Agriculture Worker In The City

Since1978, the economy of China has grown phenomenally. This is not in dispute. And the facts of structural imbalance between urban-rural and the East-West areas is also not in dispute. As the result, migrant population has exceeded the local household registration population in many big cities.The massive exodus of rural people flooding into cities and more developed areas to do business or find jobs (called nong min gong, or simply mingong) has in recent years become a topic of interest for social scientific research. From sociological point of view, mingong migration represents not only workforce and population mobility, but also social mobility in its three aspects: territorial, occupational and strata.The majority of "nong mingong" in China leave their hometown and to do the nonrural work. But the group studied in this paper, their profession is not "factory workers" in strict sense. They are still engaged in agricultural production. However, in their everyday discourse and identity, they are still workers of the city, not the factory. This makes the group itself in the tension:in their identity, they are nong min gong, but in fact they engaged in "agriculture".Why do rural people leave home? What is the cause of such migration? That is a question referred to in recent years in every study about mingong migration. We can explain the macro-factors of rural people’s migration, with special reference to the structural factor of uneven economic development of different areas as responsible for the migration of rural people from underdeveloped to more-developed areas and cities. But what are the reasons for the group who choose to do rural work in the city? From my field research, I found that their choice can’t simply be explained by economic gains, I attempts to construct their logical behavior as the implementation of "embedded" in Polanyi’s viewpoint.From my field research, I found that their implementation of "embedded" with this order. The first one is "child", doing agriculture work bring they free time, they can take good care of their children, act their role as parents. In that case, Their children do not have to become one of the38million children who left in the rural country, children will be able to grow up healthy; The second one is the "house", doing agriculture work makes them feeling at home, it gives them the ability to establish a rescue network, their self-worth may be raised. All of their efforts make them believing that their existing in the city is not just a labor force but a man who has complex, rich feeling.However, the city also digest their effort, all the city and capital needs are pure workforce. The city use the regime, legal to achieve the purpose of possession of simple labor. This raises another question of this article, the spatial politics this group will encountered in city.