Land (Nov 2021)
Resilience and Circularity: Revisiting the Role of Urban Village in Rural-Urban Migration in Beijing, China
Abstract
Recent policies in China have encouraged rural-urban circular migration and an “amphibious” and flexible status of settlement, reacting against the recent risks of economic fluctuation in cities. Rural land, as a form of insurance and welfare, can handle random hazards, and the new Land Management Law guarantees that rural migrants who settle in the city can maintain their rights to farmland, homesteads, and a collective income distribution. Existing studies have pointed out that homeland tenure can reduce migrants’ urban settlement intentions (which is a self-reported subjective perception of city life). However, little is known about how the rural-urban circularity and rural tenure system (especially for those still holding hometown lands in the countryside) affect rural migrants’ temporary urban settlements (especially for those preferring to stay in informal communities in the host city). The existing studies on the urban villages in China have focused only on the side of the receiving cities, but have rarely mentioned the other side of this process, focusing on migrants’ rural land tenure issues in their hometowns. This study discusses the rationale of informality (the urban village) and attests to whether, and to what extent, rural migrants’ retention of their hometown lands can affect their tenure security choices (urban village or not) in Chinese metropolises such as Beijing. Binary logistic regression was conducted and the data analysis proved that rural migrants who kept their hometown lands, compared to their land-loss counterparts, were more likely to live in a Beijing urban village. This displays the resilience and circularity of rural-urban migration in China, wherein the rural migrant households demonstrate the “micro-family economy”, maintaining tenure security in their hometown and avoiding the dissipation of their family income in their destination. The Discussion and Conclusions sections of this paper refer to some policy implications related to maintaining the rural-urban dual system, protecting rural migrant land rights, and beefing up the “opportunity structure” (including maintaining the low-rent areas in metropolises such as Beijing) in the 14th Five Year Plan period.
Keywords
