Abstract

1. Introduction
Since the 1980s, the rapid growth of labor demand in urban China has induced massive migration from rural to urban areas, and the inequality between urban residents and rural migrants has led to a serious social concern. The problem is exacerbated by the household registration system called ''hukou.'' In particular, the government grants different social benefits to families that hold an urban hukou and families that still hold a rural hukou, even if both live in the same city. 2 In addition, a substantial literature has shown that hukou status has enlarged the wage inequality and occupational segregation between urban workers and rural-to-urban migrant workers who do not hold an urban hukou (Liu, 2005; Lu and Song, 2006; Meng and Zhang, 2001). To facilitate the migration of farmers to urban areas, the government began to grant permissions for individuals to live and work outside of their places of hukou registration in the 1980s. Removing the migration restriction increased the number of these temporary migrants sharply: the 2000 Census showed that more than 75 percent³ of the internal migrants in China were temporary, compared to 25 percent who were permanent migrants who transferred their hukou registration to the migration destination (Liang and Ma, 2004). Additionally, a sequence of hukou policy reforms, which took place during the 1980s and 1990s, enabled a greater number of rural migrants to obtain permanent urban hukou than before. 4 According to Deng and Gustaffson (2006), rural-born permanent urban migrants made up 20.3 percent of China’s urban populations in 2002. Nevertheless, the growing population of permanent rural migrants, as well as how these migrants assimilate into the urban labor market, have been largely ignored in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to examine the occupational attainment and job mobility of permanent rural-to-urban migrants who successfully obtained a local urban hukou . We specifically compared these rural-to-urban migrants with urban-to-urban migrants who were born with a hukou from a city other than where they resided at t he time of data collection. 5 Both groups were permanent migrants who obtained a hukou registration in the destination city. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the difference in the occupational attainment between permanent rural-to-urban migrants and permanent urban-to-urban migrants. Moreover, the urban-to-urban migrants are a better comparison group for the rural-to-urban migrants than urban local residents because they are both "outsiders." Rural-to-urban and urban- to-urban migrants differ in their original hukou type, but they both face high job-search costs and a segregated labor market that favors local urban residents, especially given the reform of state- owned enterprises, in which labor policy was changed to protect local laid-off workers (Cai and Wang, 2007; Zhang, 2010). The comparison will shed light on whether an individual’s original hukou type might affect the rate of assimilation in urban areas. We focus on occupational-prestige scores 6 and job mobility. Specifically, we construct occupational-prestige scores based on the average educational attainment of workers employed in each occupation to capture additional, less tangible job features such as welfare and social status. Using retrospective employment and migration histories from the 2003 wave of the Chinese General Social Survey, we construct panel data of occupational-prestige scores7 and break down the variance between rural- and urban-born migrants into components attributable to differences in observable characteristics and the remaining unexplained portion of the variance. Furthermore, we e explore migrants’ job mobility to understand the evolution of their performance and opportunities in the urban labor market. We consider within-work-unit and between-work- unit job changes for both groups and associate them with the changes in the occupational- prestige scores. The main finding of the paper is that the gap in occupational-prestige scores between rural migrants and urban migrants becomes very small and statistically insignificant after we control for the observed characteristics including gender, educational attainment, family background and the occupational-prestige score of premigration jobs. 8 This reveals a similar integration speed for both rural and urban migrants with the same predetermined characteristics. Although we do not observe any changes in the gap of occupational-prestige scores within the first ten years after migration, the job mobility of rural migrants is higher than that of urban migrants. We find that rural migrants are more likely to experience job promotions to different work units, whereas urban migrants are more likely to be promoted within the same work unit. These growth trajectories might be the cause of higher mobility of rural migrants. The paper is arranged as follows. The next section summarizes the relevant literature. We describe our data in section 3 and our empirical strategies in section 4. Section 5 reports the main findings, and section 6 concludes with policy implications.
