Environmental Migrants’ Social Capital And Its Effect In Ankang City

Recent years migration activities have intensified due to frequent natural disasters. After“718” incident, long suffering Shaanxi government has carried out the migration programwhich is the biggest project since the foundation of PRC. As involving reconstruction,recovery and leading a new life and so on, migration raised a lot of concern from bothgovernment and the public. Sociological research shares a long history of this, focusing on thesocial behavior and lifestyle.“social networks” and “social capital”, since its introduction,have played an important part in the research.Social capital has made a great deal of progress since its emergence. Generally, twocamps can be identified: the micro or individual perspective focus on social relations andnetworks, while the macro or collective perspective emphasizes trust, norm and participation;each has developed its theory and measurement that are widely applied. After social capital’sintroduction to China, scholars as Bian Yanjie and so on have contributed greatly to theindigenization, especially in measurement, such as using “Chinese New Year GreetingNetwork” and “social eating network” to measure individual social capital, and using trustscaling and participation scaling to measure collective level, both have been applied in largesocial survey.The majority literatures of migrant social capital concern mainly about migrationscaused by earthquake, while little has shown interest in migrants in Shaanxi. This paper wantsto do an exploratory research in Ankang city of Shaanxi.Based on the representative theorists of social capital and the indigenized measurements,we conducted a survey in migrant communities in Ankang to examine the migrants’ socialcapital and their role in recovery and rehabilitation. The results show that party membership,occupation and education have significant effect on shaping migrants’ social capital, whiletheir roles in forming macro social capital are complicated. Having a party membership, goodoccupation and high education level benefit in accessing social resources and showing moreinstitutional trust, and higher income increases public trust and cohesion. On the other hand,both of micro and macro social capital have contributed to the recovery and rehabilitation tosome degree, among which institutional trust has shown a strong effect, an indicator of theimportant role of government during the reconstruction. The results suggest that migrants increase the variety of occupation as to improve redundant resources caused by strong ties; onthe other hand, local government needs to rebuilding trust and fostering community toreinforce macro social capital.This thesis includes five parts: the first chapter is introduction, explaining the purpose,meaning, innovativeness and methods of this study; the second chapter discusses the theoryand researches involving environmental migrants’ social capital; the next two chapters are themain theme of this study, analyzing migrants’ social capital and its effect; the final chaptermakes conclusions and discussions.