Co-authored by associate professor Wang Jiejing from the School of Public Administration and Policy, the research paper finds out that the China’s floating population migrate firstly upward (to big cities), then downward (to small cities).

Wang Jiejing | Associate Professor of School of Public Administration and Policy of Renmin University of China

The paper, which is titled “Patterns of onwards migration within the urban hierarchy of China: Who moves up and who moves down?”, has recently been published in Urban Studies, a leading international journal in urban studies whose five-year impact factor is 4.869.

The paper discovers that the Ravenstein’s laws of step migration can not well explain the characteristics of re-migration in China and proposes the “transition-level effect”: in the urban system, the greater the difference in rank between the place of household registration and the first city of migration, the greater the likelihood of further migration.

This effect is strongest in middle-aged migrants of rural origin with low levels of education (those born in the 1970s and 1980s) . Moreover, it can also predict the upward and downward mobility within the urban system and portrays “the multipolar nature of onwards migration.”

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project approval number: 72274200). Co-authors of the paper include Dr. Mai Xin of the South China Normal University and Dr. Zhang Lizheng of the Policy Research Center of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development.

Link to paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980221144236