Social Integration of Rural-Urban Migrants in China: Current Status, Determinants and Consequences

This book focuses on rural-urban migrants in China. They are one of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in the country but are essential to the country's industrialization and urbanization. Integration of these migrants into urban societies is an urgent issue facing Chinese policy makers. The book provides an updated, systematic, empirically rich, and multifaceted analysis of migrant integration, its determinants and consequences in China. It integrates insights from the perspective of sociology, population studies, social psychology, and public health to help us understand how and why migrants integrate, the role of migrant networks in social integration, and the relationship between integration of migrants and their mental health and settlement intentions.

Readership: Academics, undergraduate and graduate students, professionals and policy makers interested in social integration of rural-urban migrant workers in China, and China's modernization.

Zhongshan Yue, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Xi'an Jiaotong University. He has a BSc and a PhD from the School of Management, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. He had been a visiting scholar at the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, Stanford University. Since 2013, he has worked on migrant integration and related policies with the Department of Service and Management of Migrant Population, National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People's Republic of China. His research areas include migrant integration, migration policies, and social network analysis. He published a first-authored Chinese book titled Social Integration of Rural-Urban Migrants in 2012. He is the co-first author of the Urban Studies paper, "The Role of Social Networks in the Integration of Chinese Rural-Urban Migrants: A Migrant-Resident Tie Perspective", and the Environment and Planning A paper, "Floating Choices: A Generational Perspective on Intentions of Rural-urban Migrants in China".

Shuzhuo Li, PhD, is Changjiang Professor of Population Studies, Director of the Institute for Population and Development Studies, Co-director of the Center for Aging and Health Research, School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Co-director of Shaanxi Provincial Laboratory for Population and Development Research, and consulting professor at the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies, Stanford University. He received his PhD in System Engineering in 1991 from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China. He also studied and worked at Princeton University, Harvard University and Stanford University. He is lead professor of "Gender Imbalance and Public Security" in the "Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in Universities" of Ministry of Education of China, lead consultant for the National Office of Care for Girls Campaign China, member of the Public Policy Committee of the National Health and Family Planning Commission of China, member of the Social Sciences Committee of Ministry of Education of China. His research is focused on population and social development as well as public policies in contemporary transitional China. He has published numerous papers and books, and has won many honors and prizes, including the Fudan Management Award in 2011.

Marcus W Feldman, PhD, is the Wohlford Professor of Biology at Stanford University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He directs the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies and is Co-director of Stanford's Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Feldman's specific areas of research include the evolution of complex genetic systems that can undergo both natural selection and recombination, the evolution of modern humans using models for the dynamics of molecular polymorphisms, especially DNA variants, cultural evolution, and the evolution of learning as one interface between modern methods in artificial intelligence and models of biological processes, including communication. He has collaborated for the past 23 years with demographers from Xi'an Jiaotong University on problems of son-preference and rural-urban migration. He is the author of more than 500 scientific papers and 10 books on evolution, ecology, mathematical biology, and demography, adding significantly to the greater database over the years. In 2003 his work received the "Paper of the Year" award for biomedical science from The Lancet.