Social Consequences of Forced Urban-Rural Migration in China: Sibling Model for Send-Down Experience

Yu Xie, University of Michigan
Yang Jiang, University of Michigan

During the Cultural Revolution, a large proportion of Chinese youth in cities were forced to go to the countryside as a result of the state’s “send-down” policy. Local government policies typically dictated a formulaic assignment of send-down (such as keeping the oldest, or the youngest, child in city) with no apparent rationality when a family had more than one child. Thus, the comparison of siblings who were sent down with those who were not constitutes an ideal research design that mimics a true experiment. Comparison between two siblings, with one having been sent down while the other having not, allows us to study the true influence of send-down experiences on later life chances. We use the fixed-effects model for the statistical analyses.