Should I stay or should I go? Untangling the determinants of urban-rural migration in China

The Chinese government’s response to rural poverty, increasing inequality, and its changing role in the global order is ‘rural revitalisation’, a policy direction which relies on educated individuals moving from cities to the countryside to engage in entrepreneurship and innovative governance. In this paper I test the feasibility of this reverse urbanisation using survey data from 110 highly educated urban residents across China. Asking respondents to self-report their likelihood of relocating to a rural area and their potential motivations for this, I find that pressing issue motivations, such as job scarcity or obligations to family care, are significant predictors of relocation desire. In contrast, long-term considerations, such as rural and urban lifestyles, do not display any significant effect. The insight that educated individuals are unlikely to relocate for all but the most immediate reasons raises doubts about the effectiveness of current relocation incentives presented by the Chinese government and their rural revitalisation project.