Abstract
For a long time, the majority of China, which has the world’s largest population, has been immobile and lived in rural areas. However, over recent decades, with the economic rise of China, rural labor has demonstrated a trend of moving to rapidly industrializing regions in search of higher income and better employment opportunities. Along with the labor cutback, out-migration introduces negatives to the sustainable development of rural areas, i.e., depopulation, the abandonment of rural settlements and agricultural lands, and the aging of the population, among others. Due to the threats of labor outflow to sustainability, studying the causes of China’s rural out-migration can reveal lessons on how state policies can be designed to reduce the negative impacts of out-migration on rural communities. The purpose of this paper is to identify the major causes of migration movements among the rural areas of northern China that are considered to be the best-performing among the provinces of the country in terms of rural development, agricultural production, and the wealth of rural dwellers. A two-stage survey of a panel of experts involved: (1) respondents representing government officials and universities of the Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning provinces and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and (2) regional and district levels of administration, and research and public establishments of Heilongjiang Province. In stage three, drawing on the authors’ own survey of 128 rural households in three counties of Heilongjiang Province, the major migration drivers have been identified, and the portfolio of a typical rural migrant has been developed. Some of the key findings are that migration intentions are fueled by the rural–urban income gap, poverty, a reduction of demand for labor in rural areas, underdeveloped infrastructure, the low quality of social services in rural settlements, and the low social standing of rural dwellers. The approach allows monitoring the dynamics of migration attitudes as responses to the policy interventions that are aimed at the sustainable development of rural areas.
Highlights
In the conditions of growing urbanization, many countries face the challenge of ensuring sustainable development alongside the social and economic progress of rural areas [1]
One of the world’s lowest land ratios per capita, a lack of arable land, environmental pollution, and rural poverty constrain the increase of agricultural production and threaten the sustainable development of the rural areas of China
The migration of excessive rural labor to the cities eases social and economic tensions by providing people with employment and income, as well as increases the land-to-population ratio in rural areas, it results in the outflow of the most active part of the labor force, i.e., young people of prime working age
Summary
In the conditions of growing urbanization, many countries face the challenge of ensuring sustainable development alongside the social and economic progress of rural areas [1]. A critical bottleneck of the agricultural sector is that neither labor nor land can be replaced by capital. It is for this reason that in rural areas, sustainability is conditioned by land management and conservation, as well as by the retention of rural labor in the traditional habitats. The Chinese rural population has been largely immobile, but over recent decades, rural–urban migration has taken place at a considerable scale [3], and Chinese rural migration has demonstrated a general pattern of rural labor moving from economically underdeveloped inland provinces to rapidly industrializing and urbanizing coastal regions in search of living and employment. Over the previous three decades of economic growth, urbanization driven by globalization has spurred rural migration [5], while rural migrants moving to urban areas have provided flexible and cheap labor for China’s industrialization [6]
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