Domestic migrant remittances in China: distribution, channels and livelihoods

Remittances are an integral feature of the migration system in China. Remittances occur largely because migration forms part of a strategy for ‘rural livelihood diversification’. This means that rural households spread their earning activities over a range of on-farm and off-farm activities in order to minimise their risks and raise their returns to available labour. This document considers the role that remittances play in international development. The author looks at how money distributed across and within regions and the channels used to send the money back to the rural areas.

The document also examines who in the rural community receives remittances, how they are spent and their policy implications. The author shows how in the case of China, for the most part, rural people enjoy access to reliable and affordable services for sending and receiving remittances. The money that migrants send to their families is a way of maintaining strong bonds of care, affection and belonging in an environment whereby both urban employment and agriculture are precarious. The following points are additionally made:

• policy makers overlook the immense human costs endured by migrants and their families to produce this resource also the intergenerational and gender inequalities within families
• sometimes the migrants do not remit because of ill fortune in the cities. For instance their wages may have been withheld by employers or their money may have been stolen
• in China as elsewhere in the world, when money is received from migrant workers, it is used mostly for consumptive investment in house-building, the purchase of consumer goods and health and education expenditure
• in some circumstances migrant earnings nevertheless play a role in partially off-setting the effects of labour lost from agriculture and in providing an insurance buffer in the risky agricultural sector, particularly in regions prone to ecological disaster.