2. Institutional Background and Relevant Literature
2.1. A brief overview on hukou and internal migration
The hukou system in China, which was established in the late 1950s, requires every member of the household to register at t the local authority of their permanent residence (Chan and Buckingham, 2008). For several decades the system place strict limitations on migration, but these restrictions were later relaxed in the late 1970s. The dual classification of hukou registration is based on both the regular residence and the status (i.e., hukou site and hukou type; Chan and Buckingham, 2008; Chan and Zhang, 1999). The type can be either agricultural or nonagricultural. Agricultural hukou holders mostly reside in rural areas; therefore, they are also known as rural hukou holders. Nonagricultural hukou holders are often called urban hukou holders because they mostly reside in urban areas. Very limited state socioeconomic benefits were given to the rural hukou population, and the state utilized the hukou system to impose significant limits on Chinese citizens’ geographical mobility (Zhao and Liu, 1997). Because hukou was tied to access to food, education, health services, and other basic necessities in the system's early years, it was very rare or even impossible for people to live in a place outside of their hukou registration (Fan, 2002a) until the hukou reform in the late 1970s. Rural-to-urban status transfer (i.e., changing one's rural hukou status to urban status; known as nong-zhuan-fei in Chinese) entails state approval with various restrictions (Chan and Buckingham, 2008), and this process was more difficult to navigate before the late 1970s. As a result, there was very little labor mobility during this time. The hukou system was reformed several times over the following decades to help the country meet the rapidly increasing labor demand in urban cities due to the economic reforms in the late 1970s. On the one hand, the rural-to-urban transfer process was simplified and eased. On the other hand, the introduction of national ID cards and temporary residence permits in the mid- 1980s induced a new wave of internal migrants (Fan, 2002a) who no longer need to register their hukou to the area where they work or live. These non-hukou migrants are temporary migrants without local household registration status. 9 In contrast, migrants who transfer their hukou to a local authority of the migration destination are called hukou migrants or permanent migrants. The growth of rural-to-urban migrants, both temporary and permanent, has been tremendous: the number grew from 8.9 million in 1989 (Zhao, 2005) to 79.7 million in 2005 (Gagnon et al., 2009). Urban-to-urban migrants comprise the second-largest group of internal migrants in China: they accounted for 4.5 percent of the total population in 2005 (Gagnon et al., 2009), which is only 1.6 percent less than the rural-to-urban migrants. 2.2. Literature on the occupational attainment of rural migrants Most of the existing literature on China’s internal migration has focused on the floating population, especially temporary rural-to-urban migrants. These studies usually use local urban residents or workers as a comparison group for temporary rural migrants. Researchers have focused extensively on the earning differentials between the two groups, including the determinants of selection into different occupational sectors. Regardless of data differences (Zhao, 2005), these existing studies establish that wage inequality between the two groups is mainly due to the low educational attainment among the rural population and low returns to education in the rural labor market (Liu, 2005; Lu and Song 2006). Moreover, the unexplained wage gap between rural migrants and urban residents might be attributed to the labor market’s discrimination in favor of urban hukou holders and against rural migrants (Lu and Song, 2006; Meng and Zhang, 2001). 10 For example, Meng and Zhang (2001) find that discrimination within occupations can explain about 82 percent of the hourly wage differential between urban and rural migrant workers. Studies on the determinants of selection into different occupational sectors (Meng and Zhang, 2001; Demurger et al., 2009; Gagnon et al., 2009) have shown that both education and experience play an important role in the occupational segregation between rural migrants and urban residents. 11 Nonetheless. De Brauw and Giles (2006) point out that many cities have reserved some occupational categories for registered urban residents and that there is a segregation of rural residents into unskilled service and construction sectors or other relatively low-skilled jobs that are unwanted by the urban residents. Gagnon et al. (2009) first point out the substantial differences in comparing the rural migrants, urban migrants, and urban residents by decomposing the migration effect and hukou effect. Using Oaxaca-Blinder’s decomposition, the authors find that 40 percent of the observed wage gap between rural and urban migrants might be due to hukou status. They also compare urban migrants with urban residents and find a large migration premium. Nevertheless, the migrants, in particular the rural migrants, were discriminated against in sector choice compared to the urban residents; specifically, formal sectors were less likely to employ rural migrants, which excluded them from accessing health and educational services. However, in their study, Gagnon et al. (2009) did not consider the permanent rural-to-urban migrants who obtained an urban hukou. Therefore, our paper complements Gagnon et al.’s (2009) study by comparing the permanent rural migrants with urban migrants to understand the assimilation of rural migrants into the urban labor market. Another paper that is closely related to ours is Deng and Gustafsson’s (2006) study, which is one of the few studies that examines permanent migrants. Combining several household surveys, the authors investigate the determinants of permanent migration and the economic benefits of migration. To study the economic assimilation of permanent rural migrants, they compare them with local-born urban workers as does most of the other literature. They run regressions on earnings and control for observed characteristics such as gender, marital status, age, and ethnicity. For rural migrants, they also control for the years since receiving an urban hukou. Their results show that the permanent rural migrants who received their urban hukou before age 25 are well integrated economically in their place of destination. Overall, they actually receive higher earnings than the local-born urban residents. Though the sample size of our data is smaller than Deng and Gustafsson's (2006), its retrospective information enables us to examine the job trajectories of the permanent migrants. Another difference between the current paper and Deng and Gustafsson’s (2006) study is that we limit our sample to those who migrated in the 1980s or later in order to exclude positively selected rural migrants who migrated for special policy reasons. 12 Few studies show empirical evidence on the job mobility of rural migrants. Though the reform of state-owned enterprises in the late 1980s has increased the mobility of urban workers, rural migrants have remained more mobile even after controlling for their demographic characteristics (Knight and Yueh, 2004). On the contrary, Zhang (2010) argues that temporary migrants have longer job durations than local urban workers and only start to change jobs more often after they have stayed in their destination city for some time. However, due to data limitations, Zhang (2010) was not able to distinguish between temporary urban migrants and temporary rural migrants. We find that the permanent rural migrants tend to have higher mobility than permanent urban migrants. In this sense, the current paper complements the study by Knight and Yueh (2004), which compares temporary rural migrants with local residents and finds a higher turnover rate for the former group. Moreover, we distinguish between internal job mobility (i.e., within-work-unit job changes and promotions) and external job mobility (i.e., between-work-unit job changes and promotions) and discuss the variations and potential implications for rural and urban migrants.
