Hometown landholdings and rural migrants’ integration intention: The case of urban China

Abstract

This paper investigates the association between hometown landholdings and rural migrants’ intentions to integrate in their destination societies in Chinese cities. We argue that hometown landholding affects rural migrants’ integration intention through the asset effect, security effect and emotional attachment effect. The empirical work based on a large national micro-level data extracted from the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS) shows that, rural migrants who possess contracted farmland but no homestead land in hometown have the highest level of integration intention, followed by those without any land, those with both types of land, and finally those with homestead land only. Such findings suggest that the possession of farmland tends to boost rural migrants’ integration intention while the possession of homestead land appears to have a depressing effect. However, the depressing effect of homestead land on average dominates the boosting effect of farmland. Further analysis shows that, the positive effect of farmland is strengthened when the asset function of contracted farmland is strong, while the negative effect of homestead land is reduced when migrants have purchased housing in the host cities. The paper also identities the mediating effect of local social security insurance in the impacts of hometown landholding on rural migrants’ integration intentions as well as the heterogeneity of such impacts across age-cohorts and subgroups associated with different connection levels to hometowns.