THIS chapter focuses on (1) the role of returned migrant entrepreneurs in promoting social and economic change in their home communities and (2) their contributions to the modernization goals of the central and local state. Local states in Xinfeng and Yudu try to harness the resources generated through return migration and direct them toward wider development strategies sanctioned by the central state – for example, the construction of rural industries and towns, the absorption of surplus rural labor, and the expansion of commodity markets. Returnees use their urban experiences and resources to engage with the local state in ways that improve the local policy environment and the local infrastructure, thereby making the native community more conducive to the pursuit of entrepreneurial goals. In this way, returned migrants struggle against local-level obstacles that prevent them from prospering through self-employment while contributing to broader development objectives.

The following discussion contributes a rural perspective to a growing body of literature on internal mobility as the new element in state and society relations in post-Mao China. It examines the dynamic role of returned entrepreneurs in injecting investment into the local economy; broadening the political criterion determining eligibility for loans; lobbying for changes to local tax policies and contesting the official “squeeze” on businesses; increasing local opportunities for rural livelihood diversification; integrating poorer rural areas into the national market economy; reforming business management practices; and building rural towns. Each of these contributions is examined in turn.

THIS chapter examines the ways in which migration interacts with village inequalities, the political distributional mechanisms of rural society, and pre-existing tensions over resource allocation. These tensions are present at various levels: within households, between households in a family, within villages, and between the political elite and rural society. The migration strategies of social actors are in part responses to the limited resources and the distributional mechanisms of their households and wider rural society. These migration strategies precipitate a reorganization of resources such as labor, money, and land, as well as a redistribution of burdens; that is, claims by others on these resources. It is important to note that, in an environment that is changing through migration, even those not directly involved in migration change their livelihood strategies. This has carryover implications for resource distribution and rural inequality.

This chapter pursues three main areas of inquiry. The first examines how the demographic composition of households influences their capacity to obtain resources from migration. The boundaries between the different households in a family are ambiguous, with the members maintaining close economic and social relations. But this discussion reveals that there is also considerable conflict between the different households of the same family over the distribution of resources. Such conflict is nothing new; people have pursued competing goals since the beginning of time.

THIS chapter examines the characteristics of returnee enterprises and of the entrepreneurs themselves. The returnee enterprises are discussed in terms of their scale, type of business activity, and form of ownership. The smaller-scale businesses arrange their operational structure according to the familial petty commodity mode of production, whereas the larger-scale businesses adopt more of the formalized management and production features of urban factories. Returnee business activities are concentrated in the manufacturing and service sectors, with only a few businesses engaged in specialized agricultural production. The ownership structure of these enterprises varies: returnees establish private-sector entities and they also purchase or contract the running of collective and state enterprises.

Analyzing the characteristics of the entrepreneurs facilitates an understanding of the migrants' capacity to obtain resources both in the cities and at home, with implications for the scale and strength of the businesses that they create on their return. These characteristics include the duration of their absence in the cities, age on return, level of educational attainment, and reasons for return. Although most of the returned migrant entrepreneurs are men, women returnees receive separate in-depth discussion because gender-specific considerations affect their decisions to return as well as the scale and type of businesses that they create. The chapter shows that, while the returnees in south Jiangxi differ from each other in terms of their characteristics and hence in the kinds of businesses they create, they share a goal in common with returned migrants all over the world: that of becoming their own bosses, free from both agricultural work and the control of an employer.

LOCAL state cadres struggle with other social actors for control over the resources generated by labor migration, and this can be seen particularly in their efforts to encourage return migrant entrepreneurship. The “local state” refers to the government and Party bodies that run the townships and their constituent administrative villages. The County Rural Work Office evaluates local state cadres according to their ability to improve economic conditions within their jurisdictions, and such improvements are particularly tangible and powerful when in the form of newly created enterprises, upgraded town infrastructure, and increased tax revenue. In some parts of the Chinese countryside, the local state encourages successful migrants to return home and create businesses as a way of obtaining more resources for attaining their political and economic goals. In appealing to migrants to invest at home, local cadres invoke values such as loyalty to the family and love of the native place, and they offer incentives such as improved access to local resources and opportunities for deploying resources profitably.

THIS chapter introduces the reader to socioeconomic change at three levels: China, Jiangxi province, and the fieldwork counties of Wanzai, Xinfeng, and Yudu. Wanzai is situated in Yichun prefecture in northwest Jiangxi, and Xinfeng and Yudu counties are located in Ganzhou prefecture in the south. The chapter explores the changing position of petty commodity producers in Jiangxi within the context of socioeconomic transition in China as a whole. The analysis is concerned with the historical–structural environment in which rural people struggle to obtain resources for attaining their goals; the ways in which these strategies and struggles shape socioeconomic transition at the national, provincial, and county levels; and the responses of the state to those strategies.

