With a moderate income and close contact with quite a few fellow-villagers, migrant worker Zhang Wei lives a happy life except that he feels somewhat emotionally isolated from the city where he works.

"We live together, have our our own vegetable market and the whole life circle. I am almost always with the fellow villagers from central Hunan, Zhang's native province." said Zhang. "We are just like an 'isolated island'in Kunming and have not been really integrated into local communities."

Zhang came to the provincial capital of southwestern Yunnan Province about one year ago. His job as a construction survey worker earns him 2,200 yuan (322 U.S. dollars) a month. But with the exception of a few words with his landlord, he has almost no contact with Kunming locals.

Like Zhang, tens of millions of farmers from China's rural areas have gone into cities for work in the past decade. But due to the urban-rural gap and other institutional problems, migrant workers tend to be marginalized in cities in both rights and interests.

Currently, the country has more than 130 million migrant workers. Some of them have decided to stay in cities for the rest of their life. It is necessary to solve the "indifferent relationship" between urbanites and migrant workers.

"The nature of the problem that new migrant workers face is their adaptation to and integration into city life," said Zhou Daming, chief expert for a project launched in January 2008.

The project of the Ministry of Education, was aimed at finding out the problems that migrant workers face and formulating policies so as to remove the "indifference" between migrant workers and locals.

"The key to the solution lies in the social support and status that migrant workers gain," said Zhou, also deputy head of the School of Sociology and Anthropology of Sun Yat-sen University, at the 16th congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) which ended on Friday in Kunming.

Zhou Qiong, a 58-year-old Kunming resident who has decided to rent out one of her houses, says she just wants to rent it to locals of Kunming.

"Migrant workers from outside have different living habits from us. And I am not clear about their financial situation, so it will be safe to rent it to a local," she says.

Yang Xiaoliu, another participant of the program, said the economic, social and cultural repulsion of locals at migrant workers, should also be blamed for the indifference.

"Migrant workers and local citizens should make joint efforts to realize good relationships," said Yang.

Researchers have gained 3,500 questionnaires from respondents in six cities such as Shenyang, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou and Chengdu. They will continue to conduct 30 to 50 in-depth interviews in each city and complete the project at the end of 2010.

The project will provide theoretic reference and policy suggestions for the solution of the "emotional isolation" of migrant workers, Zhou said.

(Xinhua News Agency July 31, 2009)