3. Data
The data used in this paper come from the CGSS (2003). The 2003 CGSS contains 5,900 urban households in more than 100 counties and districts in 26 provinces, as well as the cities of Beijing and Chongqing and four independently administered municipal districts. 13 Besides demographic information such as age, sex, education, family background, and household registration status (i.e., hukou ), the CGSS 2003 provides each respondent's employment history from the first to the current job. The data include details on the nature of employment, including three-digit occupation codes, management level, professional title, work-unit type, rank of the departmental supervisor for the work unit, job-related housing and medical benefits, and so forth. Our main dependent variable is the occupational-prestige score. It is the z-score of the average educational attainment of workers within each occupation normalized by the average educational attainment of all workers in the sample. 14 A more detailed process is described in the appendix. Although our main analysis is based on the occupational-prestige score, we also examine job mobility. We eexploit rich information on work units and job ranks to capture upward job moves that are independent of occupational changes. Specifically, we count the number of job changes, both including and excluding job reassignment within the same work unit, and moves to better jobs in terms of the characteristics of the work units and job ranks. The construction is also described in the appendix. In addition, we use personal income in 2002 as another supplemental variable to capture the gaps between urban and rural migrants that are not reflected by the occupational-prestige score. We constructed a panel dataset from the retrospective information on hukou status changes, migration, education, and job histories. We set the time window as the period from 1979 to 2003 to exclude migrations due to special policy reasons such as "up to the mountain, down to the village.”¹5 We further limit our sample to rural-to-urban migrants (hereafter, rural migrants) and urban-to-urban migrants (hereafter, urban migrants). Rural migrants are migrants from a rural area who reported that they had a rural hukou when they were born. 16 Urban migrants are migrants from an urban area 17 who were born with an urban hukou . Lastly, we restrict our sample to those who have valid information for all variables included in the regression analysis. Such variables include educational background, parental information, and jobs held in the year prior to the migration. Consequently, this limits our sample to those who had a job both before and after migration. Details are presented in the appendix (table 1, panel A). The final sample consists of 433 urban-to-urban migration spells and 208 rural-to-urban migration spells. Panel A of table 1 illustrates summary statistics of these two groups. Although only one rural migrant experienced rural-to-urban migration twice, a nonnegligible fraction of urban migrants migrated more than once. The t-test shows that differences between the two groups are statistically significant in all demographic variables except for the year of migration and percentage of female. On average, the rural migrants in the sample are less educated than the urban migrants; specifically, about 65 percent of the rural migrants are at or below the middle school level, whereas about 60 percent of the urban migrants are at the high school level or above. 18 Also, the parents of rural migrants are less educated than those of urban migrants. The occupations of the rural migrants’ fathers were less prestigious than those of urban migrants. Furthermore, the rural migrants themselves held less prestigious jobs prior to migration than the urban migrants. These variables indicate that the rural migrants have a lower socioeconomic background than the urban migrants. It is worth noting that our sample of rural migrants is, on average, more educated than the general population of China. According to the 1-percent sample survey of the Chinese population in 2000, the educational distribution of the population aged 50 to 54 (the cohort that corresponds to the mean and majority of our sample), was as follows: 13.7 percent no schooling, 43.14 percent primary school, 30.38 percent middle school, 9.15 percent senior high school, 2.71 percent associate's degree; 0.86 percent university, 0.05 percent graduate students. This is probably because there is a large percentage of rural population in China, who are generally less educated. At the same time, our sample is less educated than the data used by Deng and Gustafsson (2006). 