Analysis of the Regional, Educational and Residential Heterogeneity of China’s Internal Migration

Wu Yingji, Asian Demographic Research Institute, Shanghai University
Samir KC, Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital

As a result of relatively low fertility levels in the past decades, China's population increase has slowed down decades before and started declining in 2022. It seems impossible to reverse this trend although the government has loosed the family planning policy in the past decade. In China, most of the better-educated women are more likely to spend their time and energy for self-improvement and enjoy their lives. As a result of low fertility, internal migration will take a more important role in affecting the population distribution in China. Every year millions of populations migrate from western to eastern provinces and from rural areas to urban in China. It is believed that education and internal migration will become two dominant population dimensions for China's population dynamics and distribution in the future. In this paper, we will use the micro-sample data from the China Census 2010 to analyze the regional, educational, and residential heterogeneity of the internal migration flows and their influence on China's population distribution. We will also investigate how the current internal migration education pattern will shape the future China population dynamics.

Keywords: Population projections, forecasts, and estimations, Internal Migration and Urbanization, Human Capital, Education, and Work, Census data

See extended abstract.