Mind the Gap: The Structural Dilemma of Urban Migrant’s Integration in Eastern China

Zihan Chen, University of Birmingham

By designating individuals as agricultural or non-agricultural, hukou system regulates access to employment, education, healthcare, and so on. In the context of rapid urbanization, large numbers of rural residents have become urban migrants, relocating to cities in search of better opportunities. However, without local hukou, these urban migrants face persistent institutional barriers that limit their integration. Governments at various levels have introduced policies aimed at improving the integration of urban migrants, focusing on hukou, labour market access, and public service provision. Despite these efforts, a significant gap remains between the intentions of policies and the lived experiences of urban migrants. This gap is conceptualized as the Structural Dilemma (SD), which captures the tension between integration policies and the reality. This study focuses on Eastern China, a region characterized by a large inflow of urban migrants and active experimentation with integration policies. Through topic modelling, entropy method and relative gap method, the development of a Structural Dilemma Index (SDI) has been developed. and examines Three key dimensions has been examined: hukou, labour force access and public service access. Findings indicate that (1) Policies closely tied to the hukou system are more likely to exhibit structural dilemmas; (2) Among these three policy aspects, topics that receive relatively high policy attention often exhibit lower SDI scores, indicating a comparatively weaker structural dilemma; (3) Public Service Provision aspect exhibited the lowest overall SDI values, indicating the weakest structural dilemma.

Keywords: Internal Migration and Urbanization, Population Policies, Computational social science methods, Big data

See paper.

  Presented in Session 107. Internal Migration in Developing Countries