Bride-to-go, bride-on-the-way, bride-back-at-home: Chinese internal and international migration case

Wanli Nie, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Marriage signifies a timing point of psychological “settled-down”, however, migration process is full of uncertainty. Unfortunately, Chinese migrants move abroad at the age when they have to make decisions of marriage, given early marriage norms in the society. Using retrospective data from Chinese international Migration Project, I applied multistate competing risks model to disentangle inter-correlation of marriage decision-making and migration dynamics. I found neither internal nor international migrants would follow “bride-to-go” pattern, meaning getting married before migration, but internal migrants follow the “bride-on-the-way” pattern, which means they get married after migration. I also find significant “bride-back-at-home” pattern, or getting married after return, for both internal and international migrants. It implies that marriage is culturally important, that even for long-term migrants, returning to get married seems to be normative. Transition-specific covariates are introduced to learn their correlation with different marriage and migration dynamics.