Are Floating Migrants in China “Child-Bearing Guerillas”?: An Analysis of Floating Migration and Fertility

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
In China, the media often portray the floating migrant population as “child-bearing guerrillas,” that is, as persons who have moved to new locations, usually in urban areas, because they want to escape the supervision of their local family planning workers and be able to have more children than the policies allow. Migration theory predicts the opposite, that is, that migrants in general should have fewer children than non-migrants in the areas of origin. To our knowledge there has been no empirical examination in all of China of whether floating migrants are “child-bearing guerrillas.” Earlier studies by Goldstein et al. (1993) and Yang (2000) have looked at this relationship in one province. In this paper we use sample data from the 1990 census to assess the relationship between floating migration and fertility. A floating migrant is a person who has moved to a new location but has not transferred his/her household registration ( hukou) to this new location. We conduct a series of logistic regressions and show that in many instances, after controlling for relevant demographic, social, and economic factors, floating migrants are not “child-bearing guerrillas”; indeed their likelihood of having had a baby in the preceding 18 months is actually less than that of the non-migrants in the areas of origin.