Pathways to Urban Residency and Subjective Well-Being in Beijing

Size of population, sources of population, and distribution of population within the city, according to Park, are the first things we should establish when studying a city. During the past 30 years, the composition of China’s urban population has changed considerably. While studies have focused intensively on migrants who leave rural areas to work in urban centres, this chapter draws attention to a number of other modes of migration also occurring on a major scale in China, including those of urban-to-urban migrants from townships and small cities to large metropolises and in-situ urbanized rural residents who became urbanites because their land was reclassified as urban. Based on two waves of a household survey undertaken in Beijing in 2013 and 2015, our study highlights the effects of the divergent pathways to urban residency on individuals’ subjective well-being.