1China’s migrant workers have been excluded by the urban household registration system and are unable to enjoy employment and public services equal to those of local citizens (Wang 2005, 36; Li and Gu 2011, 50; Guo and Zhang 2013, 38). Therefore, the mainstream view is that the household registration system is the greatest obstacle to the urbanization of China’s new immigrants (Zhu 2007, 65; Zhao and Howden-Chapman 2010, 363). Urbanization here refers to the process of moving from rural areas to cities and settling down in cities. However, with the accelerated development of household registration in China in recent years, the system’s impedimentary effect on the floating population regarding integration into cities has gradually declined. Even in municipalities directly under the Central Government, such as Shanghai, migrants can still enjoy almost the same right to work and live as local citizens by applying for residence permits, and they still have the opportunity to obtain Shanghai household registration through points (Li, Li and Chen 2010, 145; Qian, Cheng and Qian 2020, 3920). So, stable employment and urban housing are the two barriers to urbanization (Cao et al. 2015, 639; Sun and Chen 2017, 1491; Liu, Wang and Chen 2017, 1834), while stable employment serves as the foundation and premise. Stable employment means a sustained source of income and getting a monthly social security and housing provident fund, which can be used to buy a local home with strong debt capacity; it also means people can make long-term life plans in migrant cities, such as those for marriage, children’s education, and elder care. However, for the migrant population with a low-level education, it is very difficult to obtain a stable and secure job. To gain admission to a university is the first step in changing that fate; only with the experience of higher education can they get the opportunity to achieve stable employment through their own efforts. In this case, Qi is a typical case of realizing urbanization by entering college and gradually getting employed in the city.

Getting Admitted to University

2Qi is a typical second-generation child of Chinese migrant workers. These children were mostly born where their parents worked and spent their childhood in the city, but they are unable to return to their hometown to become “stay-at-home children” because they cannot take the high school entrance exam or the college entrance examination in the city. The experiences of staying at home during childhood and flowing between two places would cause them to feel confused about their native place. They would feel bewildered when counting themselves as city fellows or country folks. However, their ultimate home is still the city, since it is an irreversible trend in China.

3In China, the majority of migrant children continue to repeat their parents’ lives. After middle school or high school, they go to cities for work. However, in this case Qi was admitted to a university. For the rural youths in China, it is the unique and the most important way out. Although she was admitted to an ordinary university, her career development later still proved the importance of rural children attending university.

4During the period of studying and work, children from rural areas often had to make greater efforts than students in the city did to get better jobs. In this case, after Qi entered the university, she set a specific four-year goal for herself, for example, participating in a variety of artistic performances and various activities, studying hard, and getting the national Encouragement Scholarship in the first year; taking professional courses and taking part in professional contests, and getting prizes and the national scholarship in the second year; and getting the certificate of Network Engineer, and College English Test Band Four and Band Six in the first two years. These certificates and scholarships show that she is a very self-disciplined and diligent student.

Qi’s Career Planning

5Diligence is not enough to find an ideal job. Qi was studying at an ordinary university, not a key or prestigious one, so it limited her options for finding a job. In China, there are nearly 9 million college graduates every year, and they experience very fierce competition in employment. The employment market is highly stratified, with government departments, large state-owned enterprises, multinational companies, banks, and other first-class jobs with good reputations, high incomes, and promising prospects. As a result, these entities typically only recruit graduates from prestigious universities (985 universities), while graduates from elite university are only about 1 % of college graduates in China. For graduates of ordinary universities, no matter how hard they work and how many certificates they get in college, it is hard to break through the “university origin” ceiling in job-hunting to enter famous enterprises, just like in the 1980–1990s migrant workers could not break through the restriction set by the household registration system. As a result, graduates like Qi who are from ordinary universities make up of the vast majority college graduates in China, but their job targets were oriented toward the second-tier labor market, such as grassroots civil servant positions, private companies, small businesses, sales, and physical jobs, since these enterprises or posts often cannot recruit graduates from top universities.

6After she failed to find a well-paid job, Qi decided not to confine herself to her major and started looking for a job that was not related to her major. Her criteria for choosing a job shifted to a high salary, with the goal of getting a higher return of income. It is also a realistic choice for most of China’s rural graduates in job hunting. They lack a superior family background and are generally graduates of ordinary colleges and universities; but since it is very difficult to pursue jobs with a high salary and good development prospects by sticking to their interests, they have had to compromise. Our previous research shows that migrant workers or graduates from rural areas encountered frustration in job-hunting for the first time, mainly because they lacked a job-hunting support network and had no access to information about high-quality positions, they could hardly afford the relatively high cost of transportation and accommodation, and so on, and so they hurriedly had to choose a job with which they were not satisfied. This phenomenon is called “getting employed before finding an ideal job,” which is often the concept of job-hunting that university teachers have repeatedly taught. Once they get their first job, they will start seeking for a new and more suitable one; therefore, there is a very high job-hopping rate among college students within three years after graduation, and their first job serves as a springboard for their career mobility in the city.

7Qi also followed this career development route. She first found a job she was not satisfied with and entered a company to work as a telephone salesperson; later, she was shifted to a post in charge of human resources. Two years later, she was transferred to Shanghai to expand her new business. In 2015, Qi and her boyfriend bought a house in Shanghai and solved the key problem of settling down in the city; in 2016, Qi quit her job to study for an MBA at a university in Shanghai; and in 2018, after getting a master’s degree, she cooperated with friends in Shanghai to start a business.

8Qi’s career development route is typical for a new immigrant in a megacity. Such immigrants have achieved their career goals by almost completely relying on their own efforts and a steady self-struggle. Educational background provides a stepping-stone, and when paired with very good luck, career success can be achieved. However, a large number of young people who failed to find stable jobs were forced to return to small cities in their hometown.

