Group Mobility Characteristics and Urban Residence Intention of China’s Rural Highly Educated Population, 1978–2017

The sample data for this study came from the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey. This study defines the highly educated rural population as follows: The population born in 1980 or before with a secondary school/high school education or above, and those born after 1980 with a junior college education or above and who had a rural household registration. Then, 12886 samples were collected after cleaning and sorting.This paper constructs the network by taking the city where the highly educated rural population original residence is located as the outflow node, the permanent residence city as the inflow node, and the flow quantity as the weight of the edge. After processing, the research area includes 333 geographical units (nodes), and the threshold is set to 10.The residence intention of city is described by the ratio of the sample size of rural highly educated population with residence intention in city and the total number of rural highly educated population moving to city. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan are not included in this study. The indicators of influencing factors of residence intention are derived from the China Urban Statistical Yearbook.