Patterns of onwards migration within the urban hierarchy of China: Who moves up and who moves down?

This paper examines onwards migration patterns and the factors that influence them in urban China. In contradiction to Ravenstein’s laws of step migration, we argue that movement up the urban hierarchy does not dominate onwards migration in the Chinese context. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, we model how past migratory experiences intersect with migrants’ demographic and socio-economic characteristics to explain the stay-versus-move decision and who moves up as well as who moves down within China’s urban hierarchy. The general pattern of China’s domestic migration is a movement up the urban hierarchy in the first migration and a movement down in onwards migration. We identify a transition-levels effect whereby the larger the difference between the hukou-registered place and the first migration city in the urban hierarchy, the greater the probability of onwards migration, with the effect manifesting most strongly for less-educated, mid-age (the 1970s and 1980s birth cohorts) migrants with rural origins. As to onwards migration direction, mixed results were found for migrants’ demographic and socio-economic characteristics whereas educational level and the transition-levels effect are both highly predictive of movement up and down the urban hierarchy. Our findings suggest that ‘jumping too high’ in previous migration(s) predicts a greater likelihood of moving down the urban hierarchy in response to insurmountable obstacles to settling in cities classified as large and above. Our research advances migration scholarship by considering the multipolar nature of onwards migration and offering an integrated approach to analysis that foregrounds the causes and effects of multiple-step migration.