The Influential Factors and Spatial Distribution of Floating Population in China

This paper makes a critical review about the researches on the floating population in China since the 1990s, then based on the floating population data in 1996 from the Ministry of Public Security of China, some influential factors and spatial distribution of floating population are analyzed. (1) By analyzing the factors, the authors find that two factors, i.e., economic growth and investment in city, are notably relative to the size of urban floating population. (2) By visualization technique of GIS and the integrated methods for spatial correlation analysis, the authors find that the spatial distribution of China's floating population is of an evident urban rural duality with three clusters and five zones, which are the Eastern cluster, the Middle cluster, the Western cluster, the Beijing Tianjin zone, the Northeast zone, the Anhui Jiangxi zone, the Xinjiang zone and the Yunnan zone.