ABSTRACT
During the year 2010, a total of 14 young migrant workers committed suicide in the plants of Foxconn, the world’s largest electronic outsourcing manufacturer, in different cities of mainland China. This human tragedy quickly became the focus of the world news, and mental health problems among the new generation of migrant workers began to attract the attention of government officials, entrepreneurs, scholars, and the public. The suicides raised heated discussions about the causes of mental illness among rural-to-urban migrant workers in China. Is it due to the factory’s militarized management style or the worker’s personal characteristics? How much impact do economic pressure, working conditions, and residential environment have on migrant workers’ mental health status? Do the mental health issues result from the social exclusion of rural migrants in Chinese cities? How could policies be modified to successfully incorporate migrant workers into urban society? Many recent studies on the mental health status of migrant workers in China are in the fields of medical science, epidemiology, and psychology. Most of these studies are descriptive and only focus on a narrow range of risk factors, mainly demographic characteristics and socioeconomic status (Gong et al. 2008; Jiang et al. 2007; Li et al. 2007; Wong et al. 2008). After the series of suicides at Foxconn occurred in 2010, sociologists began to join the discussion about migrant workers’ mental health and attempted to explore the influence of a wider scope of social factors, including social capital (Hu and Chen 2012; Liu 2011), working conditions (Liu 2011; Liu et al. 2011), migration related stress (including cultural shock, difficulties of integration, and economic pressure) (He et al. 2010; Liu 2011), and the perceived meaning of migration (He et al. 2010; Wong et al. 2008). However, the existing studies tend to be small-scale and at a single location, and focus only on a subset of influencing factors. There has not been any previous studies examining the influence of the residential environment and unexpected life shocks, such as victimization, on migrant workers’ mental health status. Some people suspect that highly educated migrant workers are more likely to be dissatisfied with working and living circumstances and have a stronger sense of unfairness. However, no study has examined whether higher educational attainment intensifies the harm of daily stressors and negative life events to mental well-being.
