The rural migrant workers have never been really welcomed in megacities across eastern China, and the trend is not to change as the government has unveiled, in its 2016 Five-Year Plan, a specific chapter about its great ambition to relocate this population in the coming years.

The objective of Xi Jinping set in the Plan is double: steer millions of Chinese out of poverty and develop new centers of growth in order to reduce the pressure on the Tier one cities of coastal China. Indeed, the government has recently announced its wish to curb population in main cities to avoid congestion in these urban centers, thus, Shanghai for example, will have to limit its population to 25 million by 2035 (A figure the city already overpassed: See also this recent article from The Guardian).

The ambition of the government is big as we are talking about 100 million people that will be forcefully evicted from the richest megacities, then urged to settle in smaller cities in order to spread the economic growth in more remote areas within central and western China. This policy, accompanied by great urban developments and incentives for migrant workers, has already begun, and the reaction to this Plan is not yet clear.

The documentary below directed by NHK World (Japanese TV channel) tries to analyse this project from the migrant workers' point of view to answer the central question of this strategy: Will the 100 million targeted population react to the Plan as Beijing intends them to do? Let's wait for the statistics in 2021...