Rural-to-urban migration and adolescent delinquent behaviors: evidence from Hunan and Guangdong in China

ABSTRACT

Analyzing data of a merged sample of two Chinese student surveys conducted in two rural counties of Hunan province and in the capital city of Guangdong province, this paper examines the impact of parental migration on rural children’s involvement in delinquent behaviors. We compare delinquency of non-migrant and left-behind children in the countryside, rural-to-urban migrant children, and urban local children. Both rural children left behind by one migrant parent and those left behind by both migrant parents are similar to rural children without parental migration in terms of delinquent involvement. The situation of rural-to-urban migrant children is noticeably worse, as they are more likely to engage in delinquent behaviors than rural children without parental migration. Nevertheless, rural-to-urban migrant children are not more prone to delinquency compared to their urban local peers. We also found an acculturation impact in the study because the odds of engaging in delinquent behaviors first increases and then decreases for rural-to-urban migrant children when they stay longer and learn some local language in the hosting city.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural-to-urban migration
• adolescent delinquency
• China

Acknowledgment

We sincerely acknowledge the valuable comments and suggestions by Professor Yuan Ren, Professor Kam Wing Chan, and Nancy Johnston Place. The data used in this paper are from the project “Stuck in the City: Migration and Delinquency among Migrant Adolescents in Guangzhou” and the Hunan Rural Adolescent Survey, both funded by the South China Programme, Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A detailed description of the survey can be found at Cheung (2013).

2. The original questionnaires include another two items asking whether the child had ever “played network games continuously for five hours or more” and “stayed out all night or until late night” in the past 12 months. We chose to exclude these two items due to the urban-rural digital divide in China and the more colorful nightlife in cities. The inclusion of them along with the other behaviors may make the delinquency measure urban biased.

Additional information

Funding

This work is a part of the project “Social Transition and Sociological Theory” founded by the “Double-First Class” plan of social science development of Fudan University. It was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China [17ARK002], National Natural Science Foundation of China [71490735], and research fund from School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University.