The impacts of urban migration experiences on employment and prospective settlement for rural returnees in China

Abstract

After decades of rural-to-urban labor force exodus, Chinese cities’ high living costs and competition have made the counter-flow of migration, return migration, from urban to rural an increasingly important migration trend in China. Lockdowns in different cities under the covid-19 pandemic and current government support for return enterprises have further encouraged migrant laborers to return to their rural homes. However, such a rising migration trend has not received sufficient scholarly attention. Existing studies have focused on the impacts of urban-rural out-migration and the return of overseas migrants, but few papers have examined internal returnees from cities to rural areas. Among the scattered studies investigating the impacts of internal return migrants, institutional factors such as family social networks and internal interactions between family members have been overlooked, and nationwide systematically investigation of the post-return employment choices of returnees is absent. Internal mechanisms and factors explaining the post-return behaviors of urban-to-rural return migrants (URRM) are also underexplored. To fill these research gaps and extend the literature discussing the impacts of internal returnees in China, this study explores the influence of urban migration experience on urban-to-rural returnees' post-return employment and settlement behaviors and understands related socio-economic impacts resulting from these behaviors through quantitative and qualitative methods. First, this research used nationally representative

III data from China Family Panel Studies (2018) and introduced family factors to construct a binary logistic regression model for investigating and comparing the relationship between urban migration experience and post-return employment choices of urban-torural returnees nationwide. The quantitative empirical results indicated that URRM nationwide are generally more likely to become self-employers than non-migrant rural workers, but this correlational relationship is significant only in medium-high and medium-low-income regions and southern and western regions in China. Empirical findings also proved that family social networks and self-employment experience are also positively correlated with the likelihoods of URRM to engage in self-employment. This research then conducted semi-structured interviews with returnees in China and applied the push-pull gravity framework to analyze factors that motivate migrants to leave and return to their rural homes. The qualitative empirical findings showed that apart from differences in objective conditions, such as economic development, employment, and business resources, between migrant-sending and migrant-receiving areas, subjective opinions of migrants such as the yearning for working in cities and setting up businesses are also crucial factors that have not been discussed much but affect people's migration choices. The empirical results also demonstrated that while returnees all considered the needs of other family members in deciding on places to settle in the long term, returnees with longer urban migration experiences have a stronger willingness to settle in small cities near their rural hometowns, which have convenient transportation locations and low living costs. Further implications and research recommendations are also presented in this research.