The determinants of job choice by rural labor migrants in Shanghai

Based upon data collected in 1993 on 54,372 individuals in the Fifth Sampling Survey of the Floating Population of Shanghai, this paper examines the characteristics and occupations of 32,967 rural labor migrants, defined as those migrants whose previous occupation was in agriculture and who held an agricultural household registration. These migrants comprised approximately three-fifths of Shanghai's floating population in 1993. The data support the conventional wisdom that labor migrants are most often young males who work in the "hard and dirty" jobs of construction and manual labor-jobs left vacant by Shanghai's educated and aging registered population. But there also exists significant sorting of rural labor migrants among occupations and sectors (state, collective, township and village enterprises (TVEs), and private enterprises) by gender, age, marital status, education, and especially region of origin. Thus, it appears that these characteristics and village-based networks are important in channeling migrants into particular occupations and destinations, undermining the notion of a "blind" migration from rural areas to coastal cities during China's rapid economic transition. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.