migrants accounted for a large part of the increase of the off-farm labor force. The
proportion of workers moving from rural to urban areas for employment purposes rose
from 3 percent of the labor force in 1988 to 7 percent in 1995 (row 8, columns 1 and 4).
The self-employed rose from 6 percent of the labor force to more than 11 percent (row 4,
columns 1 and 4). Almost forty percent of all new off-farm jobs belong to the newly self-
employed. In contrast, the proportion of the rural labor force that commutes to urban
areas and the fraction that works in the village as a wage earner rose more slowly (rows 5
and 7). This represents a slowdown in employment generation in the formal rural
industrial sector and a slowdown in the growth of rural-to-urban migration.
These estimates, although from a relatively small sample, are largely consistent
with those published by the State Statistical Bureau (SSB) and other social scientists. We
estimate that approximately 147 million farmers worked off-farm in 1995 (33 percent of
the rural labor force of 446 million) by assuming that neighboring provinces similar to
those surveyed have identical rates of off-farm labor participation. Our estimate is about
eight percentage points higher than the best guess made by Parish, Zhe, and Li’s 1993
national study (1995), but given the slightly broader definition of off-farm labor and the
rapid growth of China’s economy between 1993 and 1995, the estimates coincide fairly
closely. Our results also confirm Parish, Zhe, and Li’s tentative finding that off-farm
employment opportunities have grown rapidly, despite some claims otherwise. Nineteen
percent of the rural labor force worked off-farm in 1988, a figure that agrees with the
State Statistical Bureau estimates for that year, 21 percent.
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