In China, the media often portray the floating migrant population as “childbearing
guerrillas,” that is, as persons who have moved to new locations,
usually in urban areas, because they want to escape the supervision of their
local family planning workers and be able to have more children than the
policies allow. Migration theory predicts the opposite, that is, that migrants
in general should have fewer children than non-migrants in the areas of
origin. To our knowledge there has been no empirical examination in all of
China of whether floating migrants are “child-bearing guerrillas.” Earlier
studies by Goldstein et al. (1993) and Yang (2000) have looked at this
relationship in one province. In this paper we use sample data from the 1990
census to assess the relationship between floating migration and fertility. A
floating migrant is a person who has moved to a new location but has not
transferred his/her household registration (hukou) to this new location. We
conduct a series of logistic regressions and show that in many instances, after
controlling for relevant demographic, social, and economic factors, floating
migrants are not “child-bearing guerrillas”; indeed their likelihood of having
had a baby in the preceding 18 months is actually less than that of the nonmigrants
in the areas of origin.