[MUSIC] Hi. In this module, I'd like to introduce you to some of the questions that are coming up in current research on migration in China. One of the big topics in social science research for studying China. Since the 1980s, the number of people who are living away from their homes or moving away from their homes in China has increased enormously. Young people have been moving from rural areas into the cities. And in doing so they have provided the cheap labor that allowed China's economic miracle of the last two decades to take place. As a result, the share of China's population that is living in cities has risen rapidly. People, again, have moved away from the countryside. Many of these migrants, however, and this is a very big problem for social scientists. Many of these migrants do not have a official or complete status in the cities in which they live. They remain second-class or second-tier citizens, even after they move into the cities, and do not necessarily enjoy all of the social services available. So to dramatize the recent changes in the share of the population that's on the move in China, just look at the year 2000 when only about 11.41% of the population was living away from home. By 2010 that had reached nearly 20%. Of course, China has a big population, now over 1.3 billion, so we're talking about a lot of people. So some of the big questions that social science researchers are looking at when they study migration in China, is first of all, trying to understand what the consequences are for migrants when they move into the cities with their children. Of being, essentially, lower class citizens in those cities. So because of their structure of the household registration, after moving into the cities, they're still considered rural residents. And they don't have, again, as I mentioned, complete access to city services. Their children may not be able to attend local schools. They may have difficulty accessing healthcare. This has big implications for the wellbeing of the rural migrants who have moved to China's largest cities. Another big issue is understanding what the implications of all this migration are for the children of migrants who are left behind in their home villages to be raised by their grandparents or other family elders. Right now we see estimates that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of children, are not joining their parents when they migrate to the big cities, but rather they are staying in their home villages being raised. Where they may have limited access to schooling and not much contact with their parents. This is a really big issue and its the subject of a lot of studies right now. A related issue is what happens to the elderly whose adult children have moved off to the big cities. Again, if you go to rural China these days you're going to see a lot of villages that almost seem to be ghost towns because all of the adults, the working age adults, have moved away. Gone off to the city leaving behind the elderly. This poses big challenges for taking care of the elderly. So there's a lot of work to be done on migration in China in terms of understanding its implications. And not just for the economy but also for the people involved in migrating. And for the villages they left behind, and for the cities that they move to.