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Urban Poverty and Urban Slums in China

Between 1978 and 2004 the urban population of China grew from eighteen percent to forty-one percent of the total population, commonly said to be 1.3 billion.¹ Given the annual increments in this massive urbanization process, it is not hard to estimate conservatively that China’s urban population is now close to forty-five percent of the total number of people in the country.

By 2010, probably close to one half of the national population will be urban dwellers. That’s 600-700 million urbanites of one sort or another, the most massive single urbanization in the history of the world.

The Floating Population
One of the compounding factors in getting a true figure is the phenomenon commonly referred to as the “floating population”—rural migrants who temporarily move to urban areas, most often living in ghettos filled with people who come from the same province. The proportion of returnees varies: one study says between two and fifteen percent of migrants return to their rural communities²; another suggests the number is closer to thirty-three percent.³

Thus in Beijing, for example, one finds the so-called Zhejiang village (the name of a coastal province south of Shanghai) with its tens of thousands of densely-packed people of living in conditions of squalor and a total lack of physical and social infrastructures. Michael Dutton⁴ describes the police action reflecting the Beijing government’s desire to suppress the “floaters” or mangliu of Zhejiang village, which (along with many other such “villages”) are generally considered to be a “blight” on the urban landscape of the national capital.

In China, there have been two classes of urban dwellers: those who have the official city residential permit (the notorious hukou) and the more recent arrivals who do not. These latter people are part of China’s floating population. People’s Daily reported in July 2005 that “China's floating population has increased from seventy million in 1993 to 140 million in 2003, exceeding ten percent of the total population and accounting for about thirty percent of rural labor force.”