Psychological distress of rural-to-urban migrants in two Chinese cities: Shenzhen and Shanghai

ABSTRACT

Using survey data collected from Shanghai and Shenzhen, two popular destinations for rural-to-urban migration in China, this study found a significantly higher level of psychological distress among rural migrants in Shenzhen compared to those in Shanghai, which are partly attributable to the lower earnings and longer work hours among rural migrants in Shenzhen. In addition, a range of structural (e.g., socioeconomic status and work hours), social (i.e., frequency of home visits, perceived social support, and neighbourhood social cohesion), and personality (i.e., optimism) factors were found to be important correlates of psychological distress. Compared to those in Shanghai, rural migrants in Shenzhen were socioeconomically disadvantaged but psychosocially advantaged. A significant and negative interaction effect between optimism and long work hours was also found. Without the presence of the observed psychosocial advantages among rural migrants in Shenzhen, the Shenzhen-Shanghai gap in rural migrant’s mental health would have been even greater.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• psychological distress
• rural-to-urban migration
• city adaptation
• optimism
• China

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. China’s household registration system was implemented in late 1950s and has been used by the Chinese government as a means to restrict the geographical mobility of the population. Under the hukou system, each Chinese citizen was assigned to a particular place of residence which is typically the hometown; and rural residents with rural hukou are much more disadvantaged than urban residents with urban hukou in terms of a wide range of opportunities such as education and employment and social benefits such as housing, pension, and health care (Cheng & Selden, 1994). Although there are institutionalised and non-institutionalised channels for hukou mobility (Wu & Treiman, 2004), and the use of a person’s hukou to control residential mobility has relaxed in the reform and opening up era, it remains difficult to officially change hukou and rural hukou remains to be an important institutional barrier limiting rural residents’ and rural migrants’ access to employment, social benefits, education, and health care in today’s China (Wu & Treiman, 2007).

2. Eighteen Shenzhen Foxconn employees attempted suicide with fourteen deaths in 2010.

3. Special Economic Zones (SEZ) were urban areas designated by the Chinese government led by Deng Xiaoping as one of the initial reform policies starting from the late 1970s. SEZs were given special (more free market-oriented) economic policies and flexible governmental measures (e.g., tax benefits). This allows SEZs to utilise an economic management system that is especially conducive to doing business that does not exist in the rest of mainland China.

4. We tested different categorisation of marital status distinguishing those married but not living with spouse and married living with spouse. No significant effect was detected regardless of the form of marital status in the analyses. We thus chose to include a dichotomous indicator of married versus non-married to control for marital status.

5. We examined different categorisations of education and the results remained the same. No significant effect was detected.

6. The higher average educational attainment of rural-to-urban migrants in Shenzhen compared to those in Shanghai is not surprising given that most factories in Shenzhen require high school education in their employees in recent years, whereas in Shanghai the educational requirement of rural-to-urban migrants is less stringent.

7. The percentage reduction is calculated as (1.362-1.708)/1.708 = -25.5%.

8. Although benchmark statistics from representative samples are not available, we compared our sample statistics with other non-probability-based surveys conducted roughly at the same time and found that our sample statistics were largely comparable in terms of education but somewhat different in demographic characteristics. In Shanghai, we compared our survey with a survey conducted in 2006 (Wen & Wang, 2009) and a survey conducted in 2004 (Wong, Chang, & He, 2009). Compared to the other two samples, our study participants were on average older, more likely to be female and married, and similar in terms of education. The other two samples also differed on age, sex and marital status distributions but were comparable in terms of education. The income measurements used in the studies were too different to make comparisons. In Shenzhen, we found two surveys both conducted in 2009 on migrant workers (Mou et al., 2011; Wang & Wu, 2010). The differences in age, male and education statistics among the three studies were not large.

Additional information

Funding

The Shanghai Migrant and Health Study was supported jointly by internal research seed grants from the College of Social and Behavioral Science at the University of Utah and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Environment and Health Survey of Migrant Workers in Shenzhen was supported by a grant from the China Environment and Health Initiative of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The authors have received no financial interest or benefit from the direct applications of this research.