A total of 6.13 million people flowed out of China's
southwestern Sichuan Province last year, making it the
largest source province of China's migrants, the provincial
statistics bureau has reported.
Most of them headed for developed cities and regions where they
could expect higher wages. Guangdong, Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangsu, and Shanghai were the top
destinations for Sichuanese, said the report in Thursday's
Chengdu Daily.
Most people on the move were low-income earners, the paper
said.
The country's total migrant population is estimated to hit 130
million.
China's migrant wave began in the 1990s when a handful of
coastal cities started to develop and become rich, leaving the vast
inland provinces far behind.
Migrants from poor western China often take jobs as construction
workers, maids, waiters, waitresses and vegetable hawkers in
cities.
The migrant population has made a remarkable contribution to
urban development but their rights have not been well-protected. In
the early days of China's economic transformation, they were often
seen by local government as a threat to social stability. In recent
years, officials have started to realize that migrants are an
indispensable part of the city.
The influx of migrant workers has helped push up the population
of Shanghai, China's economic hub, by almost 11 percent to nearly
18 million since 2000, previous reports have said.
The population of Shanghai has increased by 1.7 million since
2000, and more than 80 percent of the newcomers are migrants,
reports said.
(Xinhua News Agency October 6, 2006)