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Before reform, the annual quota of planned migrants was mainlydetermined by consideration of fluctuations in grain production, with thegovernment approving more migration when agricultural products werein plentiful supply. Since reform, the government has been more sensitiveto unemployment, and has been more inclined to approve hukou transferswhen there are more job opportunities. (Cai et al. 2001). The number ofplanned migrants in 2003 was 17.26 million, 1.37 percent of the totalpopulation (MPS 2003).According to the 2000 census, between 1995 and 2000, 144 millionpeople changed their place of residence (township, town and community),regardless of whether they changed their hukou. The 1 percent populationsample survey in 2005 showed 147 million internal migrants in that samecategory – an increase of 3 million. As planned migrants account for onlya small percentage of this number, it is clear that the majority are informalrural–urban migrants.Table 1 Numbers, Growth Rates, and Spatial Distribution of Rural MigrantsOf which:Total migrantsInter-provincialYearNumbers(million)Increases (%)Numbers(million)Increases (%)1997 38.90 - 14.88 -1998 49.36 26.89 18.72 25.811999 52.04 5.43 21.15 12.982000 61.34 17.89 28.24 33.522001 78.49 27.96 36.81 30.352002 83.99 7.01 38.97 5.872003 98.31 17.05 40.31 3.442004 102.60 4.5 42.99 6.65Note: Migrants before 2000 refer to those who migrated between townships, towns (zhen), andcommunities (jiedao), and stayed at their destinations for three months or longer. Migrants in 2000refer to those who migrated between townships, towns (zhen), and communities (jiedao), and stayed attheir destinations for six months or longer.Sources: Department of Training and Employment of Ministry of Labor and Social Security and RuralSocial and Economic Survey Team of National Bureau of Statistics, “The Employment and Flow ofRural Labourers in China 1999”; Liu Jianjing, Rural Labour Employment and Transition, in ChinaEmployment Report 2003-2004, China Labour and Social Security Press 2004.250Estimates of the number of rural migrants without urban hukou status can befound in various sample surveys conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture(MOA), the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), and other governmentagencies. According the MOA, the number of rural migrants soared from2 million in 1982 to 103 million in 2004. The NBS estimate also shows