Impact of rural-to-urban migration on family and gender values in China

ABSTRACT

Drawing on data from the 2006 China General Social Survey, propensity score matching was used to investigate the impact of rural-to-urban migration on family and gender values in China at distinct stages of the migratory process. Little evidence of ideational difference is found between rural natives who intend to migrate to urban areas and those who intend to stay in rural China. However, rural-to-urban migration has significant, diverse and gendered impacts on various domains of family and gender values at distinct migratory stages. The results also cast light on the important roles played by hukou status and various forms of socioeconomic and cultural status, such as education and occupation, in mediating the impact of rural-to-urban migration on family and gender values. The ideational impact of migration is shown to be shaped by China’s distinctive institutional features.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• family and gender values
• propensity score matching
• rural-to-urban migration

ORCID

Yang Hu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2027-8491

Acknowledgement

Support from the Gates Cambridge Trust at the University of Cambridge is gratefully acknowledged. The author is grateful to Jacqueline Scott, Maria Iacovou, Fangsheng Zhu, Ellen Percy Kraly, the editor and anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For the permanent migrants, a strong collinearity is observed between the length of time since obtaining urban hukou and age (variance inflation factor > 10). Therefore, the former variable is excluded from the analysis. Multiple collinearity can significantly reduce the efficiency of matching (Pingel & Waernbaum, 2015), and respondents' age should provide a good control for the length of time since obtaining urban hukou. I further regress the time spent in possession of urban hukou on the permanent migrants' family and gender values, controlling for the demographic characteristics reported in Table 4. The variable is not found to have a significant impact (at 10% level) on any of the family and gender values net of respondents' age.