19 Because their sample is much older than ours, it is likely to include individuals who had migrated to cities before the hukou relaxation policy. However, older samples may create a selection bias because early hukou policy was so strict that only highly skilled and highly educated individuals tended to migrate, usually in response to government efforts to relocate personnel. We limit our data to individuals who migrated in the 1980s or later to avoid this potential selection bias. Panel B of table 1 presents the occupational-prestige scores in each year since migration. The negative scores (measured by the normalized mean education level) for rural migrants reveal that rural migrants are taking less prestigious jobs; specifically, their occupational-prestige scores are lower than the general population’s average by around 26 to 33 percent of one standard deviation. The sample's urban migrants tend to take jobs with relatively high prestige—about 13 percent to 18 percent of one standard deviation higher than the population average. The table also shows little variation over time in the average occupational-prestige scores in the first ten years after migration for both rural and urban migrants. Panel C of table 1 presents the number of job changes and upward moves within and across work units. A sizeable proportion of rural and urban migrants changed jobs and work units within the first ten years after their migration. In the sample, the rural migrants are more mobile than urban migrants. Moreover, rural migrants are more likely to move to a better job in a different work unit than urban migrants. Finally, the average personal income in 2002 was 14,403 Yuan for urban migrants and 10,952 Yuan for rural migrants. Before carrying out the main analysis on the labor-market performance of the rural migrants and urban migrants, we compare their occupational-prestige scores with those of local urban residents of the same age and gender. 20 Figure 1 illustrates how the difference in the occupational-prestige score from local urban residents evolves over time for rural and urban migrants. 21 We control for age, age-squared, and gender, and thus the graph represents the differences between migrants and local residents with the same age and gender. We see that the urban migrants are likely to hold jobs with more occupational prestige than the local urban residents, especially in the first few years after migration. This may be due to the fact that urban migrants have a higher education than urban residents who have never migrated. 22 Other studies also find that urban migrants have a higher income level despite the limited choices of work sectors compared to the local residents (Gagnon et al., 2009). As expected, rural migrants hold jobs with much lower occupational prestige than the local urban residents. Section 5 investigates how much of this gap can be explained by differences in observed human capital such as education and premigration job experience.
4. Empirical Model
To measure the gap between urban and rural migrants, we estimate the following regression: 23 Y it = α + βR i + θ'X it + ε it ,
where y tt represents the occupational-prestige score for individual i in year t , and R i is a dummy variable for rural migrant. X i  is a vector of control variables, to which we add variables gradually. ε it represents the remaining error, which can be correlated within an individual. We cluster our standard errors by the individual. We begin by including only age, age-squared, and sex in X it to examine the gap between urban and rural migrants without controlling for any differences in skill level. Then we add the migrant’s own educational background and observe how β changes. Our hypothesis is that controlling for educational qualification will reduce the gap between the two types of migrants. To explore the role of family background in explaining the gap in the outcome variable, we add parents’ years of schooling and father’s occupational-prestige score from the year when the migrant was 18 years old. Lastly, we add the occupational-prestige score of the last job prior to migration as a proxy for job experience accumulated before migration. In order to allow β and θ to vary with years after migration, we estimate equation (1) separately for those in the first to third year after migration, the fourth to sixth year, and the seventh to ninth year. Furthermore, to explore the change of β year by year, we estimate the following regression:
and plot the gap in each year subsequent to migration. D k it is a dummy variable that takes the value of 1 if year t is the k th year after migration for migrant i. β+γ k is the gap between rural and urban migrants in the k th year after migration for k ≥ 2, and β is the gap for k = 1. As an additional test, we estimate equations (1) and (2) separately for migrants with different educational levels. We further explore the job mobility of rural migrants compared to urban migrants by estimating an equation similar to equation (1), except that the sample is collapsed into the person level instead of the person-year level: Y i = α + βR i + θ' X i + ε i
The dependent variable Y represents the following four measures of job mobility, all measured in the first ten years after migration: (a) number of job changes, including job transfer within a work unit; (b) number of work unit changes; (c) number of within-work-unit job promotions; and (d) number of upward moves across work units. Finally, we examine the gap in personal income in 2002 between urban and rural migrants. The equation we estimate is the same as equation (3), except that the dependent variable is personal income in 2002 and the sample is limited to those who had a nonzero income in 2002.
