Ethnic Migrant Workers and Emerging Ethnic Division in China's Urban Labor Market

Abstract

China's market transition has become a powerful integrative force, increasing social and economic interaction between the Han Chinese and ethnic minorities, by drawing various ethnic migrant workers into the urban labor market. In this article, we explore the ethnic dimension of migration and labor market dynamics, and compare wage earnings between ethnic minority and Han migrant workers in Kaili City in the Guizhou Province of China. The finding suggests that the labor market transition has increasingly put ethnic migrant workers at a disadvantage in the urban labor market in terms of wage earnings. With the economic restructuring from the 1990s to recent years, the earning gap between ethnic minority and Han migrant workers has widened. The study finds that the labor market experiences and outcomes of ethnic minority and Han migrant workers are quite similar.