The Role of Children in the Migration Decisions of Rural Chinese Women

Abstract

This paper investigates the role that children play in the migration decisions of Chinese women. The presence of children of various ages is hypothesized to affect the timing of migration, the length of migration, and the nature of migration in terms of who goes along. In addition, we also investigate whether the sex of the children affects migration decisions. Results indicate that whether one's husband ever migrated has a positive effect on migrating before childbirth. Return timing is strongly linked to the age of the child. Many mothers return to rural areas around the time that the child begins formal schooling. We also find that women who have given birth to a boy are significantly less likely to migrate after childbirth but more likely to take the boy with her if she does migrate.

Notes

*Rachel Connelly, Ph.D., is the Bion R. Cram Professor of Economics at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine. Her research focuses on rural to urban migration of Chinese women and educational issues for Chinese children. She can be reached at [email protected]. Kenneth Roberts, Ph.D., holds the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cullen Chair of Economics at Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas. His research focuses on circular migration patterns in both Mexico and China and the role of remittances in migration decision making. He can be reached at [email protected]. Zhenzhen Zheng, Ph.D., is Professor and Division Chief, Division of Statistical Demography, Institute of Population and Labor Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Science. Her research is on fertility and contraceptive choice as it connects to migration and the whole of women's lives. She can be reached at [email protected].

^1. Kenneth Roberts, Rachel Connelly, Zhenzhen Zheng and Zhenming Xie, ‘Patterns of temporary migration of rural women from Anhui and Sichuan provinces of China’, China Journal 52, (2004), pp. 49–70.

^2. For 62% of the women, their first migration episode was also their last migration episode, however even among those with two or more migration episodes, the percentage taking the children along was the same, at 12%.

^3. Rachel Connelly and Zhenzhen Zheng, ‘Enrollment and graduation patterns as China's reforms deepen, 1990–2000’, in Emily Hannum and Albert Park, eds, Education and Reform in China (London: Routledge, 2007).

^4. Bjorn Gustafsson and Shi Li, ‘Expenditures on education and health care and poverty in rural China’, China Economic Review 15(3), (2004).

^5. Bjorn Gustafsson and Shi Li, ‘Expenditures on education and health care and poverty in rural China’, China Economic Review 15(3), (2004), p. 295.

^6. Rachel Connelly, Kenneth Roberts and Zhenzhen Zheng, The Settlement of Rural Migrants in Urban China—Some of China's Migrants Are Not ‘Floating’ Anymore, Working Paper, (2007).

^7. Connelly and Zheng, ‘Enrollment and graduation patterns as China's reforms deepen’. However, there is more recent evidence that suggests that parents now invest the same amount of money in their daughter's as their son's education. See, for example, Emily Hannum, Peggy Kong and Yuping Zhang, ‘Family sources of educational gender inequality in rural China: a critical assessment’, International Journal of Educational Development 29(5), (September 2009); and Hong Zhang, ‘China's new rural daughters coming of age: downsizing the family and firing up cash-earning power in the new economy’, Signs 32(3), (Spring 2007).

^8. Jieyu Liu, Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation (London: Routedge, 2007) reports on this phenomenon for urban women. According to Liu, mothers of daughters received less help with childcare than mothers of sons.

^9. Several papers recently have focused on the effect of the sex of the child on US women's marriage and divorce behavior. Shelly Lundberg and Elaina Rose, ‘Child gender and the transition to marriage’, Demography 40(2), (2003), found that single mothers of sons marry sooner, especially to the father of the boy, than single mothers of daughters. Gordan Dahl and Enrico Moretti, ‘The demand for sons’, Review of Economic Studies 75(4), (October 2008), find that knowing that one is going to have a boy increases the probability that a single woman in the US carries the baby to full term. They also find that single mothers of sons are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced than mothers of daughters. These findings in the context of the US, which is not thought to have a strong son-preference, provide us with some sense that the sex of the child may be a factor in Chinese rural women's migration decision making.

^10. Connelly et al., The Settlement of Rural Migrants in Urban China. The rice harvest might not have been the best time to try to minimize missing migrant women since the rice harvest is a time of heavy farm labor when men are more likely to return than women. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this insight.

^11. Connelly et al., The Settlement of Rural Migrants in Urban China. The rice harvest might not have been the best time to try to minimize missing migrant women since the rice harvest is a time of heavy farm labor when men are more likely to return than women. Thanks to an anonymous referee for this insight

^12. Roberts et al., ‘Patterns of temporary migration of rural women from Anhui and Sichuan provinces of China’; and Rachel Connelly, Binbin Lou, Zhenzhen Zheng and Kenneth Roberts, ‘The migration experience of young women from four counties in Sichuan and Anhui’, in Tamara Jacka and Arianne Gaetano, eds, On the Move: Women in Rural–Urban Migration in Contemporary China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) find that the majority of the most recent migrants from rural Anhui and Sichuan were married at the time of their first migration. In fact, the dagonmei stereotype might never have been an accurate depiction of Chinese women's migration, although if we limited the migration episodes in the RMS to those that ended before 1995, a much larger portion of the women first migrated before marriage. Using the full dataset, 36% of the ever-migrated women (currently married and single) migrated before marriage; however, if we limit the data to episodes that ended before 1995, 60% of those episodes happened before marriage.

^13. The RMS does not have a full migration history for the women's husbands. We know if he ever migrated, the date of his first migration leaving, the duration of his first migration in broad categories of time, and total time he had migrated out since their marriage.

^14. Some 76% of the women who had children at the time of their first migration left them with the children's grandparents, mostly their paternal grandparents. See Roberts et al., ‘Patterns of temporary migration of rural women from Anhui and Sichuan provinces of China’, p. 65.

^15. Recall that for 62% of the sample, first migration is also their last.

^16. We know the RMS is missing a lot of the young women from these villages who are currently single and currently migrated, such that Table 1 does not represent the percentages of the whole population of women from these counties who would have first migrated after the birth of a child; but this does not change the reality that many women (the women in the RMS) do have this experience.

^17. Wenfei Wang, Return Migration in China: A Case Study of Sichuan and Anhui, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 74.

^18. Wenfei Wang, Return Migration in China: A Case Study of Sichuan and Anhui, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2005, p. 75.

^19. Yaohui Zhao, ‘The role of migrant networks in labor migration: the case of China’, Contemporary Economic Policy 21(4), (October 2003); Rachel Connelly, Kenneth Roberts and Zhenzhen Zheng, ‘The impact of circular migration on the position of women in rural china’, Feminist Economics 16(1), (January 2010), pp. 3–41.

^20. Margaret Maurer-Fazio and Ngan Dinh, ‘Differential rewards to and contributions of education in urban China's segmented labor markets’, Pacific Economic Review 9(3), (October 2004); Alan de Brauw and John Giles, Migrant Opportunity and the Educational Attainment of Youth in Rural China, The World Bank, Policy Research Working Paper Series 4526 (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008).