China’s Floating Population:
An Analysis of Spatial Structure
GU Chaolin, YU Taofang
Department of Urban Planning, School of Architecture, Tsinghua University, CHINA
E-mail：gucl@tsinghua.edu.cn
Ian G. COOK
Centre for Social Science, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
E-mail： I.G.Cook@Livjm.ac.uk
ZHU Chuangeng, MA Ronghua
School of Geography, Xuzhou Normal University,CHINA
Abstract
• This paper begins with a critical review of researches on
the Chinese floating population. Then, based on floating
population data in 1996 from the Ministry of Public
Security of China, it moves on to analyze the factors
underlying the spatial transformation and spatial
structure. The authors discover that two factors in
particular, economic growth and city investment,
underpin the spatial transformation of the urban floating
population..
• Keywords: China’s Floating Population, Spatial
Transformation, Influential Factors, Spatial Structure,
GIS analysis, Spatial Divisions.
• I. Introduction
– 1. Definition of Floating Population
– 2. Overview of researches on the Chinese floating
population
• II. Critical Literatures Review on Migration
–
–
–
–
1. Geographical approaches
2. Economic approaches
3. Sociological and psychological approaches
4. Quantitative approaches
• III. Research Assumption and Data Availability
– 1. Research assumption
– 2. Data availability
• IV. Analysis of Influencing Factors
– 1. Three-dimensional Spatial Model
– 2. Spatial auto-correlation analysis
• V. Spatial Division and Fundamental Characteristics
• VI. Discussion and Conclusions
Introduction
• The People’s Republic of China has witnessed big
changes in the last two decades. Spatial transformation
has been wide-scale and far-reaching, with economic
growth in China’s ‘Gold Coast’ reaching unprecedented
levels, especially in the cities. An important feature of
this spatial transformation has been the freeing up of
previous restrictions on population mobility (Scharping,
1997), to the extent that China’s floating population has
become one of the most remarkable phenomena to bear
witness to the changing nature of China’s population
structure. Perhaps an inevitable outcome of the shift to
a market economy, this phenomenon of the floating
population significantly affects the progress of social and
economic development.
Definition of Floating Population
• Operational definitions of migration are tedious affairs
comprising five dimensions: legal status, time, space,
activity and actor.
• In China, whereas it was used in the nation-wide
establishment of the household registration(HUKOU)
system after 1958 and the tightening of policy in the
early 1960s limited the meaning of migration to persons
moving with permission to change their place of
permanent household registration.
• “ Floating population (Liudong renkou)” is a very broad
category that covers a diverse bundle of people such as
tourists, people on business trips, traders, sojourners,
and peasants in the cities, both employed and
unemployed (Chan, 2001). It refers to population moving
to or staying in cities, towns or townships other than the
place of permanent household registration. These
people could account for as much as 20-25% of Chinese
population.
II. Critical Literatures
Review on Migration
• There are too many literatures on migration since human
being has a long history of movement and migration.
With his “Laws of Migration” published in 1885 and 1889,
Ernst Georg Ravenstein is the ancestor of all attempts at
migration model building.
• Although his rough sketch of general trends in migrant
behavior does not justify the claim to elaborate
universally valid “laws of migration”, it provides some
applicable points today, such as, migration decreasing
with the distance between two places. Geographical,
economic, sociological and psychological, quantitative
approaches have focused on different aspects of
migration.
1. Geographical approaches
• Economic geographers Walter Christaller and August
Losch with their theories of central places and standard
market areas have broken ground for an understanding
of rural-urban linkages and movement caused by the
availability of crucial goods in a hierarchically ordered
system of urban settlements. Other geographical
approaches in migration studies are represented by the
“gravity” models developed by Zipf, Stouffer and Lowry,
which have been elaborating on the function of spatial
distance and city size in population movement.
• William Skinner had got his inspire by his work and
described the market areas in rural Sichuan, China in
1940s, and then his research on the role of regional
systems extended to the whole of China.
• Urban hierarchies are the major sources of hampering
forces of migration in China. Migration is not only a
horizontal occupational mobility, but also a hierarchical
movement desired by most would-be migrants.
Geographical and occupational migration is a market
driving practice in which people migrate in search of
better paid jobs, whereas hierarchical migration is rentseeking practice by which people migrate to change their
entitlements of access to a set of welfare provision. Here,
we can list a host of differentials in welfare provisions
between rural and urban areas and between smaller and
larger cities (housing subsidy, pension provision, health
care, job security, price subsidy etc.). Therefore, current
migration in China is a two-goal practice. People move to
search both market-determined betterment and
hierarchy related benefits.
