Expectations for the Future Life of Floating People in Mega-Cities: A Study of In-Migrants in Beijing, China

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the theorisation of the expectations for the future life (EFL) of floating people whose household registration books (hukou) are not registered locally in China's mega-cities. Although the EFL of many rural-urban migrants is explicit, the EFL type of other floating cohorts such as educated migrants and the formation mechanism of EFL of floating people are much less well understood. We argue that EFL is a person's pre-judgment or estimation of living conditions in the future based on his/her perception of current human well-being or utility of life and its main concern is whether he/she expects to live in the mega-city in the future. Based on the social production functions (SPF) theory, three types of EFL for floating population are identified by using data collected from in-depth interviews with 30 Beijing's migrants. This paper reveals that the EFL of floating population is formed by comparing their current actual utility of life with the "normative utility" in the specific life course stage, which is the life utility that people should have in their specific life course stage expected by the society. Finally, these findings are checked out that the theoretical saturation has been reached by applying another 9 copies of transcripts of interviewees.