Economic Resources, Cultural Matching, and the Rural-Urban Boundary in China's Marriage Market.

Abstract

This article investigates marital sorting by household registration status (hukou) and education in contemporary urban China, paying special attention to individuals who have achieved rural-to-urban hukou mobility before marriage. Existing theoretical frameworks of assortative mating have highlighted economic resources and cultural matching as two key dimensions. These two frameworks place different emphasis on individuals' achieved versus ascriptive characteristics, and hold different implications for understanding the link between marital sorting patterns and social openness/closure. With a focus on hukou converters, this study examines the relative importance of achieved versus ascriptive traits in China's marriage market and contributes to the evaluation of the two frameworks. This study adopts a mixed-methods approach. The quantitative analysis uses the harmonic mean marriage function to analyze the nationally representative 2006 China General Social Survey. The qualitative data consist of 115 in-depth interviews collected in two Chinese metropolitan areas between 2016 and 2017. Quantitative results showed that hukou converters and urban-born individuals both had the highest propensity of marrying a spouse of the same hukou trajectory. Qualitative results further revealed the gap between converters and their urban-born peers to be hierarchical. Although both groups emphasized the importance of shared values and habitus in evaluating prospective partners, urban-born individuals regarded hukou converters as a culturally distinct and less desirable option. The findings highlight the power of cultural matching in China's urban marriage market. Hukou converters' rural origin remains visible and acts as a source of lasting symbolic distinction despite adulthood status attainment.