Human mobility restrictions and inter-provincial migration during the COVID-19 crisis in China

Abstract

The governmental responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, including the approach, interventions, and their associated effectiveness, vary across social, cultural, political, and institutional contexts. In China, the Wuhan lockdown significantly reduced the transmission of COVID-19 throughout the country. Chinese central and local governments’ responses to disease containment and mitigation were uniform in policymaking but implemented differently across local governing contexts. This study examines the variation in the effects of human mobility restrictions on inter-provincial migration flow during the COVID-19 outbreak in China. The results show that mobility restrictions reduced the inter-provincial in-migration flow by 63%, and the out-migration flow by 62% from late January to early May in 2020, but the effects varied significantly across provinces. Further, the negative effects of mobility restrictions on province’s outflow migration were greater in provinces where local governments had higher levels of social media involvement, greater public security spending, and longer duration of first-level response to public health emergencies. The finding provides important insights for understanding China’s local governmental responses to mobility restrictions and their effects on the spread of COVID-19.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Mengchen Liu, Dingxin Zhao, Yanfei Sun, Yinxian Zhang, Tongyu Wu, Licheng Qian, and Zongshi Chen for their helpful feedback on the early versions of the paper. We also thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers from CSR for their comments on improving this article.

Notes

1 In the supplementary analyses, the results reveal a consistent pattern reported in other studies. The decline in provinces’ in- and out-migration flow significantly reduced the daily confirmed cases outside of Hubei (See Figure A1).

2 Previous research shows that provincial governments also use social media accounts on WeChat to disseminate information since WeChat is one of the most popular social media mobile APP in China (Pan 2019). However, the 2019 China Statistical Report on Internet Development does not include information on provincial governments’ WeChat accounts. In the supplementary analyses, we construct an alternative measure of social media involvement using data from the 2018 Evaluation Report of Government E-Service Capability Index. This alternative measure accounts for the government E-Service Weibo and WeChat Indices and then is weighted by the provincial population size. The results yield consistent conclusions.

3 The urbanization rate is the percentage of the population living in urban areas.

4 In the supplementary analyses, we use an alternative sample dropping Hubei cases since Hubei is the epicenter of COVID-19 and may be a potential outlier. The results are consistent with those reported in the paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angran Li

Angran Li is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. His research interests include social stratification, sociology of education, family, urban and neighborhood sociology, and quantitative research methods.

Zhen Liu

Zhen Liu is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. Her research focuses on internal migration in China and immigration in the United States, particularly how these processes intersect with health and educational inequality.

Mengsha Luo

Mengsha Luo is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Zhejiang University. Her research focuses on social stratification, family sociology, and social demography. Other projects consider the links between family functioning and healthy aging in older adults.

Yan Wang

Yan Wang is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Zhejiang University. His research interests include migration, economic sociology, and data science.