The Floating Population in China’s Cities: A New Ethnic Underclass?

Chinese society has undergone a major transformation during the last two decades, as the old ideas about creating a socialist utopia have been cast aside in favour of what some observers have described as rampant capitalism (Schell 1994; Theroux 1993). The economy has been heated up to boiling point by the introduction of market-oriented reforms. Part of this process, as described in Chapter 3, has been the relaxation of the more draconian elements of migration control (see also Selden 1988; Cheng 1991), leading to an unprecedented increase in population mobility. The most dramatically visible component has been the movement of millions of peasants away from their homes in the countryside (Pannell 1995).