![Sample our Health and Social Care journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5938/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Health-Social-Care.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
China is rapidly urbanizing, with hundreds of millions of migrants leaving villages for cities. Under the discriminatory Household Registration (Hukou) System, migrants have been denied urban welfare benefits. The Chinese government has been promoting inclusive urbanization with significant policy changes in recent decades, yet its impact on migrants is not clear. This article examines whether housing is becoming more inclusive to migrants in Chinese cities. A review of recent policy changes at both central and local levels shows that although central housing policy is becoming more inclusive of migrants, local governments have largely remained exclusionary and exercise selective inclusion—allowing only migrants who meet additional, strict requirements to access subsidized housing. The empirical analyses, using two waves of the China Migrants Dynamic Survey, reveal that few migrants have access to subsidized housing despite the policy changes. Institutional barriers continue to exclude migrants from subsidized housing, although many barriers have become less important over time. It is clear that housing discrimination persists, and housing inclusion remains a distant dream for most migrants in China. This research highlights exclusion based on an important but uncommon birth-ascribed status defined by the government and provides a multiscalar perspective on the inclusion of domestic migrants.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Hukou is assigned at birth, often following parents’ hukou status. There are only a few ways for residents with rural/agricultural hukou to change to urban/nonagricultural hukou, including attending college and joining the army.
2. Five insurances and one fund refers to five types of social security insurance (pension, medical insurance, unemployment insurance, work-related injury insurance, and maternity insurance) and the Housing Provident Fund (HPF), a housing saving account with employer matching.
3. The income threshold is no more than 3,000 yuan per month for one person, no more than 4,000 yuan for a couple, and no more than 2,000 yuan per month per person for larger households. The household must not own housing or must have per capita living space of less than 13 m2.
4. The six cities for the experiment were Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chengdu, Huai’an, and Huangshi.
5. If migrants are from the city administrative region, the criteria are slightly less restrictive, and qualified migrants in this case include those who have been paying for social security insurance for 3+ years, either married or single but 35+ years old, and do not own homes.
6. Like the immigration policy in Canada, Shanghai adopts a point system to allow migrants to establish their legal residence in Shanghai, which is based on a list of factors such as education, employment, and years of residence (SMG, Citation2018).
7. In 2017, about 50% of new HPF enrollers are college graduates and migrants; more than 10% of withdrawals were made by renters and about 3.5% of the funds withdrawn were for rental housing (MHURD, Citation2018). By the end of 2017, cumulatively there were 540,240 HPF mortgages, in the amount of 163.5 billion yuan, that were issued in a different city from that of the HPF deposit.
8. Owned private housing includes self-built housing, commodity housing, and small property rights housing. Employer-provided housing is sometimes subsidized by employers but other times not; thus, it is not considered subsidized housing by the government.
9. Migrants are more likely to own small property rights housing (2.55%) and self-built housing (3.62%), which tend to have poor conditions and less secure property rights than the commodity housing owned by most local residents.
10. According to the 2010 census, 11.76% of migrants compared with 35.13% of local urban residents lived in subsidized housing. Although census data are not completely comparable with CMDS regarding housing type, this demonstrates the difference between migrants and local residents in accessing subsidized housing. In the following decade, the Chinese government set up ambitious targets for subsidized housing with massive investment; however, most of them are for local urban residents, and thus the difference in access to subsidized housing between migrants and local residents in 2017 is expected to be even larger.
11. Some college refers to training in vocational and technical colleges, which usually require a study duration of 3 years, instead of 4 years as in regular colleges.
12. According to Allison (Citation2012), it is the number of events, not the percentage of events, that matters regarding rare events. In the case of a large number of events but a small percentage, regular logistic regression using maximum likelihood estimation has no bias. Although the percentage for subsidized housing in this study is small, the number of migrants living in subsidized housing was 1,402 in 2010 and 3,826 in 2017. Thus, it is not considered a rare event scenario and there is no estimation bias in the logistic regression. For multinomial logistic regression, similarly, the number of events is 102 in subsidized rental housing and 1,300 in subsidized owned housing in 2010, and 1,702 in subsidized rental housing and 2,121 in subsidized owned housing in 2017. For the combined model on which our main findings are based, the number of events is in the thousands. Again, estimation bias is less of a concern. However, a Firth logistic regression is conducted for comparison.
13. Regression coefficients in the models for 2010 and 2017 cannot be compared directly regarding their relative importance with different samples in the models; however, the coefficients for the pooled data model can test the significance of the change in the effect of a specific independent variable over time.
14. Chinese cities are differentiated in a four-tier system: Tier 1 cities are the very large cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Chongqing; Tier 2 cities include provincial capitals, cities with populations of 3–15 million; Tier 3 cities are prefecture capitals with populations of 150,000 to 3 million, and Tier 4 cities are county-level cities.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Youqin Huang
Dr. Youqin Huang is a Professor of Geography and Planning at University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY). Her research aims to understand the unprecedented market transition in China and its impact on Chinese people and places, focusing on housing, migration, and urban development. She is the (co-)author/(co-)editor of several books, including Chinese Cities in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Confronting the Challenges of Urbanization in China: Insights from Social Science Perspectives (Routledge, 2016), Housing Inequality in Chinese Cities (Routledge 2014), China’s Geography: Globalization and the Dynamics of Political, Economic and Social Change (Roman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006, 2015, 2021), and The Emergence of New Urban China: Insiders’ Perspectives (Lexington Books, 2012). She has also published many papers in leading journals in geography, urban studies, housing, and China.
Jianyu Ren
Dr. Jianyu Ren is a lecturer of Economics at Zhejiang Gongshang University (ZJSU). Her research focuses on housing market and policy, urbanization, migration and population change in China. She is good at analyzing data and forecasting development trends by using various models. She has also published some papers in leading journals in housing and urban studies.