
Internal migration in China or the Chinese Great Migration is the migration which has occurred in China since the middle of the twentieth century, especially in the quarter of a century between the early 1980s and the late 2000s. This migration came about as China rapidly industrialized and developed, leading people to leave poor agricultural areas for the growing cities where there were better economic opportunities. Particular areas of early growth were designated 'special economic zones' like Shenzhen, the Silicon Valley of China. Because so many of China’s larger metropolises are in the east of the country along the course of the Pearl, Yellow and Yangtze rivers, much of this migration was west to east within China. The Chinese Great Migration mirrors similar urban industrial migrations in the western world such as the move to the cities that occurred in countries like Britain and Germany during the Industrial Revolution and the Great Migration in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. However, China’s size and population means that it dwarfed these other mass movements in scale. The Chinese version involved a quarter of a billion or more people and was the largest and most rapid mass migration in human history.[1]
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Internal migration in China chronology of events

The Chinese Great Migration was the final stage of a tumultuous period in the modern history of China. While China has been a great power in the Far East for thousands of years, after a series of crises in the early modern era the state became increasingly isolationist and withdrawn from the world. It was dragged back into engagement with the wider world in the middle of the nineteenth century when Britain went to war with the Chinese to force the Qing Dynasty to open its ports to the sale of British opium from India. The introduction of western ideas following the Opium Wars profoundly destabilized China, leading to the collapse of the imperial system that had prevailed for thousands of years in 1911. A period of anarchy followed, at the end of which the Chinese Civil War broke out in 1927 between the Nationalists and the Communists. It raged until 1949, with the Empire of Japan invading and occupying much of the country in the middle of that period. Even the end of the Civil War and the establishment of Communist rule only brought further horrors in the shape of the famine attendant on the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and then the Cultural Revolution of the period from 1966 to 1976.[2]

Despite all of its woes, there was no denying that China was a slumbering giant ready to become a great power once again if it could only enter a period of stability and effective governance. That period of stability began with the ascent of Deng Xiaoping as the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China in 1978. A reformer and pragmatist, Deng was willing to introduce policies which favored elements of free market growth, albeit with Chinese characteristics. Elements of the economic policy that had benefited other Asian nations like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore were adopted as well, but on a much greater scale. The result was the beginnings of the Chinese economic miracle in the 1980s, one which continued into the 1990s and 2000s.[3]
Looking back decades later it is easy to forget how dramatic the transformation in the Chinese economy was. After turbulent years in the first half of the 1970s, the economy began to grow significantly again in the late 1970s and continued to do so into the 1980s. It grew by 15% alone in 1982. Then, after a lull around the late 1980s and early 1990s as the collapse of the Soviet Union necessitated a reorientation in Chinese economic policies, an era of consistent economic expansion began. Between 1992 and 2010 Chinese GDP grew by an average of around 10% per year.[4] Few nations have ever managed such sustained growth over a continuous period of two decades. As it did, China became the workshop of the world, moving from producing goods like steel, foodstuffs and small mechanical and industrial goods in the 1980s to become a more high-tech economy in the 1990s and 2000s. Today Chinese tech, electronic and car companies rival those of the most advanced European countries and the United States.[5]
Extent of Chinese internal migration
All of this economic growth required workers. It also needed them concentrated in cities. The exact scale of the Chinese Great Migration is hard to gauge, because it was so vast and internal to the country, whereas it is easier to evaluate foreign migrations which produce immigration records. These issues aside, studies estimate that approximately 150 million people Chinese people in the country’s rural areas migrated into the cities in a period of less than a decade between the end of the 1980s and the mid-1990s. Across the wider period it is believed that somewhere between 250 million and 300 million migrated internally within China between the mid-1980s and the end of the 2000s. This is a figure equal to or larger than all other migration everywhere else in the world during the same time period. This was both a country to city migration and also a west to east migration as so many of China’s foremost cities are located in the east of the country along the course of the Yellow, Yangtze and Pearl Rivers.[6]
Demographic impact of Chinese internal migration

The demographic impact of the Chinese Great Migration is best assessed by looking at the way its cities have developed over time. According to the most recent Chinese censuses, there are eleven cities in China with more than 10 million people in the greater urban area: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Wuhan, Xi’an, Hangzhou and Dongguan. There are over a hundred cities in the People’s Republic with more than a million inhabitants. Many of these are cities that people in the western world have never heard of. And yet in many instances they are larger than the capitals of European countries. A large proportion of these cities were little more than large towns at the time of the Cultural Revolution. They were transformed in the half century that followed, often growing by 600% or 700%.[7]
Even the larger cities have mushroomed in size. Chongqing was a large city of around one and a half million people when the Chinese Civil War ended in 1949. Today it has expanded to become a metropolis of around fifteen million people, although estimates of there being over thirty million people are inaccurate and based on the conflation of city and state populations in Chinese demographic records.[8] Regardless of these methodological issues in evaluating the size of Chinese cities, the Chongqing example and dozens of others point towards the way in which the Chinese Great Migration has created a country of scores of cities that have populations into the millions. Such has been the dramatic transformation wrought by the Chinese economic miracle.
See also
Explore more about internal migration in China
- The Largest Migration in History at The Economist
- The Demography of the Great Migration in China at ScienceDirect
- China's Internal Migrants at the Council on Foreign Relations
- China's Rapid Development has Transformed its Migration Trends at Migration Policy Institute
References
- ↑ https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/china-development-transformed-migration
- ↑ https://www.history.com/topics/asian-history/china-timeline
- ↑ Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Harvard, 2013).
- ↑ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locations=CN
- ↑ Tahir Hussain Andrabi, ‘Understanding China’s Economic Miracle’, in Strategic Studies, Vol. 34/35, Vol. 34, No. 4/Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter 2014 and Spring 2015), pp. 90–116.
- ↑ Rufei Gua, et al., ‘The demography of the great migration in China’, in Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 167 (March, 2024), 103235.
- ↑ Anthony Yeh, Fiona Yang and Jiejing Wang, ‘Economic transition and urban transformation of China’, in Urban Studies, Vol. 52, No. 15, Special issue: Producing and Consuming China’s New Urban Space: State, Market and Society (November, 2015), pp. 2822–2848.
- ↑ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16761784