By studying the county-level census data of 1990 and 2000, we analyzed the spatial and temporal changes in
the floating population in China between 1990 and 2000. The results of the analysis revealed the following characteristics.
First, the spatial distribution of the migrants (referred to as ‘floaters’ in this paper) became increasingly concentrated
in the cities during the 1990s. Second, the number of floaters increased rapidly during this period, and the area in which
the floaters settled expanded quickly into four population explosion belts: the coast, the Changjiang River Delta, the
Beijing-Guangzhou Railway and national border belts. Third, the number of inter-province floaters increased rapidly and
exceeded that of intra-province floaters in the 1990s. In addition, to obtain a quantitative relationship between the
number of floaters and 10 socio-economic variables by using statistical methods and also to find the chiefly important
pulling factors of the migration destination, the authors selected approximately 100 cities with the largest population of
floaters. Consequently, we found that four factors—GDP, passenger trips per 10,000 persons, per capita GDP and foreign
direct investment—could provide an explanation for 83.7% of the number of floaters in 2000. The GDP showed the
highest correlation with the number of floaters, suggesting that a highly developed economy is the most important factor
that attracts floaters. Furthermore, a fairly close relationship between the number of floaters and the GDP was also found
in 2000 for all the counties.