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

Zihan Chen, University of Birmingham

“Urban migrants” refers to internal migrants whose destinations are urban and hukou does not belong to their destinations in China. Obstacles to their integration still exist when relevant policies are introduced. In this case, the gap between policies and reality is defined as “Structural Dilemma (SD)”. To explore what SD arises, this paper crawl three types of policies from the State Council from 2012–2021, namely, hukou system (HS), labor force access (LFA) and public service provision (PSP). Then LDA is used to do the topic modelling. To find what reality is, 44 relevant indicators from four kinds of Yearbook in 2014 and 2023 are selected. Compared with policy and reality, the results are: 1. For HS, only Topic Employment Security has a lower degree of SD. 2. For LFA, except for Topic Talent Guarantee and Topic Public Service Improvement, other topics have a high degree of SD. 3. For PSP, only Topic Tourism Market Cultivation has moderate degree of SD. 4. Different policy types have different degrees of SD, while in LFA is large and more serious. Based on this, when issuing policies on the urban migrants’ integration, it is necessary to focus on labor force access.

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

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