1. Introduction
Since the reform and opening up in China, migrants from rural to urban areas have become an indispensable driving force of China’s economic development [
1,
2,
3]. The growth rate of the migrants slowed down recently but still exceeded 290 million, accounting for 20.8% of the total population in 2019 [
4]. Most of them have realized the transition from agricultural to nonagricultural in occupations rather than in their lives because they have not yet obtained urban registered residency (called
hukou in the following sections), which is an identification document where general household information such as names, marital status and one’s place of residence were recorded. Therefore, high difficulty in obtaining an urban
hukou has been considered as an important factor that prevents migrants from moving to urban areas but also affects their daily life and consumption level [
5]. In addition,
hukou not only has population registration functions but also is an important administrative tool to distribute key welfare such as access to primary and secondary schools, affordable housing and medical insurance reimbursement ratios. The long-standing
hukou system also prevents migrant workers from integrating into local society and even suffer discrimination from the labour market [
6]. The
hukou system and its subsidiary social welfare distribution system in Chinese cities is accordingly an intervening obstacle in the ‘push-and-pull’ theory. The research of
hukou’s impact on long-term settlement intention provides ideal evidence in the effects of institutional intervening obstacle in developing countries, where countries such as China are enduring fast urbanization.
In the past, scholars have constructed a corresponding evaluation index system to measure the difficulty of obtaining
hukou according to the specific requirements of policies in cities [
7,
8,
9]. However, this approach is based on the strong assumption that migrants in the same cities feel the same way about the difficulty of obtaining
hukou, which ignores the heterogeneity of the individual. As an improvement, this paper measures the difficulty of obtaining
hukou based on respondents’ subjective judgments from the survey question: ‘
How do you think of the requirements for obtaining a local hukou in your current city?’. In addition, this paper also referred to the experience of previous scholars by exploring the influencing factors and their differences from four dimensions: individual attributes, economic status, mobility characteristics and social integration status.
Specifically, based on a panoramically representative survey in 46 cities in China in 2020, this paper analyses the relationship between the difficulty of obtaining local hukou and the long-term settlement intention. Moreover, this paper attempts to quantitatively evaluate for the first time the impact of this obstacle on migrants’ long-term settlement intention in urban areas. It contributes to the development of the ‘push-and-pull’ theory for other economics managing to design wise immigration policies that well balance inbound labor and talent supplies, permanent residency threshold, aging society, and social welfare fund management.
The outline of this paper is as follows: the
Section 2 reviews the influencing factors on long-term settlement intention, particularly from the institutional perspective. The
Section 3 introduces
hukou system, its reform process, and explains what makes it an intervening obstacle in the ‘push-and-pull’ mechanism. The
Section 4 presents research data and methodology. The
Section 5 and
Section 6 illustrate the analyses of preliminary and empirical results, respectively, followed by conclusion and policy recommendations.
3. The hukou System
3.1. The Fundamental Role of hukou System in China
China’s hukou system essentially performs three functions: population registration, mobility restriction, and competitive welfare restriction.
Population registration function: in 16 July 1951, the Ministry of public security promulgated the Provisional Regulations on City Household Registration Management, which established the function of population registration in a registered residence system. Because it defines regulation for social affair management such as birth, death, immigration, relocation, social change and social identity, this function has its counterpart in the hukou system in Japan and the social security system in the United States.
Mobility restriction function: Based on the distinction between “agricultural household registration” and “non-agricultural household registration” in the Household Registration Regulations Of The People’s Republic Of China passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in January 1958, the provisions of the Ministry of public security on the Handling of Household Registration Migration (Draft) “in August 1964 established restrictions on moving from rural areas to cities and market towns; and restrictions on moving from market towns to cities. “ Consequently, Chinese cities are regarded collectively as welfare highland, with walls defined. The hukou system has become an administrative tool in restricting inbound migrants for long-term settlement.
Competitive welfare restriction function: What makes China’s hukou system different from other countries’ population management systems is that it artificially divides urban welfare according to its competitive attributes in the time when social production is not as high as nowadays. Noncompetitive welfare refers to public goods that have positive externalities, such as the degree of cleanliness of one city, the accessibility of municipal infrastructure and convenience. The number or quality of these benefits does not decline sharply due to the increase in people. Residents, no matter original or newcomer, can enjoy the same level of benefits. Competitive welfare refers to public service that has relatively high incremental cost due to limited professional resources such as teachers and doctors, or dedicated facilities such as schools and hospital beds. These services cover the field of healthcare, compulsory education, affordable housing, etc. The investment on these public services tightly links to local fiscal expenditure that mainly come from land transaction fees and cooperation tax, rather than property tax (this might also explain why municipal administrations are generally keen on inviting investment but are less enthusiastic in inviting population under the current tax system). Therefore, the hukou system protects vested population (citizens with local hukou) by setting access threshold on competitive benefits, such as public-school qualifications, college entrance examination qualifications, house purchase qualifications, car purchase qualifications, and medical insurance reimbursement ratios.
