Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Urbanization and migration have been the main themes in many developing countries in the last decade. While bolstering economic development, they have also contributed to issues such as social segregation, soaring housing price, environmental degradation and traffic congestion. China, as one of the most prominent examples, experienced a series of social, economic, and environmental transformations during urbanization process. But how urbanization and migration have affected social mobility remains an open question.

Urban residents in China can be divided into three social groups based on their hukou (inner passport) identity: urban natives, rural-urban migrants and city-city migrants. City-city migrants are generally more educated and have stronger desire to get integrated into local communities than rural-urban migrants. Since 1990s, millions of migrants have entered cities in response to large demand for cheap labor force in some labor-intensive industries. Urban natives face intensifying competition from migrants in job markets although migrants are usually blocked from prestigious jobs. Most peasants can earn considerably higher income by either getting employed in manufacturing industry or starting their own business in urban areas compared to their counterparts in rural villages. However, higher income does not necessarily guarantee higher social status. Hukou system, an institutional barrier, has rendered migrants persistently in marginalized social-economic positions, which forms a “dual society” in Chinese cities.

By employing the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) from 2003 to 2013, we quantify the evolution of social mobility in urban China, examine factors influencing social mobility and measure structural changes in them. We extract six latent factors and explore relationships among social mobility, self-association, individual trust, institutional trust, career connections and assessment of social fairness, by using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) controlling for the social-economic and demographical characteristics such as income, education attainment, group membership, information acquisition, etc. SEM approach allows us to make simultaneous evaluation of all variables and constructed relationships among them in the model. Moreover, this method can derive latent attitudinal factors from survey respondents’ answers and improve the explanatory power of our model.

We expect to see enhanced social mobility among both rural-urban migrants and city-city migrants although the latter group may have higher upward mobility than the former. For urban natives, we predict that social mobility among them does not experience significant change during great urbanization process. Self-association, social trust and career connections are expected to have a positive effect on social mobility. But the variation of their effects across the three social groups needs to be confirmed by the Wald test. It is hard to make causal inference between social mobility and assessment of social fairness so we choose to just calculate their correlation coefficient.

In this paper, we will make a robust comparison of social mobility changes in urban China from 2003 to 2013. It is crucial for China's future sustainable development to understand the evolution in urban residents' social mobility and its determinants. Our study will help policy-makers design more effective social policies to reduce social segregation for a pathway towards a more inclusive and sustainable society.