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Political economy of the floating Chinese population

China's "floating population" becomes a headache for its 2000 census (Sisci 2000). Different from many developing countries, many rural migrants in the post-Mao China do not settle down in urban areas. Instead, they become a floating population. The "floating population" refers to a group of rural laborers who, drifting between urban areas and their rural hometowns, seek and hold temporary jobs, similar to "circulation" in population movement (see Chapman/Prothero 1985; Prothero/Chapman 1985). When they "float" out of rural areas, the Chinese migrants engage in different kinds of temporary jobs in urban areas. When they "float" back to the countryside where they maintain permanent residence, they may bring back financial resources, information, and new technologies, which might foster the rural development. The size of this floating population, according to the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, already went over 50 million in 1994 (Yi and Lu 1995). Recently, it is estimated that rural temporary laborers, returning to work in Guangzhou after the Chinese New Year, arrived at the Guangzhou train station about 220,000 a day (Wei 2000). Such a phenomenon in China poses new challenges to scholars who study politics in general and migration in particular. Current English literature on China's internal migration has made promising contributions to policy analysis of the hukou restrictions (e.g. Chan/Zhang 1999) or to empirical analysis across regions (e.g. Ho 1994; Day/Ma 1994). There has been a large amount of Chinese literature on the floating population contributed by Chinese scholars. Little effort, however, has been made in theorizing the origins of the floating population. The most serious attempt at theorizing the findings on China's internal migration that we have seen so far includes Dorothy Solinger's works (1993; 1999). Solinger has evaluated the positive and negative effects of the "transients" on the state within a framework of state-society dichotomy. In her new book, she challenges the notion that markets necessarily promote rights and legal equality in any direct or linear fashion. To further Solinger's studies, this article hypothesizes that the "state" plays an active and essential role in "creating" the floating population. Contrary to the neoclassical economic argument that the state emerges from property rights, William Riker and