Rumin Luo

Rumin Luo: Boston University, Center for the Study of Asia

Ms Rumin Luo obtained her Bachelor’s Degree (2003) in Rural Regional Development and Master’s Degree (2006) in Sociology from China Agricultural University (CAU), Beijing, China. She started her PhD work from Oct.1st, 2008 in Bielefeld University, Germany, with the Excellency Scholarship from German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). She was involved in projects and researches in development fields which covered a wide range of issues, poverty, gender, natural resource management, sustainable development. At the end of 2005, she started to work for Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) GmbH as a full time officer in the Sino-German cooperation Poverty M&E project in China.

Migration, Integration and Life Chances – An Empirical Study of Urban China

In 2008, some 214 million people – 3.1% of the world’s population — lived outside their country of origin. At the same time there are around 740 million internal migrants, so altogether nearly 1 billion people are on the move across the world. Although India and Germany are also very important destination countries for international migrants, the United States is home to the largest share of
immigrants in the world with 33 million, 19% of all international migrants, within which scholar often discuss the 12 million “undocumented” immigrants in the USA. The People’s Republic of China is also experiencing large social change accompanied by, or more accurately caused by, population mobility. Massive population movement to urban areas has been the inevitable trend of market economies and the motivation for social transformation. Although it is a normal phenomenon in the modernizing world, this still comprises the largest population movement in human history during a peaceful period. The variety and complexity of factors propelling the new migration have generated a distinctive set of domestic characteristics and impacts in transitional China, which underpin contemporary political concerns and highlight significant issues in the social relations between settled communities and new migrants. My research looks to identify key factors affecting the integration of “migrants” in Urban China.