Characteristics and influencing factors of rural household migration in Chongqing Mountainous regions

Since the reform and opening up, there has been a large-scale population movement in China. Few natural resources, inconvenient traffic and poor public services are the characteristics of mountainous rural regions, and these regions are the main population centrifugal areas. A large number of people have moved out of the mountainous rural regions, resulting in a series of problems such as idle houses, abandoned land, and insufficient supply of public services, thus rural regions lack development conditions and decline gradually. Therefore, it is necessary to explore how to revitalize the rural from the perspective of population migration. At present, with the rapid development of market economy and deepening of the urbanization process, the household migration in China has been the mainstream form of the floating population. However, little attention has been paid to household migration in mountainous regions, and few studies have directly explored the factors influencing household migration at household level. This paper takes three typical towns and villages of Youyang county, Chongqing as study area, which is located in 108°18′25″-109°19′02″E, 28°19′28″-29°24′18″N, and obtains 58 community-level questionnaires and 323 household-level questionnaires of community level and farmers in 2017. There are two main steps in the research; first, statistically analyzing the characteristics of household migration in mountainous rural regions, to explore the location preference of relocated rural households. Second, using binary logistic regression, the dependent variable is whether the households are relocated, and the independent variables select 16 indicators from three aspects: householder level, household level and community level, to explore the factors influencing household migration. The results show that: 1) the population movement in mountainous rural regions is active and the migration of the whole households is obvious. 2) The migration of rural households shows the pursuit for infrastructure services such as transportation, education, medical care and non-agricultural employment. 3) The move-in regions are characterized by near highways, low altitude, and household migration is affected by economic and policy factors, moreover households are more likely to move to townships or communities closer to townships. 4) The household migration in mountainous rural regions is affected by many factors, among which gender and age of the householder, and actual farmland area of the household have a significant negative impact, while education level, only one child in the household, total household income, and non-agricultural labor ratio have a significant positive impact, besides, rural households tend to migrate to communities with better economic foundation, better public infrastructure and attractive tourism resources. Based on the above conclusions, this paper proposes the following two policy implications: 1) For the resettlement regions, it is necessary to handle the contradiction properly between the immigration of households and basic infrastructure such as transportation, education, medical infrastructure as well as comprehensive carrying capacity of social services, and to meet the basic public needs of the households, thereby absorbing more labour force nearby and promoting in situ urbanization of the agricultural population. 2) For the regions of origin, it is necessary to deal with the problems of migrated households and abandoned land, idle houses, and the public service demand of left-behind households. At last, different rural revitalization strategies should be taken based on different traffic conditions, terrain, and development basis.