2. Economic approaches
• The great majority of migration studies have documented
the overwhelming importance of economic factors. Basic
among them is economic structure in regard to shares of
the primary sector, the various branches of industry,
construction and the tertiary sector. Market access can
be a major determinant of living standards as well as a
direct cause of population movement. Another important
economic factor is the volume and distribution of
investment.
• However, there are also sectors such as trade,
transportation and a number of services that can
generate employment without large outlays of capital.
Following this kind of light, we discuss the migration
theories in economic approaches as following three
assumptions: labor market, capital flow and human
capital.
• In China, the curve interrelated between inter
province labor migration (1990's state census)
and FDI (1979-1990) in each province
showed the dynamic relationships between
migration and FDI (Figure 1).
3. Sociological and psychological approaches
• Economic approaches suffer from such defects as they
operate with better defined and easier to quantify
variables such as investment and growth rates in the
non-agriculture sector, wage levels, employment figures
and labor productivity. In particular, they were unable to
explain why some people left their rural areas of origin
while others stayed.
• Furthermore, regional population dynamics and structure
are an indispensable element of understanding. Besides
absolute numbers determining population density, manland-ratios and land use, fertility levels, age structure
and household composition seem to be of special
significance.
3. Sociological and psychological approaches
• They are intimately connected with social structure
involving groups defined by family relationships,
occupation, income and property. White-collar
professions, specific household types and income
groups seem to have a particularity great propensity for
migration. Educational attainment has been shown to
exert a clearly recognizable influence on migration
behavior, too.
• One variable not mentioned by Lee but of paramount
significance is the role of kinship ties. Stark and Bloom
gave an interpretation of migration in the light of new
economics.
• In China, migrants tended to cluster in younger
age groups entering the labor force and getting
married. The majority of the qualification is most
opportune for the Chinese case where political
variable, legal regulations and information
policies of the state have greatly influenced
migration patterns, while personal networks
have worked as a major force of circumvention
and facilitation. In Lee’s list, only transportation
costs can be discounted as a major of obstacles
for migration in China.
4. Quantitative approaches
• It is in recognition of this problem that more recent
version of the migration theories and models have
stretched many aspects such as differences in economic
structure, labor market, social relationship, leisure time
or housing conditions between places of out- and inmigration. A further question has been how to quantify
and package a constant formulas group that has been
worked into all factors and variables in order to express
all parts of migration referred to above. Such factors
would be important items as, for instance, geographical,
economic and social structure, life cycles or different
development level. Scharping (1997) gave a model
which try to reconcile the analysis of macro-level data for
the geographical, economic, demographic and social
setting with the study of migration decisions on the
micro-level of individual and household behavior.
• Quite obviously, here the model would
show great differences between various
periods of China’s history. Migration
dynamics there resemble Western
patterns much closer. They reflect the
wide social distance that has developed as
a result of different economic and political
conditions.
III. Research Assumption
and Data Availability
1. Research assumption
• However, these Western migration theories and
China’s real situation have been anything but
consistent. China have smacked heavy does of
ideology and preoccupation with the own
historical record and have had to be constantly
adapted to new developments. Many economic
theories have started from the basic assumption
of the homo-economics, simplified to a rational
maximize of profit and utility, acting in an open
political system and a free market framework of
full information and equal chances.
• It is these migration theories and models
that need modification even more thought
they accumulated so far stimulate an
attempt at synthesis in a migration model
for China. The increasing complexity of
formulas, however, has been offset by
their decreasing suitability to account for
temporal change. At best, they can
elegantly sum up cross-sectional analyses.
2. Data availability
• Chinese censuses and micro-censuses have adopted
compromise solutions for counting population and
classifying it by places. Thus, floating population having
left their permanent registration place for more than one
year plus more recently departed persons with fixed new
abodes were included among the inhabitants of their
actual place of stay. The censuses of 1982 and 1990
embrace either a permanent household registration
independent of residence permanency or a minimum
residence of one year with registration elsewhere. The
micro-censuses of 1987 and 1995 reduced the minimum
time requirements for persons with registration
elsewhere to 6 months. This category of people exclude
holders of provisional registration status “temporary
registration population (Zanzhu Hukou)”, no matter how
long their duration of stay.