Under the current system, the mobility restriction function of registered residence system makes it possible to maintain the basic functions of a city and maintain public order. Through the administrative control of settlement conditions, settlement procedures and annual hukou quotas, cities are able to handle corresponding demand according to their own public service carrying capacity.
3.2. hukou Is an Intervening Obstacle in the ‘Push-and-Pull’ Theory
During the development of the ‘push-and-pull’ theory, E.S. Lee [
12] argued that the mobility of migrants is not only affected by the ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors from their hometown and destination but is also affected by intervening obstacles, such as distance and transportation between hometown and destination, cultural and dietary differences and the immigration laws.
The competitive welfare restriction function theoretically makes hukou an intervening obstacle besides the ‘push-and-pull’ mechanism, because it does not restrict migrants from entering the urban labor market at the present stage but restricts their right to obtain equal public services (esp. competitive welfare that are fundamental in access equal local development opportunity) in the city. For instance, participation in the middle school entrance examination and college entrance examination outside migrants’ children’s hukou registration place have been challenging. First, they are required to provide evidence that their parents are legally domiciled and employed locally (e.g., most provinces stipulate that in order to take the exam in the destination, the children who have migrated with parents need to provide a certificate of residence of their parents, a proof of stable occupation and a number of years of social security payment from their parents). Second, most cities do not open all types of public secondary schools to the children of migrants. Megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin only allow children of migrants to take entrance exams of secondary vocational schools.
3.3. The Reform of hukou System
The establishment of hukou system can be traced back to 1958, when the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed the Household Registration Ordinance. It stipulated that “citizens migrating from rural areas to urban areas must hold an employment certificate, a certificate of enrolment from educational institutions, or a permission document from the urban household registration authority”. From the 1960s to the 1970s, the hukou system saw strengthened restrictions on the movement of people between urban and rural areas legally. For example, in 1964, the Ministry of Public Security issued regulations to restrict population movement from two aspects: (1) from rural areas to cities; (2) from towns to cities.
Due to China’s market-oriented reform in the 1990s, the rapid development of urban industry led to an increasing demand for labour, which provided incentive for the reform of the
hukou system to gradually expand from small towns to cities. The State Council approved pilot schemes for reforming the
hukou administration system in small towns in 1997, allowing rural residents who already work and live in small towns and meet certain conditions to apply for permanent
hukou locally. After 2000, some local governments began to explore the path of household registration reform in cities. Cities such as Shenyang and Anshan introduced policies in 2010 to encourage talented people to transfer their
hukou [
42].
In recent years, the state has accelerated the reform of the
hukou system. In 2013, the promulgation of the CPC Central Committee on reform of the overall number of major issues signifies the beginning of the systematic reform of the
hukou system. In 2014, the State Council issued a guideline on the reform of the
hukou system, which stated that by 2020, about 100 million migrants and other permanent residents would be encouraged to register as urban residents [
43]. In 2019, the National Development and Reform Commission issued the
Key Tasks for New Urbanization Construction. Under the plan, cities with a population under 3 million should remove all limits on
hukou—household registration—and cities with populations between 3 million and 5 million should relax restrictions on new migrants [
43].
Table 1 shows the relevant documents and main contents of
hukou reform in recent years.
6. Empirical Analyses
6.1. Modelling the Long-Term Settlement Intention in China
In order to better understand influencing factors of residence intention, this paper establishes four binomial logistic models with residence intention as the dependent variable. Model 1 includes only the subjectively evaluated
hukou difficulty as an independent variable. Variables of personal characteristics, migration characteristics and destination characteristics were successively added in Model 2 to Model 4 on the basis of Model 1 (see
Table 6). The explanatory power of Model 1 to Model 4 was gradually enhanced according to the Pseudo R2.
