Identity, Inequality, and Happiness: Evidence from Urban China

This paper presents the impact of income inequality on the subjective wellbeing of three different social groups in urban China. We classify urban social groups according to their hukou status: rural migrants, gbornh urban residents, and gacquiredh urban residents who had changed their hukou identity from rural to urban. We focus on how the income disparity between migrants and urban residents affects individual happiness. The main results are as follows. People feel unhappy if inequality is related to their hukou identity, irrespective of whether they are urban residents with or without hukou. However, when identity-related inequality and other individual- and city-level characteristics are controlled, inequality measured by city-level Gini increases happiness. We also find that among urban residents who own hukou, mostly the gacquiredh urban residents are unhappy with hukou-related inequality. This implies that identity is formed by both policy and personal experience. gBornh urban residents have lower happiness scores when they are old. Communist Party members strongly dislike the identity-related inequality.Inequality, Hukou identity, Happiness, Migration, Social integration

The Regulation of Migration in a Transition Economy: China’s Hukou System

Unlike most countries, China regulates internal migration. Public benefits, access to good quality housing, schools, health care, and attractive employment opportunities are available only to those who have local registration (Hukou). Coincident with the deepening of economic reforms, Hukou has gradually been relaxed since the 1980s, helping to explain an extraordinary surge of migration within China. In this study of interprovincial Chinese migration, we address two questions. First, what is a sensible way of incorporating Hukou into theoretical and empirical models of internal migration? Second, to what extent has Hukou influenced the scale and structure of migration? We incorporate two alternative measures of Hukou into a modified gravity model – the unregistered migrant's: (i) perceived probability of securing Hukou; and (ii) perceived probability of securing employment opportunities available only to those with Hukou. In contrast to previous studies, our model includes a much wider variety of control especially important for the Chinese case. Analyzing the relationship between Hukou and migration using census data for 1985-90, 1995-2000 and 2000-05, we find that migration is very sensitive to Hukou, with the greatest sensitivity occurring during the middle period.internal migration, Hukou, migrant networks, reforms

Rising regional income inequality in China: Fact or artefact?

China’s local populations can be counted in two ways; by how many people have hukou household registration from each place and by how many people actually reside in each place. The counts differ by the non-hukou migrants – people that move from their place of registration – who have grown from fewer than five million when reform began in 1978 to over 200 million by 2010. For most of the first three decades of the reform era, the hukou count was used to produce per capita GDP figures. In coastal provinces the resident count is many millions more than the hukou count, while for migrant-sending provinces it is the reverse, creating a systematic and time-varying distortion in provincial GDP per capita. Moreover, a sharp discontinuity occurred when provinces recently switched from the hukou count to the resident count when reporting GDP per capita. A double-count also resulted because some provinces switched before others and initial resident counts were incomplete. This paper describes the changing definition of provincial populations in China and their impact on inequality in provincial GDP per capita. We show that much of the apparent increase in inter-provincial inequality disappears once a consistent series of GDP per resident is used

The regulation of migration in a transition economy: China's Hukou system

Unlike most countries, China regulates internal migration. Public benefits, access to good quality housing, schools, health care, and attractive employment opportunities are available only to those who have local registration (Hukou). Coincident with the deepening of economic reforms, Hukou has gradually been relaxed since the 1980s, helping to explain an extraordinary surge of migration within China. In this study of interprovincial Chinese migration, we address two questions. First, what is a sensible way of incorporating Hukou into theoretical and empirical models of internal migration? Second, to what extent has Hukou influenced the scale and structure of migration? We incorporate two alternative measures of Hukou into a modified gravity model - the unregistered migrant's: (i) perceived probability of securing Hukou; and (ii) perceived probability of securing employment opportunities available only to those with Hukou. In contrast to previous studies, our model includes a much wider variety of control especially important for the Chinese case. Analyzing the relationship between Hukou and migration using census data for 1985-90, 1995-2000 and 2000-05, we find that migration is very sensitive to Hukou, with the greatest sensitivity occurring during the middle period

Migration, Self-Selection, and Income Distributions: Evidence from Rural and Urban China

