How did COVID-19 change graduate mobility between Chinese cities?

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted human mobility on an unprecedented scale. Yet, the effects on the mobility of recent university graduates remain poorly understood. In China, a country with large internal migration, rising interregional disparities and aggressive local policies to attract high-skilled talent, the question of how, why and where graduates move has large implications for regional economic development and spatial inequality.

In this paper, Lu Hao, Yueqi Zhang, Xuyang Wang, Peng Gong and I analyze how graduate mobility between Chinese cities changed before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Using mobile phone signalling data on more than one million graduates from nine cities, we estimate gravity models to explain graduate flows between 297 cities from 2019 to 2021.

We find that (1) geographical distance, prior population flows and service-sector employment consistently influenced graduate mobility; (2) during the pandemic, technological collaboration networks became more important, while traditional economic indicators weakened; and (3) lockdown policies had no significant impact on graduate flows.

These results emphasize the importance of networks in graduate mobility and suggest that service-oriented cities are more attractive in times of uncertainty.

Available in Regional Studies: https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2025.2564849