Patterns of Migration under the Reforms

In the 1950s the Chinese government evolved what was perhaps the strictest set of controls over population movement ever exercised within a modern state. A legal transfer of residence within China, especially if it involved a move from a rural to an urban area, could involve greater bureaucratic difficulty than migration across national boundaries elsewhere in the world. In the 1960s and 1970s, migration in China occurred mainly as a result of policy decisions and government direction rather than individual responses to the workings of the market.