The Role of Social Media in Factory Workers’ rural-urban Migration Trajectories in China

In 2024, China’s rural-urban migrant population reached 299 million (NBS, 2025), making it a major phenomenon in the country’s urbanisation and industrialisation process. At the same time, the number of smartphone users active in the social media market reached 1.1 billion, accounting for 85.3% of urban residents and 63.8% of rural residents (CNNIC, 2024). Against this backdrop, the use of social media by Chinese rural-urban migrant workers has also increased. This research aims to investigate the role of social media in the migration trajectories of Chinese rural–urban migrant workers. The research uses social media as a new social element to explore the mechanisms through which migrants are simultaneously embedded in both their rural origins and urban destinations, and to uncover the complexities and dynamics of this embeddedness. For this research project 41 participants were interviewed, all of whom are rural-urban migrants working as factory workers in the city of Wenzhou. Drawing on interview data, this research finds that Chinese rural-urban migrants are active social media users, using social media to facilitate their embeddedness in both their rural origins and urban destinations during migration. The main findings of the study are as follows: 1) Chinese rural-urban migrant workers use social media to empower their careers, both in gaining a greater voice in their current workplaces and enabling them to pursue higher-skilled job positions in the city. 2) They use social media to keep connected to left-behind family and rural communities, and to participate remotely in the affairs of the rural household, lineage, natal family and community. 3) They use social media for leisure: social media content can strengthen their emotional connection to their traditional rural culture, and can also help them absorb modern ideology, shifting to an urban mindset. Embeddedness is a concept previously used for transnational migrants; this research extends this to internal migrants and develops social media as a new lens. The research conceptually develops the idea of internal migrants’ dual embeddedness. The conceptual contribution and empirical data can support internal migrant studies in other Global South countries, as large-scale rural-urban population mobility is also common in other developing countries.