There has been a long-standing academic debate on why the migrant families fail to integrate into the cities where they live and work in contemporary China. Exploring the main migrant approaches and family patterns of migrant workers, this talk attempts to design a corresponding policy scheme for migrant families’ integration into the city. It reveals four approaches of migrant workers’ family migration (i.e. ordered migration, one-off family migration, intergenerational migration and reflux migration) and four types of family patterns (i.e. some migrate and some left-behind, split family, reunited family and returning family). The social precarity has increased dramatically, and family pattern has adjusted diversely. While highlighting the specificity of China’s situation, this research argues for the more general implications of China’s case for other developing countries in terms of migrant families’ social precarity and city integration.

Godfrey Wu, a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, is an Assistant Professor at the School of Public Administration, Central South University.