THE RISE OF RURAL-TO-RURAL LABOR MARKETS IN CHINA



Village Survey Data

This paper draws on a unique set of data on the emergence of markets in rural
China collected by the authors in 1995. The authors and several Chinese and foreign
collaborators designed the sampling procedure and final survey instrument with the
village as the unit of analysis after more than three years of pretesting. The field work
team, made up of two of the authors and fourteen other graduate students and research
fellows from Chinese and North American educational institutions (all with PRC
citizenship and an average education level higher than a masters degree), chose the
sample and implemented the survey in more than two hundred villages in a nearly
nationally representative sample.i After answering questions about market activities in
1995, relying on recall in most cases because most interviews were conducted in 1996,
village leaders also approximated changes since 1988, a year chosen for its
comparability. Both 1995 and 1988 had high grain prices and followed several years of
rapid economic growth in the rural sector. Township and village accountants also
provided information from records about cultivated area, population, quota obligations,
village income, and other variables; these data make up a small portion of the project’s
information.

To get a profile of China’s labor market development during the reforms, leaders
from each village were asked to place each resident working off-farm in either 1988 or
1995 in one of four non-overlapping categories: out-migrants, out-commuters, the self-
employed, and local wage earners. An out-migrant (
changqi waigong), is a person who
leaves the village for at least one month per year for a wage earning job, but retains direct
ties to the village by returning during spring festival or annual peak season farm



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