5. Findings
5.1. Occupational Prestige Score
Table 2 presents the estimated coefficients of the dummy for rural migrants in equation (1). Column 1 includes age, age-squared, and sex in the covariates. Column 2 adds education dummies. Column 3 adds parent’s education and father’s occupational-prestige score. Column 4 adds the occupational-prestige score of the premigration job. Each row corresponds to a separate regression with a subsample divided by years since migration. First, we see that adding controls for education substantially narrowed the gap in occupational-prestige scores between rural and urban migrants. For example, in the first three years after migration, the gap is as large as 45 percent of one standard deviation of the scores in the population when holding only age and gender constant, but the gap shrinks to 23 percent when controlling for education. On the other hand, controlling for parental background does not seem to narrow the gap after we control for age, gender and education differences. Rural migrants still hold less prestigious jobs than urban migrants, and the difference is statistically significant. However, with controls for the occupational-prestige score of the last premigration job, the gap in postmigration occupational prestige between rural and urban migrants is no longer statistically significant. This finding implies that the observed gaps between rural and urban migrants are likely to be attributed to the differences in their human-capital accumulation prior to migration rather than some sort of discrimination against rural-born migrants who otherwise have the same human capital as their urban-born counterparts. Figure 2 plots the estimated gap between rural and urban migrants in each year after migration from equation (2). The results confirm the observations from table 2. Furthermore, the changes in the occupational-attainment gap between these two groups does not seem to change over time in all specifications. This stability of the gap over time suggests that something that determines the labor-market outcomes at t the time of migration (in this case, the occupational- prestige score) continues to influence the occupational attainment of rural and urban migrants over their lifecycles. Such determinants also likely include educational attainment and job experience before migration because the gap between the two groups shrinks substantially after controlling for these variables. So, does the gap vary by the educational qualification of the migrants? We run the regression separately for each educational level. Table 3 (panels A-D) and figures 3A-D show the gaps in occupational-prestige scores between rural and urban migrants for four subgroups categorized by educational background. Like table 2 and figure 2, we gradually add explanatory variables such as parental characteristics and the occupational-prestige score of premigration jobs. Except for those with post high-school education, rural migrants are taking up jobs with a lower prestige score than urban migrants. Yet, after controlling for the occupational-prestige score of premigration jobs, the gaps are no longer statistically significant, except for the least educated group. In contrast, the gap is positive for migrants with more than a high school education. This means that the rural migrants with more than a high school education hold jobs with more occupational prestige than urban migrants with the same level of education. Furthermore, the gap has an upward slope, which suggests that the highly educated rural migrants do better the longer they stay in the urban labor market. Panel D of table 3 shows that the effect is substantial in size: being a rural migrant is associated with a higher occupational-prestige score (about 30 percent of one standard deviation higher), holding other observed characteristics constant. It is interesting to note that the level of the gap is smaller for middle school graduates than that for high school graduates. The evidence is consistent with the argument by De Brauw and Giles (2006) that the career prospects of high-school graduates in rural areas might not be better (or might even be worse) than rural individuals with less education. We also explore the gap by migration destination. The results are presented in appendix table 4, panel A. We do not observe statistically significant differences for those who migrated into small towns; however, the gap between rural migrants and urban migrants remains negative for those who migrated into counties and other large cities (without controlling for the occupational-prestige score of the premigration job). The gap gradually reduces along with the length of stay in large cities (panel C). The gap decreases even further and becomes positive for migrants who moved to large cities once we control for the premigration occupational-prestige score, although these trends are not statistically significant.
5.2  Job Mobility
As already indicated by panel C in table 1, rural migrants tend to change jobs more frequently than urban migrants. To examine whether such differences in job mobility can also be attributed to the differences in observed characteristics, we estimate equation (3) with the following dependent variables: number of job changes, including job transfer within a work-unit; number of work-unit changes; number of within-work-unit job promotions; and number of upward moves between work-units. Because we define an upward change on the basis of work- unit type and job rank, the concept can capture some features associated with the job that are not reflected in the occupational-prestige score. Table 4 presents the estimated coefficients of the dummy variable for rural migrants. The first two rows show that rural migrants are more mobile than urban migrants, even after controlling for the occupational-prestige score of premigration jobs. This may be because, as Li (2008) argues, many rural migrants cannot afford to be unemployed for a long time. Another potential cause of the high mobility of rural migrants is their concentration in highly competitive, unskilled occupations. The third row shows negative coefficients of the rural-migrants dummy variable. In particular, the findings reveal that rural migrants are less likely than urban migrants to be promoted within work-units, although the estimates are not statistically significant. In contrast, the fourth row shows that rural migrants are more likely to move to better jobs between work- units. It is true that a part of this difference is spurious because rural migrants are more likely to move in general. 24 However, this potential spurious difference cannot explain all of the variation in the finding. A back-of-envelope calculation of the data (shown in panel C of table 1 suggests that the probability of a between-unit job change being an upward move is 18 percent for rural migrants but just 10 percent for urban migrants. Table 4 suggests that these differences are not likely to be attributed to the observed characteristics included in the fourth column. One possible explanation comes from Li (2008)'s argument that rural migrants lack the full information about the nature of their jobs and that rural migrants' first job in an urban labor market serve as a pilot for them to progress and find a better job (with higher pay) later.
