Exporting People for Development: the causes and consequences of state-led family migration in Qinghai’s noodle economy

This article examines the use of internal labor export as a development strategy by local governments in Qinghai, focusing on the province’s “noodle economy” as a cornerstone of local development. Based on multi-sited qualitative research, it shows how county authorities in Hualong and Xunhua have mobilized training, subsidized loans, cadre persuasion and branch offices to encourage Hui and Salar households to relocate into urban catering across eastern China. This strategy has generated tangible gains, lifting families out of poverty and generating remittances, consumption and state revenues. Yet it has also produced uneven and ambivalent outcomes: precarious livelihoods for whole families relocated to restaurant niches, exclusion from welfare and schooling in destinations, and the long-term hollowing out of villages. By analyzing labor export as an institutionalized development strategy of local states, this article reframes internal migration in China not simply as a household strategy, in which local states may act as a constraint to migrant settlement, nor yet as a resettlement scheme for poverty reduction, but as a structured mode of exporting populations to stimulate growth in the origin – much like that of international “emigration states”. Moreover, unlike central Chinese initiatives that encourage return and investment for rural revitalization, Qinghai’s counties aim not at temporary mobility but long-term or permanent relocation, raising broader questions about rural transformation, poverty alleviation and the ethics of state migration brokerage. The findings contribute to broader debates on Chinese migration and development by highlighting how risks and social costs are shifted onto migrant families, while remittances are celebrated as collective gains.