual decisions, and in cities, much marriage behavior has remained responsive to the policies of state enterprises that still supply "the basic needs" of most people (Whyte 1993: 213). While the influence of local governmental employment and policy is often less strong in rural areas, it is a factor of some weight. Josephine Smart and Alan Smart (1993) have shown some of the benefits hiring kin brings to employers: greater loyalty and thus output, and increased face to the employer for her sense of responsibility to kin. To this can be added the approbation an employer gains for helping soak up local unemployment, an approbation that may bring tangible benefit. As we consider "migrants," it makes sense to recognize that multiple stakeholders still have great influence in shaping a young person's career track. Rather than work with the migrants themselves, we decided to begin at the source of the migrant stream: the female seniors of households from which or to which migrants had come or gone since the reforms began. These women often made the critical decision that a grown child would, or would not, migrate.
In 1994, with cadres of the Sichuan Provincial Women's Federation, I organized a survey to investigate the comings and goings of household members in parts of three counties. In most Sichuan households, the senior woman is said to dang jia (to manage the household economy); these were our interviewees. The team interviewed 400 such women in each of three sites. In the two more rural sites, we chose 100 each in a suburb of the county seat, a periurban village, a more distant village (one that could be reached by four-wheeled transport or a substantial waterway), and a remote village (reached by walking, bike, or motorbike only). The sampling at each location was not random, nor did we seek out households in which migration played a role. We tried to cover every woman who dang jia within given administrative boundaries at each location, succeeding reasonably well.
Like the 1200 interviewees, our sites were chosen for a combination of reasons. The economically simplest site was the county of Zhongjiang. Intermediate in economic complexity was Jiangyou, a county under the immediate control of Mianyang, the third-ranked city in the province, a place of recent urban and industrial sophistication. The third site was within or very near Chengdu City itself, including a segment of Huanghua Xia Qu, an old ward of this provincial capital with buildings dating from the Qing dynasty (1644-1911).
In the 1990s, Zhongjiang County displayed a balance of state-directed and market-driven influences. Beginning in the 1970s, the county (and higher) levels of economic planning has fostered silk production, from scientific egg production through household-based worm and cocoon raising to filatures, weaving factories, and the production of both woven and knitted silk garments. This was created almost from ground zero; silk had not been a local product in the past. A very substantial effort at agricultural extension work, especially with women, had developed both high-quality silk production and the elaborate arboriculture on which it depends. Zhongjiang became Sichuan's leading producer of silk cocoons, the profit from which supplied "almost all" of the county government's operating budget. State agents alone may sell eggs and purchase cocoons. But silk is not grown by quota. Technical help and propaganda push women to take on this demanding work, and raising the state price when quantity falls pulls them in.
Hilly, served with very bad roads, the county in the mid-1990s offered reliable work...
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