Where You Were Born Matters: Educational Access and the Geography of Intergenerational Mobility in China

China’s rapid development post-market reform has been accompanied by significant regional inequality. While loosened residential administration policies have enabled more internal migration for labor market opportunities, the linkage of ‘hukou’ to education access still limits spatial mobility during school age, a critical period for social attainment. However, little research has focused on the childhood roots of disparities in intergenerational social mobility across China, particularly within the context of the Chinese education system.

To address this gap, this study calculates cohort-specific rank percentiles from census data and uses multiple rounds of nationally representative surveys to construct the first Chinese geographic map of intergenerational occupational mobility based on people’s birth provinces. Results from different cohorts reveal substantial regional differences in occupational mobility, with ‘lands of opportunity’—regions where mobility rates are higher than the national average—driving much of the variation. The study also finds an increasing correlation between relative and absolute mobility across provinces, suggesting that privileged families maintain their advantages, while the opening of social structure is primarily driven by individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Furthermore, the study shows that the correlation between provinces’ intergenerational educational mobility and occupational mobility becomes significant only after the market reforms, indicating that education mobility plays a more decisive role in social outcomes. The analysis also investigates how educational opportunities and quality impact social mobility in recent cohorts, with a particular focus on the unequal allocation of college entrance exam (gaokao) quotas across provinces. A multilevel model, offering greater precision than separate OLS regressions, reveals that unequal access to post-secondary education and disparities in teacher quality are significantly associated with upward mobility for disadvantaged children.