8 From ‘Integration into Cities’ to ‘An Integrated Society’: Women Migrants’ Needs and Rights in Fujian Province, China

Abstract

2This chapter addresses the rights issues of women migrants in China in the context of their complex, lengthy, unstable, and diverse migration processes, and from a gender perspective. It first documents recent efforts by governments and relevant institutions in China to address the rights issues of women migrants. It then presents results from two recent surveys of rural-urban migrants and from subsequent in-depth interviews in Fujian Province, a major destination of rural-urban migrants in China. Although great efforts have been made and significant progress has been achieved, major rights issues still exist for women migrants. The chapter suggests that the common conceptualization of rural-urban migration as a one-way transition is oversimplified. It proposes a non-urban-centred and non-residence-based approach to migrants' rights. Migrants require inclusion in a system of rights that extends wider than the municipality or locality level, probably to a nationally integrated system, to be adequate to their real, complex patterns of movement, instead of integration into a locality-specific system of social rights only. In addition, the chapter illustrates other policy implications that flow from a more gendersensitive analysis of key issues affecting the achievement of women migrants' rights and social entitlements, including education and access to work after the age of forty.

How portable is social security for migrant workers? A review of the literature

“…Migrant workers move from a place of origin to a destination in a process that can be permanent, temporary, circular or transient. Overall, the mobility processes of migrants are “complex, lengthy, unstable, and diverse” (Zhu and Lin, , p. 167). Migrants need to have their rights protected spatially and temporally; in the long transition process and at different locations (including their places of origin) before their final (re)settlement (Zhu and Lin, , p. 167).…”

“…There are also great challenges for the huge numbers of internal migrants in India (MacAuslan, ) and China (Goodburn, ; Lu and Piggott, ; Zhu and Lin, ; Stepan and Lu, ; Wang, ). China, which is undergoing the largest internal migration in the world's history, with half of all workers in urban areas being young rural migrants (Lu and Piggott, , p. 1) and half of whom are women (Zhu and Lin, , p. 157), is an interesting case for portability within countries: across provinces and regions, and within the household.…”

“…There are also great challenges for the huge numbers of internal migrants in India (MacAuslan, ) and China (Goodburn, ; Lu and Piggott, ; Zhu and Lin, ; Stepan and Lu, ; Wang, ). China, which is undergoing the largest internal migration in the world's history, with half of all workers in urban areas being young rural migrants (Lu and Piggott, , p. 1) and half of whom are women (Zhu and Lin, , p. 157), is an interesting case for portability within countries: across provinces and regions, and within the household. Coming from a rights‐based approach and mostly focusing on pensions, several authors have written on the need to consolidate and centralize the public pension system which is currently highly fragmented (Lu and Piggott, ; Stepan and Lu, , p. 3) across regions – which leads some authors to take the EU as the standard to aim for (Lu and Piggott, ; Kovacheva et al., ; Stepan and Lu, ).…”

“…In practice, however, criteria for the first type of social security system severely limit most migrant workers who are informally employed and have rural hukous , or the schemes require a contribution rate that is too high. Song and Hou (, in Zhu and Lin, ) found that the non‐portable nature of social insurance programmes was the main reason for migrants withdrawing from them…”

“…Zhu and Lin (, p. 165) provide a gendered perspective on the issue of portable social security in China based on their study of women migrants in Fujian province. They found that the diverse choices of female migrant workers on social insurance programmes are “closely related to their different preferences with regard to their place of final settlement”, with 43.5 per cent having joined a rural health care scheme before or during migration to urban areas.…”