The chapter begins by discussing the pre-liberation (pre-1949) history of migration and petty commodity production in the fieldwork counties and in China more broadly. Next I examine the state's repression of petty commodity production under collectivization and the subsequent efforts of the reformist state to channel the economic dynamism and cheap labor of petty commodity producers toward national modernization. The third section discusses economic conditions in Wanzai, Xinfeng, and Yudu; the migration strategies pursued by petty commodity producers in these counties; and the attempts of the local state to manage migration and claim some of the resources that it generates. The fourth section considers the structural features of the political economy that cause the majority of rural migrants in China to retain links with their households.

SINCE the early 1980s, over 100 million Chinese farmers have left their native villages to work as itinerant laborers and traders in the cities. They form the largest peacetime movement of people in history. To the consternation of the state, there are even more potential migrants; officials estimate that an additional 130 million rural people lack sufficient land or employment to guarantee their livelihoods. The majority of migrants are from poor rural areas of the interior provinces, which are predominantly agricultural and have low levels of economic diversification. These migrants are highly visible in the cities: at railway and bus stations, on construction sites, in markets, on street corners, and in queues at postal money transfer counters. A rich body of literature discusses the situation of the migrants in the cities. However, far less is known about the impact of out-migration, remittances, and return on those living in the countryside.

The impact of rural–urban labor migration on the Chinese countryside is dramatic not only because of the vast numbers of people who are affected, both directly and indirectly, but also because it is a relatively new phenomenon. Owing to economic planning and restrictions on mobility during the Maoist era (1955–1978), Chinese villages were isolated for more than twenty years. Since then there have been fundamental changes, including the rise of labor and commodity markets.

THIS chapter examines the ways in which villagers in Wanzai use the resources generated by migration to achieve goals such as improving their material well-being and participating more fully in the social life of both the village and the city. The analysis focuses on the spending patterns of rural producers in terms of the most common uses of remittances in the developing world: education, life-cycle goals (such as house building and marriage), and consumer goods. Scholars have widely observed the tendency for villagers to allocate a large portion of remittances and urban savings toward these three “nonproductive” goals while directing a comparatively small proportion of urban funds toward “productive” investment in agriculture and business. As discussed in Chapter 1, there is much scholarly debate about the implications of this aspect of remittance usage for development in the origin areas.

Structuralist and modernization approaches evaluate the impact of remittance usage on rural development in different ways, and here I offer crude simplifications of these two perspectives. For structuralists, rural dwellers are malleable subjects whose values, life goals, and spending activities are manipulated by powerful images of urban lifestyles displayed on billboards and in shop windows. “Taste transfer” is said to increase the dependency of traditional populations on imported items, undermining the market for indigenously produced goods. According to structuralists, the inculcation of urban tastes molds migrants into disciplined workers who are dependent on wages for satisfying their new consumer desires.

THIS book has focused on the effects of rural–urban labor migration on China's countryside. This is a massive phenomenon affecting hundreds of millions of people. But people are not simply swept along by social and economic forces, they also actively create and manipulate them. Macro-level descriptions and figures, of necessity, omit the individual human detail. I believe that this detail is central to the explanation of migration and the changes it precipitates. My in-depth qualitative data has permitted an understanding of the human strategies and experiences that lie behind macro-processes.

I have shown that many people directly benefit from migration while others suffer increased hardships. Nevertheless, overall, migration improves the lives of the rural population by broadening perspectives, improving the availability of resources, and increasing the opportunities for attaining goals.

In much of the Western literature and in Chinese policy discussions, migration tends to be seen as a process that is external to origin areas. However, I have argued that migration and return are extensions of existing diversification strategies and are facilitated through values and resources that are internal to the village. Migration is underpinned by pre-existing values such as family loyalty and love of the native place. These values are adapted to the migration process because migrants are socially, economically, and legally vulnerable in the cities and so need the safety net of the rural household.

THIS book explores how labor migration is changing rural China and proceeds by examining the interactions among values, goals, resources, and social actors. Values are the meanings that people ascribe to attributes and actions. They are expressed in the norms and rules governing appropriate behavior in society, and they inform both goals and acceptable pathways to those goals. Goals are the things that people want to do, become, own, or feel; they are achieved by obtaining and deploying resources. Resources include both material resources (e.g., cash and commodities) and abstract resources such as contacts, information, and prestige. All these resources are distributed according to culturally embedded rules stipulating which people are entitled to what quantities of which resources under what conditions. Social actors are individuals or collective entities such as households. These actors usually attempt to deploy resources in ways that enable them to obtain more resources for attaining further goals. They are generally knowledgeable about society's values and distributional structures and reconstitute them as they use this knowledge to form and attain goals. This means that each social actor continually stimulates interaction among values, goals, and resources. These interactions contribute to changes in the values and resources available within society to inform further goals, changes that both enable and constrain subsequent actions. Migration and return migration are strategies pursued by social actors for attaining goals; they involve the use and reproduction of particular values and mechanisms of resource distribution.