Beyond individualism: Social integration, family responsibilities, and the return intentions of rural migrants in urban China

China's rapid urbanization and changing urban labor markets have sparked fresh concerns about the emerging “returning-home tide” among rural migrant workers. Existing explanations often rely on an individualistic narrative of “ losers return, winners stay ”, paying limited attention to how family responsibilities are negotiated within migrant households. This study re-examines the association between social integration, particularly migrants' social and emotional connectedness in destination cities, and return intentions, while probing whether different directions of subjective family responsibilities moderate this association. Using original survey data from rural migrants across 25 Chinese cities, our analysis shows that higher social integration was associated with lower relative risks of returning to the countryside ( RRR = 0.722), to a nearby town or county ( RRR = 0.487), and to the home city ( RRR = 0.506), compared with remaining in the destination city. Notably, this association varies across family responsibility orientations. Stronger family-centered and child-related responsibilities are associated with a stronger negative integration-return relationship, suggesting that family commitments do not necessarily draw migrants back but may also coexist with continued urban settlement. These patterns are distinctly gendered: women's return intentions are more closely related to vertical responsibilities toward parents and children, whereas men's are more associated with horizontal gender-role norms related to breadwinning. These differences are particularly evident among migrants with daughters, highlighting the role of gendered expectations across generations. Our findings extend the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM) by challenging the assumption of the household as a homogeneous decision-making unit and showing that family responsibilities affect the integration-return association differently across relational orientations and gender lines. These insights call for migration policies that recognize the diverse family contexts underlying migrants' decisions rather than focusing solely on individual characteristics.