As massive rural residents leave their home countryside for better employment, migration has profound effects on income distributions such as rural-urban income gap and inequalities within rural or urban areas. The nature of the effects depends crucially on who are migrating and their migrating patterns. In this paper, we emphasize two facts. First, rural residents are not homogeneous, they self-select to migrate or not. Second, there are significant differences between migrants who successfully transformed their hukou status (permanent migrants) and those did not (temporary migrants). Using three coordinated CHIP data sets in 2002, we find that permanent migrants are positively selected from rural population especially in terms of education. As permanent migration takes more mass from the upper half of rural income density, both rural income level and inequalities decrease, the urban-rural income ratio increases at the same time. On the contrary, the selection effect of temporary migrants is almost negligible. It does not have obvious effect on rural income level and inequalities.migration, self-selection, income distribution, China

Working with the homeless: The case of a non-profit organisation in Shanghai

This article addresses a two-pronged objective, namely to bring to the fore a much neglected social issue of homelessness, and to explore the dynamics of state-society relations in contemporary China, through a case study of a non-profit organisation (NPO) working with the homeless in Shanghai. It shows that the largely invisible homelessness in Chinese cities was substantially due to exclusionary institutions, such as the combined household registration and 'detention and deportation' systems. Official policy has become much more supportive since 2003 when the latter was replaced with government-run shelters, but we argue that the NPO case demonstrates the potential for enhanced longer-term support and enabling active citizenship for homeless people. By analysing the ways in which the NPO offers services through collaboration and partnership with the public (and private) actors, we also argue that the transformations in postreform China and the changes within the state and civil society have significantly blurred their boundaries, rendering state-society relations much more complex, dynamic, fluid and mutually embedded

China Employment Law Update - August 2017

In This Issue: Guangdong Province High Court Provides Guidance on Labor Disputes Shanghai Second Intermediate Court Issues Employment Dispute White Paper for 2013–2016 Transgender Employee Wins Compensation For Unlawful Termination and Infringement of Personality Rights in Guizhou Master Chef\u27s De Facto Employment Claim Upheld Beijing Labor Arbitration Committee Considers Foreign National Working Outside Approved Location as Illegal Employment Strong Company Policies Shield Employer From Criminal Liability for Employee Criminal Conduct Unilateral Termination for Non- disclosure of Sealed Juvenile Criminal Record Ruled Unlawful Employer Recovers Hukou-related Costs for Employee Breach of Service Years Agreemen

Are all migrants really worse off in urban labour markets: new empirical evidence from China.

The rapid and massive increase in rural-to-urban worker flows to the coast of China has drawn recent attention to the welfare of migrants working in urban regions, particularly to their working conditions and pay; serious concern is raised regarding pay discrimination against rural migrants. This paper uses data from a random draw of the 2005 Chinese national census survey to shed more light on the discrimination issue, by making comparisons of earnings and the sector of work between rural migrants on one hand, and urban residents and urban migrants on the other. Contrary to popular belief, we find no earnings discrimination against rural migrants compared to urban residents. However, rural migrants are found to be discriminated in terms of the sector in which they work, with a vast majority working in the informal sector lacking adequate social protection.Migration, China, Discrimination, Informal Employment

Brain Drain, Brain Gain, and Economic Growth in China

This paper examines the effects of both permanent and temporary emigration on human capital formation and economic growth of the source regions. To achieve this end, this paper explores the Chinese provincial panel data from 1980 to 2005. First, the fixed effects model is employed to estimate the effect of emigration on school enrollment rates in the source regions. Relative to this aspect, we find that the magnitude (scale) of permanent emigrants (measured by the permanent emigration ratio) is conducive to the improvement of both middle and high schools enrollments. In contrast, the magnitude of temporary emigrants has a significantly positive effect on middle school enrollment but does not have a significant effect on high school enrollment. More interestingly, different educational attainments of temporary emigrants have different effects on school enrollment. Specifically, the share of temporary emigrants with high school education positively affects middle school enrollment, while the share of temporary emigrants with middle school education negatively affects high school enrollment. Second, the instrumental variable method is applied to estimate the effect of emigration on economic growth within the framework of system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The estimation results suggest that both permanent and temporary emigrations have a detrimental effect on the economic growth of the source regions. Our empirical tests provide some new evidence to the "brain drain" debate, which has recently received increasing attention.Brain drain, human capital, emigration, economic growth