Against the backdrop of an increasingly advanced market economy, property-oriented migration from Northwest China to Chengdu has intensified, giving rise to "migratory bird-style" mutually embedded communities characterized by a dual nature of mobility and sedentariness. Adopting a seasonal mobility pattern of "wintering in Chengdu and spending summer in the Qinghai,"migrants integrate dual-city resources through a strategy of retaining household registration (hukou) while purchasing property.This process evolves through distinct stages—tentative property purchase, community integration with cross-ethnic interaction, family-based migration with identity reconstruction, and finally, chain migration fostering ethnic intermingling. As migrants engage in non-competitive interactions and cultivate shared interests within community practices, regional identifications gradually transcend ethnic boundaries to form functional communities, thereby accelerating ethnic interaction, exchange, and integration. This migration pattern represents a survival strategy driven by market-based competition for high-quality living resources. By leveraging material mutual embedding to drive psychological identity transformation, it expands the theoretical dimensions of migration studies and offers a bottom-up practical paradigm for forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation.
Zeyi et al. (2025) studied this question.