Empirial Study On City Identity Of Migrant Workers From The Persperctives Of Human Capital And Social Capital

At present, there are nearly 145 million migrant workers working and living in the cities of China and they have been divided into different subgroups. In short, migrant workers of new generation differentiate from their counterparties of relatively old generation by their willingness to stay and integrate into the cities.At the same time, the development of Chinese economy and society has witnessed a transition point. The change of economic structure lies in the relatively growth in percentage of non-agricultural related population. Also it is an inherent requirement of the urbanization for a portion of agricultural related population to transfer to the cities. And it is the migrant workers who are most likely to meet the requirement. Therefore, it will bring benefits to the development of Chinese economy and society by helping those migrant workers to set down in the cities.When it comes to research in this field, foreign experts mainly focused on immigrants, which brought new angles and theories to domestic researchers in China. Many of the exiting researches pointed out the significance of migrant workers'assimilation process and analyzed the process by in-depth interviews and instigations. However, the methods used in those analyses are rather simply with descriptive conclusions. Adopting different kinds of ratios, the literatures told us un-optimistic results of current situations of migrant workers, which were contributed by many aspects, including the factors in migrant workers themselves. And this article tries to figure out which factors in migrant workers will affect their assimilation into the cities. From the perspectives of Human Capital and Social Capital, the paper built a Logit model on the basis of data collected from one of the researches of 1446 migrant workers working in Shanghai conducted in 2009. At first, the paper analyzed the concepts and contents of Human Capital and Social Capital. Then it turned into the figures and arrived at some descriptive ideas. After reviewing the literature and choosing parameters with discretion, the author set two basic assumptions and the model.The paper found that the Human Capital parameters represented by educational background and technical training showed a positive effect. When it came to Social Capital influencers, they were divided into two opposite sides. The Homphilous inter-actions among familiar migrant workers would defer the Assimilation process, while heterophilous inter-actions between migrant workers and urban residents tended to contribute to the process.