Place of origin, education, and the career development plights of the suburban migrant workers in Zhejiang manufacturing industry

Abstract

China’s rapid urbanization over the past three decades has created a multifaceted social-spatial dynamic on the urban fringe – urbanized suburbs, wherein an influx of migrants juxtaposed with an outflow of the local population. Against this background, the extant migrant studies in China mainly focus on rural and urban migration, yet suburban migrants are relatively underrepresented. Suburban migrants have roots in the built-up urban, and they designate rural residents who have been resettled during the urbanization process and subsequently moved into other cities to live and work. As the complexities of governmental schemes, their household registrations ( hukou) may or may not be changed from rural to urban during neighborhood redevelopment. In migrant studies that use rural-urban hukou as a dichotomous statistical classification, their socio-demographic characteristics as a sample group are hard to capture. This paper examines the career development of suburban migrants in the manufacturing industry in Zhejiang China, where migrant workers are concentrated. It compares the career development of migrant workers from rural, suburban, and urban areas on four dimensions – unemployment risk, occupational skill level, income level, and occupational position. The study of 553 intra-provincial migrant workers finds that suburban migrants encountered comparable challenges in their career development as rural migrants did. Furthermore, the level of education attained by individuals has a noteworthy mediating effect, contributing to the disparities observed across urban, suburban, and rural groups. The gap in career development between suburban migrants and their urban counterparts – even in Zhejiang, a province with the smallest economic gap between urban and rural development in China and was relatively less impacted by the epidemic outbreak – is still significant. This research aims to enrich scholarly dialogues surrounding the field of migrant studies and the intricate socio-spatial dynamics prevalent within Chinese suburban areas.