Marriage: Women "peasants," A Unique Channel

The previous studies on nongzhuanfei (converting household registration status from agricultural to non-agricultural), found a problem that is hard to explain:rural women in the various channels of nongzhuanfei are inferior to rural men, however, the probability of nongzhuanfei for rural women is not lower than rural men, even higher than them under the same conditions.I believe that this was mainly due to the neglect of past researches of nongzhuanfei on a unique way of nongzhuanfei for rural women---marriage, which resulted in the increase of rural women advantages of rural-urban hukou (household registration) conversion.Drawing upon theories in Mate-selection and Marriage Migration, the author proposes spatial hypergamy and status exchange theories in marriage market contribute to this action. And the author further explained the motivations underlying the exchange process between genders in detail.Using Chinese General Social Survey in 2003 and Life History and Social Change in Contemporary China dataset in 1996, the author also tests the mechanism empirically. It is found that marriage is indeed one of the ways for rural women to achieve urban hukou status, which significantly increased the advantage of rural women in obtaining urban hukou compared to rural men.This finding is not only an effective answer to the above problem difficult to account for in previous studies, but also extends the explanatory power of theories in marriage market in answering the rural-urban status conversion process.