Career Life of Typical Migrant Workers

9Qi is not a typical migrant worker. For those young migrant workers who have not studied in college, their careers are different from that of Qi. Qi is a new immigrant who managed to settle down in the city through her endeavor, but it should be noted that Qi only represents college students. These people realized urbanization by entering colleges and successfully shifting their household registration from the countryside to the cities, and thus found a relatively decent and stable job.

10In China, rural young people who failed to get admitted to high school or college would probably enter the labor market directly after graduating from junior middle school or high school, at the age of about 16–20 years. They usually choose to follow their parents, relatives, or friends to a city and do similar jobs. These jobs are generally ones that city dwellers don’t want to do, such as petty dealers, couriers, builders, decoration workers, cleaners, attendants, or just workers in a factory. The typical characteristics of these jobs are a dirty work environment, long working hours, high labor intensity, low income level, and lack of good social security, with no upward promotion and development of career pathways. However, the most fatal drawback of these jobs is that their work experience and social network grow very slowly or even stagnate with age and length of service, causing these workers to be unable to accumulate sufficient human resources and social capital, so the level of income does not increase with age. But university students basically will not be engaged in these kinds of jobs; their work environment is better, and although their salary at the beginning may be lower than that of the migrant workers, they have good social security and can realize accumulation in many aspects. This is the reason why the university students can settle down in cities.

11Compared with college students, migrant workers’ career peak will come early, usually around the age of 30, and then there is a long-term stagnation in this stage, without any sustained growth. So, in their forties, with the decline of weight-bearing capacity and sensitivity, it is hard for them to find jobs that fit their positions. They change from formal employment to informal and flexible employment, gradually retreat from the urban labor market, and eventually choose to return to their hometown. This is the fate of most of migrant workers of older generations in China, who cannot achieve their goal of settling down in cities due to a lack of both stable jobs and good social security.

Settling Down in the City

12Compared with the elder generation, the new generation of youths will not be willing to return to their hometown in their old age, regardless of the kind of job they hold and whether they were admitted to university or not. Because their connection with the countryside has been gradually broken and they lack farming skills, it is impossible for them to go back to the countryside; instead, they long to stay in the city permanently.

13Our previous research has shown that young immigrants expect to stay in big cities, such as municipalities and provincial capitals, and then some famous regional cities, with only a few willing to return to their home city and few willing to return to their home village. In this case, Qi is a college student who experienced rural life. One might think that she would cherish more affection for the countryside, but on the contrary, she wanted to flee it. Although she was a college student in Chuzhou, in her view Chuzhou is a small four-tier city and a part of the countryside. She refused to return to work in the countryside or similar places, so her first target in job-hunting was in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, a Chinese metropolis with a population in the tens of millions, second only to Shanghai. A few years later, she was lucky enough to be sent to Shanghai, China’s economic center, the world-famous bustling metropolis, and finally she realized her dream of settling down in Shanghai.

14Qi is fortunate. Not only did she find a stable job in Shanghai, but she also managed to buy a commodity house in Shanghai with the help of her family, which was the key step to staying in the city. Although they have not yet obtained the Shanghai hukou, after buying a house they can gradually get hukou by residing in the city steadily and by making social security payments, and once they own a house they can apply for a residence permit and their children can study in Shanghai as natives. Therefore, the possession of a house means that they have basically achieved settlement and identity transformation in the city and have become urban residents.

15The average young migrant worker cannot realize the dream of settling down in a city like Shanghai, Beijing, or Nanjing; however, he or she is not willing to return to his or her hometown. Our survey shows that more and more floating populations have chosen to buy commercial houses in the city, and their foremost choice of purchase has been the prefecture-level city or county capital for their hometown. There is no household registration restriction in these places, and with relatively low house prices and proximity to their hometown it is easy for these workers to accept this choice emotionally. After a real estate purchase, their children would move to the city to study, and their parents would help look after the children. But they would choose to continue to work in the big cities far away from their hometown and continue to endure separation from the family.

Conclusion: Stable Employment Is the Premise for the Successful Settlement of New Immigrants

16College graduates like Qi can basically achieve their goal with effort, but it is difficult for most migrant workers to get a stable job. With the globalization of neoliberalism and the widespread use of new ICT technologies, the modern labor system is full of greater flexibility and uncertainty; there are fewer jobs that are based on stable employment relationships; and young, new immigrants are more willing to become affiliated with a platform and make a living through part-time work or the provision of online services, such as by becoming delivery drivers, shared car drivers, deliverymen, and e-commerce operators. Unlike traditional jobs, although these jobs are flexible and offer more autonomy, they lack social security and come with less stability (Wan 2008, 71; Chen and Hamori 2013, 987). In such a trend, although these young people may have achieved the goal of living in cities, their employment leaves them vulnerable, and once they are faced with a serious external crisis, such as the recent outbreak of covid-19, they can easily get stuck in limbo.

17In a word, stable employment is the premise of successful urban settlement for new immigrants. China’s urban new immigrants must be studied by putting them in the transition of “rural-urban” social structure, but we should not overlook the fact that industrialization and commercialization liberated a large number of workers from farming, giving them the opportunity to work in cities, and only in this way can they realize the transformation of identity from peasants to city dwellers (Sun and Liu 2018, 57). Through the case of Qi and the common fate of young migrant workers in China, we can find that for rural youths born during the 1970s to the 1990s, the city is a dream that is constantly pursued, and the countryside is the past that is fading away. But to realize settlement in cities, the immigrants must have a reliable job and stable source of income.