• China’s regulations required for all persons
staying outside their permanent home to register
themselves again within three months. However,
surveys of floating population in some major
cities result in 30- 50% of the respondents
without permanent registration there staying
longer than one year. Some local surveys in
rural areas have hinted at up to 80% of ruralurban migrant workers without provisional
registration. Another problem is that numbers for
provisional registration actually do not define
persons but rather records.
3 Floating population data in 1996
• Based on floating population data for 1996
supplied by the Ministry of Public Security
of China, we shall explore these influential
factors at the national scale. Also, via use
of the visualization technique of GIS and
the integrated methods, deeper analysis
will be made concerning the spatial
structure of the floating population in
China.
• The data in 1996 contains the national
distribution of floating population for all 3406
counties, cities and districts in metropolis. The
data provides the total number of floating
population, the male/female sex ratio, the length
of dwelling time in the new location, and living
conditions of the floating population. The data
set also provides reasons for migration, the
occupation of floating population as workers,
farmers, in commerce, services, on official
business, temporary studying and training,
housekeeper or baby-sitter, visiting relatives, or
tourists, meetings and other activities.
• In order to analysis the data-set was
reorganized as follows: (1) Data in the
urban areas (their boroughs or counties
included). Based on these statistics, the
outcome is a general table of 146 city
areas where the floating population
exceeds 50 thousand persons. (2) Full
data-set of counties or the central city: The
first rows of each questionnaire for the
more than 3000 counties and central city
is picked up, and then comes the general
table of the floating population in the
counties and central cities nationwide.
IV. Analysis of Influencing
Factors
• Statistics show that the floating populace
in 1996 was 28.8% of the total population
in China. The cities are the concentration
“highlands” both for the economy and for
the floating population.
Table 1: Principal component-loading matrix
principal component
First
Second
Third
Fourth
1. population of the whole urban administration area
0.253
0.887
-0.107
0.009
2. the urban population
0.299
0.907
-0.120
0.110
3. the urban non-agricultural population
0.401
0.641
0.007
0.282
4. the urban at-work population
0.399
0.691
0.164
0.134
5. the urban individual-enterprise workers
0.146
0.599
0.350
0.002
6. percentage of the urban employment in the secondary
industrial sector
0.484
0.417
0.118
0.352
7. percentage of the urban employment in tertiary industrial
sector
0.232
0.499
0.402
0.187
8. the urban GDP
0.914
0.040
0.208
0.149
9. the urban total industrial production value
0.908
0.114
0.475
10. the urban total tax revenue
0.818
0.072
0.216
11. the urban tax revenue per 100 Yuan of turnover
0.633
0.142
12. the urban total passenger transport
0.078
0.498
13. total investment in permanent assets
0.236
14. the total sum of the social retail business
Variables
-0.020
-0.164
0.428
0.525
0.212
-0.049
-0.049
0.905
-0.313
0.288
-0.015
0.151
15. the actual utility of foreign capital
0.196
-0.078
0.891
16. annual average income per employee
0.602
0.002
0.031
0.934
-0.009
0.430
Table 2: Correlation analysis between size and factors
Principal component
Correlation
1. urban economic growth
0.78
2. urban social development
3. urban investment
4. urban consumption level
0.08
0.41
0.18
Critical
value
The testing
result
0.23
*
0.23
-
0.23
*
0.23
-
Note：(1) In the column of the testing result, the symbol ‘*’ represents
significant correlation at the 0.01 level. (2) Size means the size of the
urban floating population; and factors are urban integrated factors
• Table 2 shows that the urban economic growth
and the urban investment are two main factors
influencing the urban floating population in
China. The migration of the floating population
to urban areas mainly depends on the conditions
of the economic growth and the investment level,
i.e., the growth of new jobs.
• Another two dimensions, the urban social
development and the urban consumption for the
population floating, are remarkable.
• At first, the roles played by urban social development are
relatively small, which illustrates that the movement of
Chinese floating population is still in its elementary stage,
i.e., survive strategy stage.
• Secondly, that urban consumption plays only a minor
role in the process of the population floating.
• These mean that the most important things for Chinese
urban floating population are to get jobs and have some
work opportunities while they enter the cities. It is not
pressing goals for these migrants to improve their
present living standard.
• From the “consumption pulling” perspective we can see,
the population floating has not become a “force” for the
development of the cities.
1. Three-dimensional Spatial
Model
• We extracted data of the layer for the
administrative unit such as the county and
the city in the Database of the Chinese
Resources and Environments
(1:4,000,000 series), and this is then used
as the graphics data for the study of the
Chinese floating population.
