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This article uses a case study of a migrant-sending village in Anhui to understand why migrant workers build large houses in home villages. The rural sex-ratio imbalance at marriageable ages, heightened by the rural-urban migration of women, has led to an increase in the negotiating power of young women in the rural marriage market. Young men’s families construct large houses to attract potential brides and facilitate patrilocal residence. The lack of maternity leave and affordable childcare in migrant destination cities encourages female migrants to return to the countryside to give birth to and raise children. Large rural houses offer young female migrants comfortable places to live and privacy when they cohabitate with their parents-in-law, who help them raise their children. Although most new-generation migrant workers do not have agricultural experience, rural areas are important to this generation because they provide affordable housing and family support.

Focusing on the onset of circularity, this paper examines the first outward-moves and first inward-moves of rural–urban migrants in China. Using event-history analysis, we investigate the impacts of time-varying individual and household characteristics on the mobility of 787 rural workers from six villages in Anhui Province, based on a longitudinal study of 150 households for the period 1980 to 2009. The findings show that the probability of initiating the first outward-move and first inward-move is affected by age, gender, education, decade, and life-cycle and household-arrangement factors such as the location of dependent children, spouse, and elderly parents. New-generation migrants are more likely to move outward and spend longer time outside the home location than their predecessors. Gender differences persist; women continue to be less likely to move outward and more likely to return, and their mobility patterns are much more sensitive to caregiving needs than men. These results suggest that migrants’ circularity will persist and that China’s urbanization policy should consider multi-locality as a central component of migration.

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Focusing on the Yangtze River Delta region, the spatial distribution and change characteristics of the employed population were assessed by selecting three time points: 2000, 2010 and 2020. Firstly, a correlation was established between population employment statistics and spatial units of administrative divisions to analyze the spatial distribution characteristics of the employed population in general and by industry; secondly, the changing characteristics of the spatial distribution of the employed population over time, including the migration of the centroid and density changes, were analyzed; thirdly, a systematic clustering approach was adopted to carry out a typological analysis of 41 cities in the Yangtze River Delta from three perspectives: industrial structure, time stage and spatial level. It was found that (1) regional differences within the Yangtze River Delta are still significant, but are narrowing; (2) different cities or regions show different characteristics of development stages, and late-developing regions can learn from early developing regions; (3) metropolitan areas are still the main areas of employment concentration, and the spatial distribution of employment in some cities is beginning to suburbanize.