Internal Migration in China
Dr Aude Bernard

Dr Aude Bernard is a Population Geographer/Demographer, an ARC DECRA fellow in the Queensland Centre for Population Research, within the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Queensland. Her research interests are in human mobility and migration.

Dr. Bernard works closely with the Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI) to advance understanding of migration behaviour in Asia and its socio-demographic impact on societies. One of the countries that Dr. Bernard has been researching is China using a cohort perspective to analyse migration levels, patterns and reasons for moving in China for cohorts born between 1935 and 1974. She applies this approach to migration histories retrospectively collected as part of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study in 2014. She is also developing migration projections to provide insights into how migration levels are likely to evolve in the coming decades in China. Her research shows modest but rising levels of migration underpinned by a reduction in lifetime immobility and a rise in repeat movement, largely caused by an upswing in employment-related migration. Significant sex differentials are demonstrated that have persisted across successive cohorts.

Dr. Bernard has recently completed work for UNESCO to establish the association between internal migration and education attainment in countries at various stages of development. In 2016, she was awarded an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to examine the long-term decline of internal migration rates in advanced economies. This project aims to establish the onset and pace of migration decline and identify the socio-economic causes of this profound shift in human mobility.

References

Bernard, A 2017, 'Cohort Measures of Internal Migration: Understanding Long-Term Trends', Demography, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 2201-21.

Bernard A., Bell, M, and Zhu Y. (2019) Migration in China: A cohort approach to understanding past and future trends, Population, Space and Place, 2019-e2234. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2234