In Model 1, key independent variable hukou was introduced. The positive coefficient suggested that compared with migrants who feel it is not difficult to obtain a local hukou, those who find it difficult are more likely to stay in the destination for a long term, but this result is not statically significant. Moreover, the negative value of very difficult variable meaning that migrants who found that it is very difficult to obtain a hukou locally were more likely to return to their hometowns than to stay is a result that was statistically significant. However, endogenous issues might exist in this simple regression, which mainly comes from the missing variables at the city and individual levels. For instance, hukou threshold is closely related to city characteristics such as the economy, population and industrial development. The more developed a city’s economy is, the more intensive its industries are, consequently the more attractive it would be to migrants, and the higher the threshold of household registration would be (due to the constraints of population carrying capacity and management capacity of the city). In Model 2–4, the characteristic variables at the individual, migration and destination levels are gradually controlled, which significantly alleviates endogenous problems caused by the omission of variables. The coefficients of hukou difficulty are becoming significant in both ‘a bit difficult’ and ‘very difficult’. This indicates that when migrants find it a little difficult to obtain a local hukou, but they can meet the requirements later, they are more willing to stay in the destination for a long time. However, when migrant workers find it is very difficult to meet the hukou requirements, they tend to return home in the future rather than stay locally.
According to the regression results of Model 4, individual characteristic variables have significant impacts on long-term residence intention in destination. Compared with female migrants, male migrants are less likely to stay in the destination. This result is inconsistent with Siu and Unger’s findings; they argue that female immigrants do not have much advantage in the labour market, so they are more inclined to stay at home to take care of children and the elderly [
44]. One of the possible explanations is that male migrants are more likely to migrate alone, while other family members, such as children and wives, are left behind in hometowns. Thus, male migrants are likely to have a stronger desire to return to their hometown in the long-term. Compared with low-educated migrants, the stay intention of migrants with higher education is stronger and statistically significant. This may be because well-educated migrants are more competitive in the labour market and can better adapt to local life so that they are more willing to stay in the long-term. The results of Model 4 also show that married and aged migrants show less inclination to stay. The odds ratio of land variable is 0.786, indicating that migrants with land rights in their hometown are more inclined to return in the long-term.
Four migration characteristic variables in the model also showed significant correlations with residence intention. Compared with migrant workers who are unemployed, migrant workers with stable employment have a stronger desire to stay in local areas for a long time. It is also worth noting that the higher the position of migrant workers, the stronger the intention of residence. In terms of income level, compared with the reference group whose income level was less than 3500, migrants who earn from 3500 to 5000 are less likely to stay, but the medium and high-income (over 5000) group were not statistically significant. With the increase in migration duration, migrants are more inclined to stay in the destination. This match anecdotal experience that the longer the migrants stays in the local area, the more stable the local social network and living state will be, the stronger the social adaptability to the local will be, and the stronger the residence intention will be. Moreover, the increasing magnitude of migration distance suggests that there is a linear negative relationship between migration distance and migrant workers’ stay intention in the destination, but it is not statically significant for medium-distance cross-city migration.
Migrant’s stay intention in the destination is also related to destination characteristics. The coefficients of central and western regions variables indicate that migrants who migrate to these two regions are more willing to stay in the local area than those in the eastern region, but it is not significant for the central region. This may be due to the low level of living costs and housing prices in the western region, which encourage migrants to stay in the long term. A stronger level of economic development (GDP per capita) will also significantly enhance migrants’ willingness to stay. The main reason is that economic growth will lead to an increase in job opportunities, which will attract migrants to stay in their destinations. Finally, consistent with the preliminary result, there is a negative correlation between education and medical resources and migrants’ willingness to stay, that is, the higher the level of these two resources, the more reluctant migrants are to stay. One possible explanation for this result is that at present, the allocation of several key public resources is mainly based on hukou in most cities. Migrants without a local hukou therefore have to pay a higher price to access many public resources, such as medical fee. Therefore, the unequal distribution of public resources caused by the hukou system restrains migrants’ willingness to stay.
6.2. Robustness Check
Based on the above analysis of the current
hukou system reform, the objective difficulty of obtaining local
hukou is related to the city scale (see
Table 1). Therefore, the robustness test of this part will follow that of previous scholars [
8,
9] and take objective difficulty (i.e., city scales) as the core dependent variable to further examinate the relationship between
hukou accessibility and long-term settlement intention. Specifically, we divided the sample cities into three levels according to their population size. More specifically, we divided the sample cities into three levels according to their scale:
Level 1 (most difficult): Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen.
Level 2 (a bit difficult): Shenyang, Chengdu, Hangzhou, Jinan, Ningbo, Qingdao, Suzhou, Wuhan, Xian, Changsha, Chongqing.
