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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More than half of the country's workers now reside in urban areas, as rural migrants move to cities for better employment opportunities.
Having heard so many news stories about hideous abuse to rural migrants, including physical assault and personal humiliation, I was full of sympathy.
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China's household-registration system denies equal access to public services for rural migrants, who work in the cities but are registered in the villages.
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The thrust of China's strategy will remain boosting urban development in the hope that this will create job opportunities for rural migrants and prevent unrest among city dwellers.
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.
That is the earliest possible repeal of the country's household registration system, or hukou, which limits the access of rural migrants to public services in the cities where they work and live.
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Some of the key sources of inequality in China include the geographical factors, a large and persistent informal sector, gaps in access to education, and barriers to employment and career progression for specific groups, particularly rural migrants, the OECD says.
Anger at the government for its handling of the rescue effort, even though this was carried out in almost impossible conditions, could translate into support for the opposition Islamist party Virtue, especially among the poorer, rural migrants in the area for whom the Islamist message resonates strongly.
So too, said Caijing, a fortnightly magazine, did the dissatisfaction expressed by party leaders with Beijing's traffic congestion. (Never mind that official events and cars are big contributors to the jams.) Chinese leaders have always been especially sensitive about rural migrants in the capital, fearing they might include dangerously disgruntled elements.
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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.
Worse still, the system of household registration, or hukou, defines even long-staying urban migrants as rural residents, cutting them out of housing, education and other benefits.
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.
Most of its residents are migrants who have come to Delhi from impoverished rural areas, widely seen as the cradle of regressive attitudes to women, where figures show rapes are commonplace but rarely reported because of the social stigma.
Central planners made the city big it covers an area almost three times the size of Belgium so that migrants could, within its boundaries, move from rural areas, to satellite cities, to suburbs of the core urban area, and to the metropolis itself without ever crossing municipal boundaries.
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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