Rural to urban migration is an inevitable population movement in the process of urbanization as well as the current transitional China. Although there are lots of literatures studying on the issues of China’s internal migration as well as rural to urban migration, little attention has paid on spatial inequalities of rural to urban migration flows. This paper takes the spatial inequality as the research focus to identify the spatial patterns of interprovincial rural to urban migration in China based on the latest nationwide migration data drawn from 2005 national one per cent population sample survey. The CV and Gini indices which have been applied in US context are adopted here for examining the differences between the rural to urban outflows and inflows for each province and among 30 provinces (excluding Tibet). It finds that the direction of rural to urban migration is mainly from western and central regions to eastern region and from developed provinces to underdeveloped ones based on volumes. Through Comparison between out and in-migration of a specific province, we also find that in most provinces the out-migrants move into fewer destinations than the in-migrants come from. The regional economy inequalities, the distance and social network are concluded as the important attributions to the spatial inequalities of interprovincial rural to urban migration flows.
spatial inequality ral to urban migration coefficient of variation Gini ndex.
Shanlin HUANG Xinhai LU Dongdong LONG Dan SUN Guoming DU
School of Resources and Environment, NortheastAgricultural University, Harbin, China 150030 Research Center for Land Resource and Real Estate,Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuh School of Resources and Environment,Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, China 150030 Heilongjiang Shidai Land Asset AppraisalConsultation Co., Ltd., Harbin, China 150030 School of Resources and Environment, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, China 150030