What Drives Migrants Back to Set up Firms?Return-home Entrepreneurial Intention of Rural Migrant Workers in China

The extant literature on international immigrants has discussed migrants’entrepreneurial activities in the context of Western countries but has paid little attention to return-home entrepreneurial intention(RHEI).Rural migrant workers(RMWs)in China,who used to promote rural development by remittances and were characterized by similarities with early international migrants,have gradually returned to their hometowns to initiate entrepreneurial activities.Based on the structured questionnaire conducted in 2015 and 2020in Anhui Province,China,this article combines the concept of mixed embeddedness with the idea of double-layered embeddedness and analyzes the impacts of the social,economic and institutional context in RMWs’hometowns and migration destinations on RMWs’RHEI by using binary logistic regression.The article shows that the social,economic,and institutional environments of RMWs’hometowns and migration destinations have effects on their RHEI.The embeddedness in the economic and informal institutional context in RMWs’RHEI is even more important than personal characteristics.Compared with migration destinations,RMWs’hometowns exert a more influential effect on their RHEI.However,that does not mean that the role of migration destinations can be undervalued.Actually,the better the social,economic,and institutional environments of migration destinations RMWs moved into is,the higher entrepreneurial intention they will have after returning to their hometowns.The article proposes a modified framework in combination of mixed embeddedness with double-layer embeddedness and proves that it is suitable for analyzing RMWs’RHEI.The framework has important implications for strengthening China’s RMWs to return home to start their own businesses.

A discourse on creating and rendering educational and cultural enrichment services to rural migrant workers by public libraries

As far as China's enormous success in her economic reforms and development is concerned,Chinese rural migrant workers indeed have had their biggest share of contributions.Yet ironically in return,they have only received a disproportionate meager share of benefit rewards.These people represent a huge economically deprived group at the bottom of the social totem pole in China's metropolises.On the whole as a social group,their educational attainment is relatively low as compared to their average urban coworkers.As such being the case,their rights to access some of the cost-free cultural and educational enrichment programs in the society are limited and not always assured.Nevertheless and in general speaking,they manifest a strong and consistent desire to acquire all sorts of new and practical knowledge by means of accessing the resources and facilities of their local public libraries.It is suggested in this paper that public libraries are in a good position to give strong support to the central government's strategic planning for the development of a public culture service systema).In implementing such a government initiative with an unswerving purpose of advancing social justice and equality,public libraries should strife to provide as many as possible their library services at no cost to the public,especially to those socially deprived rural migrant workers.

Young Women Rural Migrant Workers in China’s West: Benefits of Schooling?

This paper explores the association of rural schooling with empowerment of female rural migrant workers in remote Western China.It asks what school-related intrinsic and instrumental capabilities enhanced their urban lives and their role as“drivers for development”in urbanizing China.The analysis of a long-term observational study of the females of one cluster of villages shows that recently-arrived(2015)young rural new-migrant workers manifested enhanced capabilities associated with their schooling in four dimensions of social freedoms:protective security against early arranged marriage,enhanced occupational opportunity,constructive social arrangements founded in rural identity,and cognitive and aspirational capabilities.Lower educational attainment and achievement are associated with fewer and weaker empowerment capabilities across all dimensions.Political empowerment capabilities in the sense of civil rights and entitlements have no foundation in earlier education and are lacking in their urban lives.However,a sense of“voice”is beginning to take hold among young rural migrant women.Taking a female-centric capability perspective uncovers beneficial aspects of internal migration,contributing to a more holistically theorized understanding of associated social changes.

The process and approach for the“citizenization”of Chinese rural migrant populations

China has a large rural migrant population,the country’s urbanization rate is low,and the cost of urbanization is high.These factors make the promotion of urbanization in China a long,arduous,and expensive task.By identifying and defining key elements of China’s urbanization transformation,this paper calculates the degree of China’s current transformation and proposes an approach based on systemic data to facilitate the continued process of transforming rural populations into citizens with full urban residential rights,herein referred to as“citizenization.”This paper finds that only about 40%of rural migrants had transformed into urban residents in 2011,and this share remained stagnant in 2012.Meanwhile,according to the sixth demographic census,the incomplete urbanization rate-calculated based on the difference between the share of the registered non-agriculture population as a percentage of the total population and the share of permanent urban residents-reached 23 percentage points.This thesis argues that it is necessary to advance the transformation process in a steady,stage-by-stage manner,including by carrying out multi-pronged efforts in various fields at various levels,and establishing a diversified cost-sharing mechanism,so as to achieve higher-quality,rational urbanization in China.