The changing geography of interprovincial migration in China: history and new trends

This paper elucidates how the geography of interprovincial migration in China has evolved with the country’s structural changes over the past 35 years and explores how this geography has developed in the past decade. In synthesizing existing literature, we demonstrate that the coast-inland migration discrepancy emerged in the late 1980s when migration control was relaxed and a coastal development strategy was adopted, reinforced in the 1990s when globalization, marketization, and decentralization unfolded and interprovincial economic disparities increased, and stabilized in the 2000s when the growth of interprovincial economic disparities came to a halt with the country’s shift to a coordinated regional development strategy. Using 2020 Census data, the geography is revealed to have become less skewed between 2010 and 2020, driven primarily by two groups of provinces. One group includes five southeast coastal provinces and two coastal municipalities; the other includes nine southern inland provinces. The southern inland-coast migration flows, which had been growing prior to 2010, have decreased between 2010 and 2020, whereas counterflows have increased greatly. These emerging trends can be attributed to several significant transformations in China’s demography and economic landscape, including the aging of a large number of first-generation migrants, a declining workforce, the relocation of manufacturing industries, and people’s increasing emphasis on public services, the access to which are often tied to the hukou place. Interprovincial migration in China has reached a turning point in terms of geographic changes. The policies on this migration and the geographical framework for analyzing it may need updating.