5.3 Income in 2002
Finally, we estimate the differences in personal income in 2002 between urban and rural migrants. The results for personal income (table 5) are consistent with the basic observations from the occupational-prestige scores (table 2): the gap becomes smaller and statistically insignificant when we add the prestige score of premigration jobs and other explanatory variables.
6. Concluding Remarks
China's internal migration has been growing rapidly with the country's economic development in recent years. A substantial amount of research has been conducted on the labor- market performance of temporary migrants, especially temporary rural-to-urban migrants. However, very little empirical work has examined permanent rural migrants, who eventually transferred their rural hukou status to an urban status. Moreover, most of the earlier studies on rural migrants have compared them with urban local residents, who are generally in a segmented labor market due to factors such as local labor-protection policies. We utilize the retrospective information on employment and migration from the 2003 China General Social Survey to analyze the labor market performance of permanent rural migrants and permanent urban migrants. We measure the occupational attainment by an education-based index that reflects occupational prestige. Furthermore, we explore job mobility within and between work-units. Our results suggest that the observed inequality between permanent rural and urban migrants in occupational attainment can be attributed to differences in characteristics predetermined by the time of migration. In fact, after controlling for characteristics of one's premigration job, the gap between rural and urban migrants is no longer statistically significant, and in some cases the effect even becomes positive (although not significant). Therefore, encouraging human-capital investment in rural areas could be an effective policy intervention to lessen the economic disparities between rural-born permanent migrants and their urban-born peers (Lu and Song, 2006). Even though the analysis on the occupational-prestige score reveals a similar integration speed for rural and urban migrants in the labor market, we find that rural migrants experience higher job mobility. Rural migrants are more likely to move upward in a state-owned sector, obtaining more job autonomy (e.g., increased supervisory role at the job) or receiving more medical and housing benefits. However, rural migrants tend to have fewer opportunities than urban migrants for job promotion within work units, although the finding is not statistically significant. Although we cannot pin down where this difference comes from, it is plausible that rural migrants try to achieve better job outcomes through continued efforts to seek opportunities outside of their current workplace. Our findings might indicate that, in addition to the the vast differences in earnings opportunities between rural and urban areas, rural migrants might be attracted to cities because even relatively less prestigious jobs in cities provides better occupational attainment than many jobs available in rural areas. This suggests that, by creating more employment opportunities outside of farming in rural areas, China can possibly slow down the inflow of rural migrants into cities and mitigate social problems associated with this excessively rapid migration. Finally, China is quickly granting more permanent hukou residency to rural migrants (Xie, 2010). The hukou relaxation policy intends to settle most members of the floating population in the cities after the removal of the hurdles created by the hukou system (Zhu, 2007). On the one hand, a better understanding of permanent rural migrants and their occupational attainment will shed light on how hukou policy might affect the labor-market performance of the floating population. On the other hand, permanent urban migrants also constitute a large proportion of the internal migrants in China (Gagnon et al., 2009). Future research on internal migration in China would do well to provide more understanding of these "less well-known" migrants. 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C.  Job mobility in the first 10 year after migration
Table 2. Gaps in the Occupational-Prestige Score between Rural-to-Urban and Urban-to-Urban Migrants
Note: OLS regression with repeated observations from the same individuals. Standard errors are in brackets and are clustered by individual ID. Table 3. Gaps in the Occupational-Prestige Score between Rural-to-Urban and Urban-to-Urban Migrants, by Education
Note: OLS regression with repeated observations of the same individuals. Standard errors are in brackets and are clustered by individual ID.
brackets and are clustered by individual ID.
Table A3. Distribution of Educational Background, by Rural and Urban status and Year of Migration
1979-1983 1984-1991 1992-1996 1997-2003 Table A4. Gaps in the Occupational Prestige Score between Rural-to-Urban and Urban-to- Urban Migrants, by Migration Destination
brackets and are clustered by individual ID. Notes: (a)Y-axis represents the gap of occupational-prestige scores between migrants and local urban residents. X-axis represents the years since migration. (b) The independent variables included are age, age-squared, and a dummy variable for female. (a)Y-axis is the gap in occupational-prestige scores between rural-to-urban and urban-to-urban migrants. X-axis represents the length of the migration spell. (b) Model 1 includes age, age-squared, and a dummy variable for female in the RHS; model 2 builds on model 1 by adding dummies for the level of education. Model 3 adds father's education, mother's education, and an occupational-prestige score for father's occupation. Model 4 adds the occupational- prestige score of the respondent's premigration job. (c) The sample is limited to those with all nonmissing information in the full models.
