"If I don't have land, am I still considered a farmer?" Wei Xuexia, a 22-year-old peasant turned migrant worker asked a Economic Information Daily reporter playfully.

Wei works in a shoe factory in Shanghai. Her official place of residence is her hometown – a village called Weiyao in east China's Anhui Province – but she has no land of her own. Though she has no plans to go home in the near future, she longs for a plot of land in her own name.

In Anhui and neighboring Jiangsu, a new social group has emerged – landless migrant workers. They have become a cause for concern because, if they can't find jobs, whether they stay in the cities or go back to their villages, they will have no means of supporting themselves and may become a threat to social stability.

A new social group: migrant workers without land

Wei didn't get a share of land because her family violated family planning policy. Many migrant workers have the same problem; as farmers, they don't have land; as workers, finding continuous employment is far from certain.

Mayor Sun Yunfei of Fuyang City in Anhui says there are two reasons for the emergence of landless migrants. One is violation of family planning policy, the other is that land distribution under the policy that allows farmers to lease plots for 30 years was implemented in the 1980s, before the new generation of migrant workers (who are mostly in their 20s) were born.

According to statistics from the Fuyang Labor and Social Security Bureau, of 2.28 million migrant workers in Fuyang, 600,000 are landless; and 100,000 new landless laborers arrive in the city every year.

The marginal man: a migrant worker without land differs from a farmer who lost land

A landless farmer is not the same as farmer who has lost his land. The latter emerged in the process of urbanization. They not only received large sums of money in compensation, but also were given government help with employment, social security and medical treatment. But a landless farmer has no such rights.

Wang Kaiyu of Anhui Academy of Social Sciences divides migrant workers without land into three categories: those who settle down in the city and receive medical and social insurance; those who work in the city for many years and face unemployment when they get too old to work but stay in the city and become a new class of urban poor; finally, those who return to their hometowns to farm their parents' or relatives' land.

Most migrant workers are likely to belong to the second and third groups. When they can no longer work, whether they stay in the city or return home, they will have difficulty making ends meet.

Talking about her future, Wei Xuexia says, "I've no plans to go home in the next few years. But eventually, I will have to. I'm working in a factory now and get a monthly salary. I haven't thought too much about how the future will be without land to farm. I will just have to wait and see how it turns out."

Migrant workers without land: a possible threat to social stability

Village cadres say almost all young people leave to look for work after they finish school rather than staying at home to farm the land, so shortage of land isn't an immediate problem. But if the problem gets worse, migrant workers without land could possibly become destabilizing factor in society.

Various solutions have been proposed: one would be to comprehensively and systematically investigate the status of this group of people and take measures to provide for them; another would be to reform the village land distribution system; yet another would be to increase the pace of urbanization and change the status of migrant workers who want to stay in the cities to make them officially urban residents.

Abandoning the countryside

Investigation shows that more and more of the new generation of migrant workers are choosing a way of life that is very different from that of their parents. They are quitting agricultural production and abandoning country life. They depend less and less on the land and the trend is towards permanent migration to the cities.

Wang Kaiyu divides the new generation of migrants into two groups: those who left to work in the cities as young adults, and those who were taken to cities as children by their parents. They latter have grown up and been educated in cities and it seems natural for them to stay on and look for work.

Compared with the first generation of migrant workers, today's migrants are better educated and have wider career choices.

Liu Kun, 22-year-old, originates from a village in Anhui Province but now runs a fishing tackle shop in Shanghai. He came to Shanghai with his parents at the age of 10 and was educated in primary and junior middle schools specially established for children of migrant workers and later at a technical school. In the 12 years since he left his hometown, he has only been back three or four times. "My household registration is still in my hometown, but I can't even remember the exact location of our village. I know hardly anyone there and my accent has changed so much that I can't speak the local dialect any more."