Incomplete Urbanization and the Trans-Local Rural-Urban Gradient in China: From a Perspective of New Economics of Labor Migration

The urbanization in China is “incomplete” and the migration of non-hukou migrants is circular, wherein rural migrants often keep their rural land in the home village as a social safety net. The informal housing market is one of the main housing providers for migrant workers. Existing studies see informal housing as the migrants’ passive choice under the discriminatory hukou system, while underplaying the migrants’ familial multi-site tenure strategies between village homes and city places. As suggested by New Economics of Labor Migration (NELM), attachment to a place of origin (such as keeping hometown lands), while choosing informal housing at the destination, is a familial utility maximization strategy that can control risks when migrating between locations. Informal housing areas, therefore, become a trans-local rural-urban gradient and semi-urban landscape. We use the 2017 Migrant Dynamics Monitoring Survey data and the binary logistic regression to examine (a) whether hometown landowning is a significant predictor of the migrants’ choosing of a temporary stay in informal settlements in urban destinations, and (b) which kind of hometown land arrangement (farmland or homestead holding or both of them) is the strongest indicator of the higher probability of staying in informal settlements in urban destinations? The data analysis reveals that homestead in hometown is a more prominent pulling factor than farmland to “glue” rural migrants together within an integrated rural land “insurance regime” between the migrant-sending and -receiving places. The land-use and informal housing governance (including urban village demolition) ignore the trans-local nature of the migratory networks and semi-urbanizing dynamics. The traditional analysis of the rural-urban gradient with many landscapes should consider the functional and tenurial linkage between the locations at different points along with the complex migration activities