Our measure of occupational prestige is the standardized z -score based on the mean level of education for each occupation (measure 1) 1 .After letting Edu, denote the average years of schooling of all individuals who work in occupation j, the z -score for the Edu i can be defined as follows: Z = We calculate this score for each of the 253 occupations we observed in the 2003 dataset. We assume that the educational composition of the occupations does not change very much in the period of 1980-2003 2 . One concern is that the emerging or new occupations might consist of younger people who are generally better educated than the older generations. To remove the differences in the average education across cohorts, we obtain the residuals from the regressions of education on a quadratic form of birth year for each correspondent (measure 2).  We then compute the z -score by the same formula we used above but using the residuals. Regression results 3 using this method are similar to what we obtained from the z -scores based on raw education data. corresponding occupational-prestige score by two different measures:
Below are a few top occupations 1 year after migration by urban migrants and their corresponding occupational-prestige score by two different measures:
The number of job changes and work-unit changes can be derived directly from the survey data. Below we describe how we define job promotions within the same work unit and across different units. By definition, a job promotion is the permanent movement of a staff member from a position in one job class to a position in another job class of increased responsibility or complexity of duties and in a higher salary range. To compare the skill requirement, responsibility, and relative pay and job benefits of within and across different work unit, we will briefly summarize the characteristics of each work unit and some description on the China's economy reform prior to 2003. First, we divide the employment into two groups based on eight work unit types in our data: I. (1) Party, government, or government agency or office ( xingzheng jiguan ) (2) State owned institution ( shiye danwei 4 ) II. (3) State-owned enterprise (SOE) (4) Collectively owned institution or enterprise (5) Individually operated enterprise (6) Private institution or enterprise (7)  Foreign-investment enterprise (8)  Others 5 The first group (Group I) is state owned, nonprofit, and has the highest job security and benefits of any group. The administrative rank only applies to this group and is a very important determinant of one's wage level and other benefits. 6 Within Group I, job-type 1 (party government, etc.) ranks higher than job-type 2 (SOE). We define a job promotion if one moves from work unit with a higher rank and work unit (1) ranks the highest, work unit (2) the second highest.  We will define further for other ranks within Group II. For within work unit change in (1) and (2), the rank of administration will be the second determinant. In particular, the following categories are ranks from low to high: (a) no rank; (b) below vice-section- level; (c) vice-section-level ( Fu keji ); (d) section-level ( keji ); (e) vice-department-level ( Fu chuji ) (f) department level ( Chu ji ); (g) vice-bureau-level ( fu juji ); (h) bureau-level ( ju ji ); and higher. The supervision department level is a third determinant of job promotion, though it might be associated with the administrative rank in some cases. The fourth determinant would be housing and medical benefits. Compared to Group I, the work units in Group II have more autonomy and are for-profit. The administrative rank does not apply to these work units in general. It is worth noting that the state- owned enterprises 7 are a partial result of the economic reform of the state-owned sector. Before the economic reform, there was very little job diversity and mobility under the central administration. In urban areas, most of the jobs were state owned or in government offices, and they were called "iron-bowl" jobs, which references the very high job security of these positions. Once employed, a worker could stay employed until retirement age, except for voluntarily quitting or other reasons (such as health, etc). There was also a good amount of pension after retirement. The other sectors, mainly the private sectors, did not emerge until the economic reform in 1980s. It is well documented that after the market-oriented economic reform, there was a large number of layoffs of the employees from the state-own enterprises (Mako and Zhang, 2003). Between 1997 and 2001, the number of SOEs decreased from 262,000 to 174,000. Nonetheless, the wages of the "surviving" employees has increased rapidly (Parker, 1999). SOE assets have grown significantly, especially among centrally administrated SOEs. 8 The Chinese government also used different policies to protect the SOEs, allowing them to offer above-market wages (Putterman, 1992; Chen, Demurger and Fournier, 2005; Zhao, 2002). Furthermore, even though the administrative rank was only available in government jobs, they applied to positions in the SOEs too until the political reform of recent years (Zheng Qi Fen Kai). This assures that most of the jobs at SOEs are superior to employment at other types of enterprises with a higher political and economic status both before and after the economic reform. 