Statistics are unreliable, but perhaps 200m rural migrants are working in urban areas, with some 20m children.
Such a slowdown would certainly affect the livelihoods of many of the 100m rural migrants working in urban areas.
In China, rural migrants who earn very low salaries mostly fill those jobs.
The low-skilled jobs also serve China well as Chinese rural migrants have opportunities to move up in life and gain some skills.
To many Chinese rural migrants, enduring hardship is their way of life.
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As economies become richer, they can rely less and less on the brute force of capital spending, coupled with a steady flow of cheap rural migrants, to fuel their expansion.
Even if crises are avoided, emerging markets are prone to sudden slowdowns as they become richer and the trick of shifting underemployed rural migrants to urban jobs becomes harder to repeat.
Tens of millions of rural Chinese migrants are on the move at any given time and many have managed to settle, whether legally or not, in cities throughout the prosperous eastern part of the country.
Their bonding as fellow students means they can organise themselves more easily than can workers who are usually migrants from different rural areas.
Detroit's booming industrial economy was a major draw for migrants from across America, especially the rural South.
Many migrants use their South African earnings to acquire a herd of cows (the main store of wealth in rural areas) or to set up a small business back home.
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