From 1958, China’s household registration (hukou) system assigned every citizen an “agricultural” or “non-agricultural” status and a residential location. This, alongside other aspects of Communist social control, prevented most spontaneous migration and limited provision of state welfare and resources to urbanites, with rural-dwellers expected to be self-sufficient, providing public goods like healthcare and education through local collective organisations (Chan, 2009). 

After the mid-1980s, hukou implementation was relaxed and, with the introduction of the market economy, basic goods were re-commodified, making large-scale movement possible. However, while many labourers, released from collective farming, migrated to work in SEZs and the growing urban private sector, few were eligible for hukou transfer, a right reserved for elite groups. They thus had no formal residency rights and no access to most state goods and services in their migration destinations. For example, until 1993 migrant children were barred from registering in state schools outside the place of their hukou registration, and from 1993 extremely high fees were charged to non-locals. Urban healthcare was similarly inaccessible to those not locally registered, and even housing (traditionally allocated by the state in the Mao-era) was difficult to access (Goodburn, 2009). Migrants were dependent on their employers for job contracts, which allowed them to apply for temporary residence permits, and for accommodation, in factory dormitories. Dependents were expected to be left with relatives in the countryside, and workers who fell ill or were injured were obliged to return home for treatment if they could not pay out-of-pocket for urban services. This prevention of access to state goods and services served to ensure that rural migrants did not settle long-term in China’s cities, and helped to maintain the low cost of China’s industrialisation by excluding migrants from welfare reforms. It was not until the end of the 1990s that employment-based social insurance programmes were made available to migrant workers (Xu, Guan & Yao 2011).

Since the mid-late 2000s, when China’s central government abolished all school fees nationwide, began to merge urban and rural healthcare schemes and exhorted urban governments to provide services to migrants as well as locals, individual megacities have turned to alternative means of restricting scarce resources to locals and preventing lower-skilled “less desirable” migrants from settling. A main method has been by erecting documentary barriers to accessing social welfare and state services. In Shenzhen, for example, non-locals required six official documents, including residence permit, proofs of employment, local residence and social insurance payment, family planning certificate and school transfer letter, in order to enrol their children in school (Goodburn, 2015). Urban healthcare poses similar barriers. China’s rural medical insurance reimburses residents for care in their home county only, and until recently, migrants were not entitled to join urban residents’ schemes (Yip et al., 2012). They are still not entitled to be reimbursed at the same rates as urban workers. Some cities, like Shenzhen, have set up migrant-specific schemes, yet their strict enrolment criteria, including labour contracts as well as employer contributions, excludes most lower-skilled migrants (Chen et al, 2020). 

Migrants therefore still face significant difficulties in accessing state social welfare and resources in the cities and SEZs where they work in China. A large number of informal schools, clinics and other resources such as mutual aid organisations have been established across Chinese cities to cater to migrant settlers, but these have mostly not been supported by the state, with many schools and clinics forcibly closed without provision of alternatives (Goodburn, 2014), while third sector organisations serving migrant communities have been the target of state repression (Franceschini & Nesossi, 2018). 

China-associated zones overseas

There are no specific social welfare-related impacts for migrant workers of China-associated zones elsewhere in the world, since social welfare (including access criteria) is typically the preserve of the host country national or subnational state.