Rural-urban migration in China: from poverty alleviation to sons’ marriage

Since the 1980s, many rural Chinese have worked in cities in order to lift their households out of poverty. Yet, their needs and aspirations are not static and have evolved over the past four decades. In this paper, we use household and livelihood approaches to focus on people’s resources, strategies and desired outcomes. Based on narratives and stories of four Sichuan households who were interviewed multiple times between 1995 and 2024, we identify three themes and phases. First, migrant work helped rural Chinese with sustenance and basic needs like children’s schooling and having a reasonable shelter. In subsequent decades, rural households improved their standard of living via migrant work. A more recent need was to increase sons’ competitiveness in the marriage market, made fierce by the high sex ratio and underscoring the downward flow of resources from parents to children. These changes suggest that migration theories should consider the values and understandings, customs, norms and identities that give meaning to people, as well as the policy, structural, social and cultural contexts that complicate the assumption of economic calculus and rationality.