Individual Urbanization Process: Immigration, Urban Experience and Crime in Contemporary China
Abstract:
I did my MA in Criminology from the University of Macau and BA in Law from Fuzhou University, China. My main current research interests include the relationship between migration and crime, intimate partner violence and mass murder.
Urbanization refers as the modernization indicator, quality of live improvement among the developed or least developed countries and since then urbanization is the prerequisite to the modern and development countries. Nevertheless, urbanization is the experience for each rural-to-urban immigrant. It is a road taken by a rural residential individual to make a change. In China, more than twenty millions of rural residents immigrate to urban every year during the past years. This demographic transition has become a major concern of each city for its community safety and crime rate.
Former studies on immigration and crime in China are from a country/provincial/city level focuses on the characteristics of the immigrants (low-educated, under-employment, poor, youth) and the social problems rose by their immigration (inequality, lack of external control and migrant communities). Whereas this research is going to explore the process of institutional, special, social and cultural exclusion correlated with each other in the urban experiences of individual immigrants and its linkage to crime behavior. It tries to argue that urban life does not automatically lead to crime nor did immigration or urbanization; it is the urban experience of the immigrants interacting with the criminal behaviors between immigrants and urban society functioning in this problem. And within the urban experience, crime is one of the surviving strategies of individual urbanization process and a way of being “urbanized” (becoming an urban resident).