The subjective wellbeing of migrants in Guangzhou, China: The impacts of the social and physical environment

Article history: Received 6 July 2016 Received in revised form 6 October 2016 Accepted 10 October 2016 Available online 22 October 2016 China haswitnessed a surge of rural-urbanmigrants over the past three decades. Although a plethora of literature has shed light on the low quality of migrants' lives, little research has been done to understand how migrants evaluate their own lives in host cities, and no study has been undertaken to link migrants' subjective wellbeing with their residential environments. Using the data collected from a questionnaire survey in Guangzhou and multilevel linear models, this paper examines the determinants of migrants' subjective wellbeing in host cities. It particularly focuses on the extent to which and theways inwhichmigrants' social ties and residential environment influence their subjectivewellbeing. The results indicate that, in general,migrants have a lower level of subjective wellbeing than local residents, and the cognitive and emotional components of migrants' subjective wellbeing are influenced by different factors. The sense of relative deprivation, social support, and neighbourhood social environment matter in determining the cognitive component of migrants' wellbeing (life satisfaction) but have no impact on the emotional component of their wellbeing (positive and negative affect). No evidence shows that neighbourhood cleanliness andneighbourhood amenities influence the level ofmigrants' subjective wellbeing. © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).