Level 3 (not difficult): The rest of the cities.
Interestingly, the results of Model 5 in
Table 7 are similar to those of our models above. To be specific, taking migrants in cities without
hukou threshold (Not difficult) as a control group, those in cities with certain
hukou difficulty tend to stay local, but this result is not significant. However, for migrants in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, their willingness to stay in their destinations for a long time is weakest, and they are more inclined to return to their hometown. The results of the rest of the control variables are the same as those above and will not be repeated here.
7. Conclusions
Since the reform and opening up, due to the differences in economic development between urban and rural areas and between regions in China, a large number of migrant workers have flowed from rural areas to cities and from central and western regions to eastern regions. Unable to obtain local hukou (household registration), they are not truly local and cannot enjoy their fair share of local public resources. Since 2013, the household registration system has been further reformed. This study advances the body of knowledge by investigating the effect of what E.S. Lee has proposed ‘intervening obstacles’ in the ‘push-and-pull’ theory. Based on a nation-wide large-scale survey in 46 Chinese cities, this paper studies the relationship between the difficulty of obtaining a local hukou and long-term residence intention. The main conclusions are as follows.
First, an investigation on influence factors on migrants’ subjective evaluations on hukou difficulty presents that migrants with low education, low income and no property in destination might be vulnerable under the current hukou system. This implies that the current hukou system mainly unfriendly to migrant workers with low human capital and weak economic conditions.
Second, if other control variables remain unchanged, this paper found that the negative impact of
hukou difficulty on migrant workers’ residence intention is not linear, and only when the threshold in obtaining
hukou is too high and difficult to achieve will migrant workers choose to return hometown in the long term. This may indicate that after nearly 10 years of household registration (
hukou) system reform, most cities have gradually achieved equal access to basic public services, and migrant workers can enjoy more public services than before, though not necessarily the same as the local. As a result,
hukou in many cities is no longer the decisive factor in determining whether migrant workers will stay in the destination for a long time. However, although China’s household registration system (
hukou) reform has been improving, it still hinders migrants’ residence intention to some extent and has considerable potential to be optimized. We believe that current household registration (
hukou) system has two influences on migrants’ residence intention: first, migrants who without local
hukou cannot enjoy public services such as medical services and social security services equally with local people; also, migrants without local
hukou cannot easily reunite with their families locally because they do not have access to local public resources such as public schools for their children equally. Moreover, the long-standing
hukou system leads to the lack of parental companionship and care for left-behind children, which has a negative impact on their physical and mental health [
45]. That may encourage migrant workers to return home in the long term. In this sense, the application of E.S. Lee’s ‘intervening obstacles’ in the push–pull theorem could be extended to administrative barriers. The mechanism of this obstacle is, however, not as linear as physical distance might do. This provides implication for countries and regions within country globally to facilitate immigration policies and designation of benefits granted to non-citizen. Further research on the threshold that influence residence intention is necessary to collect more empirical evidence for this viewpoint.
Finally, the results of our model show that the human capital level of migrant workers, such as educational background and income level, is negatively correlated with residence intention. This may be because they have always been on the margins of local society and have been unable to integrate into local society due to the restrictions of the hukou system.
In terms of policy suggestions, the author suggests that future urban development strategies should give more consideration to migrants, especially in the distribution of educational resources, medical resources and other welfare. Thus, it can promote migrant workers to better integrate into the local society and enhance their willingness to stay. In particular, three policy tools are proposed in line with the findings. First, an ‘intervention unobstructed tool’ needs to be implemented to hedge the current obstacles. In detail, the current residence permit (similar to greencard that allows migrants who reside in destination for more than half year but have not yet obtained local hukou) system is suggested to upgrade so that non-hukou migrants could enjoy key settlement benefits in cities, including safe, clean, affordable housing, equal compulsory education opportunity regardless of parental hukou status, higher medical insurance reimbursement ratios. Second, investment on public services and facilities needs to be based on settle population size, rather than size of population with local hukou. Third, distribution of national fiscal and land resources in this field is suggested to shift from GDP and income level base to inbound migrants’ size base, in order to match the service and settlement demand of incremental migrants under the current taxation schemes in urban China.
There are also some obvious limitations in our research. For example, the sampling time of this study is from 2020. Due to the impact of COVID-19, many migrant workers could not go out for work normally and even chose to return to their hometown, thus causing some deviation in the results. Moreover, the objects of our study are local migrant workers. Migrant workers who have returned to their hometown are not considered, so the problem of survivor bias will also occur in this research.