Due to its rapid industrialization and urbanization over the past three decades, China has experienced the largest rural-to-urban migration in history. Initiated by Prof. Meng Xin (Australian National University) in 2006, RUMiC aims to understand the institutional barriers that restrict rural-to-urban migration and how to improve rural migrants’ living conditions. SDC has conducted this project independently since 2017.

RUMiC is a longitudinal survey conducted every year, collecting data about migrants’ health, education, employment, social networks, household income and expenditure, housing conditions, and place of origin. The annual sample size consists of 5,000 migrant households living in 15 cities across 9 major provinces with the highest level of rural to urban migration.

In 2017, SDC successfully implemented the 10th wave of RUMiC. In this wave, a Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) system replaced the traditional paper-and-pencil method and significantly improved data quality. In 2018 and 2019, all households participating in the 2016 or 2017 waves were interviewed by phone using the Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) system, successfully tracing about 3,000 and nearly 2,500 households, respectively.