9 Therefore, the observed employees in the state-owned enterprises (job-type 2) are assumed to enjoy a higher wage benefit (including bonuses, higher job security, and a lower risk of enterprise bankruptcy). There are four types of enterprises not owned by the state: collectively owned institutions or enterprises; individually operated enterprises; private institutions or enterprises; and foreign investment enterprises. It is important to take the government's supervisory department into consideration when defining job promotion for these enterprises. For our analysis, we will define upward mobility as occurring when the individual transfers from non-SOE to an SOE that is under the supervision of a department either at a central or a provincial level of government. 10 Consequently, job mobility is also defined as being upward (b) district or county (d) street or township (e) neighbourhood or village-committee or (f) other level to a centrally or provincially administered SOE. A transfer to the central level is considered to be the highest level of upward mobility. 11 There is one exception to these classifications. Research shows that the skilled workers in foreign investment enterprises (FIE) earned more than skilled workers in SOEs in 1990s (Zhao, 2002). Moreover, FIEs are considerably more profitable (especially for those FIEs under a higher level of government supervision) than other non-SOEs. Therefore, if a person moved from any work units in Group 2 to an FIE, and the management level at the previous job is considered to be lower than the management level at the FIE (the new job), we will define it as upward mobility as well. Here management level is a proxy of skills. For all the non-SOEs, job security is the highest in collectively owned institutions, where the decisions of hiring and firing reside among the workers' union. Additionally, job security is relatively equal among most of the workers. Therefore, any job changes from other non-SOEs to collectively owned institutions or enterprises are considered to be upward mobility. One exception to this classification is that we consider moves to individually operated enterprises, private institutions or enterprises, or FIEs to be upward mobility if and only if the supervisory level is higher at the new job. 12 Finally, upward mobility is considered to occur for changes from farming or joining the army to any other type of work.
the number of years of schooling. Please note that we could not distinguish the differences from high school, vocational high school, and high-school-level professional school from the total years of schooling.  We treat full-time and part-time college the same in terms of years of schooling, even though the part-time track might take longer to finish in reality. The following are a list of reasons of migration surveyed in CGSS and the corresponding explanation
Attending school (shengxue) : This generally refers to going to college in an urban area. Worker-tocadre transfer (zhuan-gan) : This refers to transfers from worker to cadre ( gong zhuan gan) , which began to occur at the beginning of the open-reform policy period. In China, workers and cadres have differences not only in terms of salary but also social welfare benefits (housing, medical, pension) etc. In general it is difficult for workers from collective ownership to transfer to state-owned sectors. In a state meeting in December 1979, this means of transfer was targeted for elimination due to a series of problems insulted from " zhuan gan " (for instance, corruption) . Additionally, as of 1993, China began to use open examination to recruit civil servants, and everyone has to pass a desired level of the national civil-servant exam in order to work at a government sector or state-owned institution. Labour recruitment (zhao-gong): This means being employed (in an urban area). The term is different than da gong. Looking for work (da gong; i.e., going to work in an urban area with qualifications). In recent years, the term da gong has been used more frequently than zhao-gong.  Zhao-gong refers to the period when the state created employment in urban factories for heavy industrial development. Supporting the inner and border regions (zhi nei /zhi bian) and “up to the mountains and down to the village" ( shang shan xia xiang ): These are some terms related to the Cultural Revolution. During the revolution, many people became jobless. From 1968, many young people were sent to rural areas to "learn from the farmers." Most of them were only 16 to20 years old, and were therefore not able to continue high school or college. After the Cultural Revolution, they were able to leave the countryside through various means, including "zhao gong," "joining the army," and "going to college." Migrated with the family (jia shu sui zhuan) and moving to live close to relatives (tou kao qin qi): This mainly refers to (a) seniors who reside in rural areas and could move into the cities where their children reside and (b) children who reside in rural areas and could move into the cities where their parents reside. Self-purchase of valid local urban hukou (e.g., “blue-stamp” (lan ben hukou) or “self-grain” (zi li kou liang hukou) ) purchasing a house from (or building a house with) a company with a hukou quota: These fall into the category of "blue stamp" hukou relaxation policy, which attracts investment through the real estate market and highly educated people. Residential changes: Moving from one apartment to another in a different residential district within a city. "Such changes in residence are driven in part by housing reforms in urban China, which give urban residents the opportunity to own their own apartment/house or improve their living space and to gain access to other amenities" (Liang & Ma, 2004, 476-477). Terms 13-16 in the table above refer to state policy related to urban development or work-unit changes due to state economic reform.