Abstract
This 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.
Keywords
This chapter is based on the results of the research project on ‘The differentiation of women migrants in the migration process and their rights issues: Case studies from Fujian Province of China’, funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) of Canada (IDRC Grant number: 105447-001). It has also benefited from the authors' research supported by the Social Protection in Asia (SPA) policy research and network-building programme funded by the Ford Foundation and IDRC. The authors would like to thank the Fujian Provincial Population and Family Planning Commission for facilitating this research, and Des Gasper, Thanh-Dam Truong, and two anonymous referees for their invaluable help in the preparation and revision of this chapter.
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Zhu, Y., Lin, L. (2014). 8 From ‘Integration into Cities’ to ‘An Integrated Society’: Women Migrants’ Needs and Rights in Fujian Province, China. In: Truong, TD., Gasper, D., Handmaker, J., Bergh, S. (eds) Migration, Gender and Social Justice. Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, vol 9. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28012-2_8
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