The Cultural Revolution practice of sending millions of Red Guards to the countryside as a way to integrate the country and the city, in retrospect, looked extremely naive. The educated urban youth seldom really integrated with the peasants--they lived in separate quarters, often kept to themselves during spare time, and many kept on studying with whatever books they were able to smuggle to the country, with the hope that one day they would be able to get out of there. Their dream finally came true in winter 1977, when the nation wide college entrance examination system was again revived. Almost all the college freshmen of 1977 and 1978, and half of the freshmen of 1979, came from the reeducated youth in the countryside or from the factories. As time went on, many of the remaining reeducated youth came back to their hometowns from the countryside, with the exception of Shanghai, where many could not return to because of overcrowdedness.

With the growth of market economy and the household responsibility system in the countryside, the reverse has been happening in the past ten or more years: about 100 million farmers have migrated to the cities looking for work. They usually live in sub-standard housing, working for extradinarily low wages, with no health insurance, no workplace guarantee of safety, and no retirement pension. The huge gap between life in the city and the country means even when many are making below minimum wages in the cities, they are still making more than they would in the country. One question that is likely to arise is: is this reverse flow of population going to reduce the gap between the urban and the rural in China?

The gap between the urban and rural is so huge that Li Zhang compares the urban and rural populations as blonging to two different "nations." (Link, chap.12) This difference continues when rural girls rush to the cities for sweatshop jobs. The very depressing working conditions described in Link, chap.7 for them contrasts with the greater job opportunies for educated city girls, indirectly reflected from the magazines the latter read (Link, chap.6). The leisure, dreams, and taste of urban girls are things the rural factory girls never dream of--they do not even have time to write home or to visit hometown friends who work in nearby factories because of the usual 12 hour work days. It never occurs to most of them that they have rights--to regular paycheck, to the right to resign, and to minimum wage and standard working hours. (Link, chap.7) They are grateful to have a chance to work. For many of them, this may be the first time they come to a city, and the first time to use electricity and even running water instead of kerosene lamp and water drawn from a well. The hard life in the countryside has prepared them to be very tough and not to complain. The bad working conditions are true also for the male workers. In some factories, workers routinely have their fingers chopped off because the factories refuse to add security measures to their machines, which increase the cost of the machinery. The workers then are usually dismissed either with minimal medical compensation or not at all. Occasionally, their cases get reported in the local newspapers and international papers like the New York Times. But most of the time, their stories go by unheard. Local governments are under pressure to check on the factories more closely, but the results are very slow in coming. Corruption is an important element: bribes have shut the mouths of many officials. Of course some rural laborers fare somewhat better, e.g. among those with lighter jobs, such as domestic nannies, many of them acquire a taste for urban life through interactions with the households they serve. (Link, chap.2)

Li Zhang argues that one of the reasons for the prejudice against rural migrant workers in the cities is the lingering hukou (or household registration) system.(Link, 279-280) Although the development of market economy means the rural migrants can survive in the city (buy their own food and clothing without need for the coupons, as the rationing system has ended), the household registration system defines the migrant workers as peasants and as such, their children need to pay extra to attend schools in the cities because they are not "residents of the district" for not having the household registration in that district. Because of the highly unstable nature of their work (construction work, nannies) and the absence of medical insurance associated with their work, illness often means the end of their work, if not death. I personally witnessed a construction worker on a stretcher in 1989. He was possibly paralyzed because he fell from a construction site. But the doctors were in no hurry to rush him into the emergency operation room because he had no money to pay for it. So he was left on the stretcher before the doctors could reach a decision on what to do about him. The migrant workers also lack legal protection, e.g. against sexual harassment. (Link, 282-283) Although some migrant entrepreneurs are able to "make it," (286-287) they are not the majority of the migrant workers. Zhang emphasizes that the household registration system continues to be a main hindrance to the rural migrants in the cities, preventing them from enjoying urban privileges such as education and perhaps some medical benefits that urban residents are entitled to. If this is the case, with the growth of market economy, the gap created by the household registration system should diminish, though the status of the rural migrant workers may improve more slowly.