Figure 3: Three-dimensional model of the floating population in China
Note: To increase the visual effects and to avoid the blocking impact of the
Pearl River delta area, the observation angle is adjusted correspondingly.
0
400
800 km
isogram
no data
Figure 4 Isograms of the floating population in China
2. Spatial auto-correlation
analysis
The model of the spatial autocorrelation analysis
(1) Moran I: the model of the whole spatial auto- correlation analysis
n
I (d ) 
n
 W
i 1
j i
ij
( Xi  X )( Xj  X )
n
S2
i 1
n
W
j i
ij
0
400
800 km
<= 0
0 ~ 0.2
0.2 ~ 0.8
> 0.8
no data
Figure 5: Analysis of spatial auto-correlation on the floating population in China
V. Spatial Division and
Fundamental Characteristics
• In order to depict the spatial structure of
the Chinese floating population
macroscopically, we extend further the
studied unit of the floating population into
the provincial level. Based on the
outcomes of Figure 5, the spatial autocorrelation on the county level is classified
and reassembled to the provincial level as
Table 3 demonstrates.
Table 3: Classified Areas of the Spatial Auto-correlation of
the Floating Population in China’s Provincial Level
(%)
Ranks
Province
I
II
III
IV
Beijing
16.6
40.9
35.6
7.8
Tianjin
27.7
41.3
31.0
Hebei
5.9
20.1
Shanxi
5.4
Inner Mongol
I
II
III
IV
Henan
5.9
20.2
73.9
0.0
0.0
Hubei
6.0
40.6
53.4
0.0
74.0
0.0
Hunan
17.5
28.7
53.8
0.0
21.2
73.4
0.0
Guangdong
26.8
49.6
15.9
8.7
1.3
11.5
87.2
0.0
Guangxi
6.5
27.1
66.4
0.0
Liaoning
11.0
19.3
69.7
0.0
Hainan
0.6
28.5
70.9
0.0
Jilin
8.0
31.0
61.0
0.0
Sichuan
4.5
9.0
86.5
0.0
Heilongjiang
13.4
41.2
45.3
0.0
Guizhou
5.0
10.2
84.8
0.0
Shanghai
0.0
62.3
23.2
14.5
Yunnan
9.0
7.3
83.7
0.0
Jiangsu
15.6
65.5
18.8
0.1
Tibet
0.0
0.8
99.2
0.0
Zhejiang
8.4
52.7
38.8
0.1
Shaanxi
1.8
7.9
90.3
0.0
Anhui
1.4
16.9
81.7
0.0
Gansu
0.4
3.1
96.5
0.0
Fujian
9.8
35.5
54.7
0.0
Qinghai
6.0
7.9
86.1
0.0
Jiangxi
1.2
4.9
93.3
0.0
Ningxia
0.0
3.1
96.9
0.0
Shandong
16.4
48.7
34.9
0.0
Xinjiang
7.5
32.8
59.7
0.0
Note: (1) Counted by area proportion of provincial-level units; (2)The bold italic numbers in the table represent that province, city or
borough area where the area is bigger than the average of its correspondence in the country as a whole.
0
400
800 km
Beijing-Tianjin zone
Northeastern zone
Yunnan zone
Xinjiang zone
Anhui-Jiangxi zone
Western cluster
Eastern cluster
Middle cluster
no data
According to this interpretation, the Chinese national floating population 1996 can be
divided into three clusters and five areas, illustrated in Figure 6.
VI. Discussion and
Conclusions
• The spatial transformation factors of the
urban economic growth and the urban
investment are the main driving forces for
the movement of the floating population of
China. The locations where rapid
economic development and associated
investment continue apace are a great
attraction to migrants from within the rural
areas of these provinces as well as to
those from other parts of China.
• The cities, especially in eastern China, are the
concentration areas of the floating population.
In these areas, as the most urbanized area in
China, the Pearl River delta and the Yangtze
River delta are also the concentrated “highlands”
of Chinese floating population. The second
structural element is the existence of an
outstanding “tripartite” structure between the
east, the middle and the west of China. The
east displays the concentration areas for the
floating population, the middle a less dense area
and the west a sparse area, while the frontier
regions have relatively more floating population.
• In all, the Chinese floating population makes
both a significant contribution to, and is itself
affected by, the massive spatial transformation
that China is undergoing. The resultant
structural change is still in its infancy, but will
develop further to pose new questions for
researchers and policy-makers alike, as China
strives to incorporate this huge movement of
people into its burgeoning cities.
Thanks!