Description

Emigration from China has been rapidly growing but understudied, largely due to insufficient data. Based on China’s census microdata collected since 1982, we have studied both trends and patterns of the country’s emigrants. The five-year volume of emigration increased from several thousand in 1982 to over 1.5 million in 2010, with the main reasons being labor and student migration. There are demographical concentrations closely correlated with emigrants’ age and regions of origin. With a few exceptions, the emigration rate was higher for the city residents and the more educated social groups. Not surprisingly, Canada is among the top three destinations and proportionally the most favorite one for Chinese emigrants. A solid understanding of the diversity of Chinese immigrants’ background can help to improve the efficiency of integration policy in their new home society.

John Zhongdong Ma (Ph.D., McMaster University, 1993) is Associate Professor of Social Science and Associate Director of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at HKUST. He has been working on census data in China and collaborated with the National Bureau of Statistics in China for over two decades. He served as Director of the Center for Demography and Sustainable Development at HKUST between 2006 and 2010. His research interests include internal migration and human capital transfer in the Asia-Pacific region, fertility, quantitative methods; geographical information systems (GIS), and mental health of labor migrants in China. He was the first researcher who conducted a survey of returned labor migrants in China and studied their occupational changes after returning to the countryside. He was awarded Second Prize in China’s Fifth National Competition in Population Science in 2010.