Since the economic reform of the late 1970s, China has undergone tremendous political, social and cultural changes. Two of the most important and unprecedented (in the history of China) transformations are the urban redevelopment and the flow of internal migration. The result is a dramatic change in the demographic profiles of many urban cities in China and an estimated 200 million migrant workers flowing from rural to urban areas. This book focuses on issues related to internal migrants, the “new-generation” migrant workers, by paying particular attention to their mobility and relations with the city, their social networks and social integration, and their habitat known as “urban villages.”

Rural Migrants in Urban China contains four parts: migrants' livelihoods, social lives, habitat and transient urbanism. Each part is composed of three to four academic articles. This logical arrangement provides readers with an overview and clear coherence of analysis. It uses an interdisciplinary approach (that draws upon urban planning, urban geography, Sinology, urban anthropology and sociology) to present facts and syntheses based on data gathered through large-scale surveys and descriptive statistics from Chinese official census data. There are abundant figures and tables, which offer readers a clear description on the livelihoods of rural migrants in China's contemporary cities. More importantly, theoretical perspectives based on different disciplines are thoroughly reviewed, on issues related to internal migrants such as the actor-oriented perspective, the risk concept, market transition, social integration and urbanization theory. These theories help readers to comprehend issues pertaining to rural migrants and their relations with the cities. The book aims to fill a knowledge gap by examining the significance of rural migrants to the process of rapid urbanization. It examines this issue by engaging scholars from different disciplines to present a sophisticated, systematic, comprehensive and interdisciplinary review, and last but not least, to consider its urban dimension.

Since the 1990s, China's rural migrants have received much scholarly attention, with extensive studies of the hukou system and rural–urban inequality. The new-generation migrant workers, mostly born in the 1980s or 1990s, represent the majority of contemporary migrant workers and thus receive most attention. In their chapter, C. Cindy Fan and Chen Chen point out that unlike their older, earlier counterparts (born before 1980), the new-generation migrants have a more balanced sex ratio, are more highly educated and more skilled. They have better awareness of their rights, but their participation in health and retirement insurance is low (p. 33). With an actor-oriented theoretical perspective and using risk concept, Heather Xiaoquan Zhang's detailed ethnographic account of a migrant family reveals the insecurity and vulnerability of migrants in urban China and describes their heroic endeavours to survive in the cities (chapter three). Such transient and unstable urbanism raises the question of institutional reform to help migrants eventually settle down in the city and mitigate the impacts of risk on them.

Importantly, this book explores the challenges faced both by the rural migrants and the urban systems. For one thing, despite rural migrant workers' remarkable contribution to the rapid development of urbanization, rural migrants have been excluded from receiving the benefits that are associated with urban residence hukou – from health care to education. This book presents the cases of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong (Uwe Altrok and Sonia Schoon, chapter 11), three major destinations of rural migrants, to show that these urban villages are now affected by the urban redevelopment in the perspective of urban planning. The choice of these three cities provides an insight into how different cities may adopt different approaches to address urban housing issues for rural migrants. In chapter four, Weiping Wu argues that compared to cities in other developing countries, the intra-urban mobility trajectories of migrants in China are much more spatially confined. The urban periphery becomes a particular attraction to rural migrants because of its lower cost of housing and accessible job market. In chapter eight, Zhigang Li and Fulong Wu compare the three destinations: Guangzhou is known for its market-oriented approach; Shanghai is more regulated with strong legacies of centrally planned economy; while Beijing lies somewhere in between Guangzhou and Shanghai's approaches (p. 128). Thus, the three cases provide a good sample of various urban villages in China. Taking Shanghai as an example, based on a survey of 23 urban villages in Shanghai, Mingfeng Wang, Xiaoling Lin and Yuemin Ning systematically examine the livelihoods of migrants and their living conditions in these villages. They demonstrate that with no means to afford decent housing in the urban cities, rural migrant workers have formed a unique kind of informal urban enclave – “villages in the city” or urban villages (chengzhongcun) – as a key way to survive in the urban society (chapter 10). The authors found that there are still some urban villages in Shanghai and this is the result of Shanghai's rapid urbanization (p. 177). As a distinct and marginalized physical and social space from other urban-resident communities in the cities, urban villages have not been integrated into the urban systems in the process of urbanization. There has been great pressure for the local Chinese government to renovate and redevelop these blemishes, but for rural migrants, chengzhongcun provide an affordable shelter in the city, not to mention the accessibility to the labour market (see Yu Chen and Gwilym Pryce's chapter). In sum, the urbanism of rural migrants is transient, temperate and incomplete. These studies also allow us to reflect the relation between rural migrants and urban development, and its practical application on public policy.

The book brings together recent studies on rural migrants, but it focuses mainly on the habitat of migrants in the cities. It opens up several highly interesting lines of thought – such as social integration, the risk concept and market transition – but not all these strands are followed through. The conclusion gathers them together in a more theoretical perspective. The quality of all these studies contributes to a better understanding of the characteristics of rural migrants in urban China. This book undoubtedly provides not only a meaningful contribution to complement and supplement previous research, but also a new perspective of “urban dimension” through which to understand rural migrants in China.