---- “Urban Migrants in Asia：A Comparative Study among China, Malaysia and South Korea”

    Du Fachun

    Associate Professor, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, CASS

    A new research project on “Urban Migrants in Asia：A Comparative Study among China, Malaysia and South Korea” has been finished by China’s scholars in Dec., 2006.  

    This project was directed by Prof. & Dr. Zhang Jijiao, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and its financial support was provided by Center for Asia Research, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

    There are an estimated 192 million migrants worldwide in 2005, up from 176 million in 2000. Migrants comprise 3.0 per cent of the global population. The number of Asian migrants has increased from 28.1 million in 1970 to 43.8 million in 2000 (UN, 2004).  

    Migration is now an essential, inevitable and potentially beneficial component of the economic and social life in Asia. Governments and scholars in different Asian countries have paid more and more attention to migration with the globalization.

    In recent years, more and more Asian migrants are finding work closer to home. On the one hand, migrants from China, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam have turned more to neighbouring destinations in East and Southeast Asia for employment, rather than the Middle East. For example, China and Malaysia are both sending and receiving migrant countries. On the other hand, many migrants are unauthorized. undocumented migrants in Japan, South Korea, China and Malaysia are driven there by poor economic conditions and internal conflicts in neighbouring countries.

    In past over 20 years, most of migration studies in china focused on the domestic migrants and based on economical or population approach. This research project on “Urban Migrants in Asia：A Comparative Study among China, Malaysia and South Korea” surveyed and analyzed urban migrant from the perspective of urban anthropology.

    There were 365 pages in the research report.

    This project report focused on urban migrants in Asia, which based on the field work in the three countries: China (East Asia), South Korea (East Asia) and Malaysia (South-east Asia). Its framework included two main aspects: (1) described urbanization in the three countries, and the different types of urban migrants’ adaptation and situation and characteristics; (2) analyzed comparatively similarity and difference of urbanization in three different Asian countries and their different types of urban migrants’ adaptation and situation and characteristics.