Native Place, Migration and the Emergence of Peasant Enclaves in Beijing

Abstract

Since the early 1980s, reduced migration control by the state and increasing economic liberalization in China have led to the movement of millions of peasants to the cities, creating various types of new “urban spaces” and “non-state spaces.” This influx has fundamentally changed the social, spatial and economic landscapes of the Chinese city, making the urban scene much more varied, lively and dynamic, but less safe and orderly than that of the Maoist era. Aside from the resulting expansion of city population, the Chinese city is also taking on some of the features common to other Third World cities, including the formation of migrant communities in both the cities and suburbs. In 1990, in the built-up areas of eight of China's largest cities, the “floating population” accounted for between 11.1 to 27.5 per cent of the total de facto urban population. At the same time, the urban population has also become much more diverse as peasants from different provinces group spontaneously in spatially distinct enclaves, producing a new urban mosaic that did not exist in Maoist China. Whereas some of enclaves are formed by non-Han minority groups, such as the two “Xinjiang villages” in Beijing where the Uygurs (more commonly but unofficially, “Uighurs”) from Xinjiang have congregated, most of them are formed by Han-Chinese. The Han peasant enclaves, however, are far from uniform in social structure, economic activity, population size or physical appearance.