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Radical housing reform has triggered tremendous changes in both housing supply and housing demand in China over the past four decades, leading to apparent generational fractures in homeownership. In contrast to the rising age of first dwelling purchasers in some Western countries, younger cohorts in China are entering homeownership at increasingly younger ages despite rising housing prices. Based on a retrospective survey conducted in Shanghai in 2018 and 2019, this study examines the changing roles of family formation and parental background in affecting the timing of entering homeownership across different cohorts. Employing event history analyses, this study demonstrates that transitions to first homeownership have become synchronised with family formation among younger cohorts, which implies the social norm of ‘marital home’. Furthermore, the results reveal that parental background is increasingly influential in determining the timing of first home purchase; men and individuals from one-child families are more likely to be the beneficiary of parental help to enter homeownership. Through the lens of cohort, this study contributes to understanding the changing role of family formation and family of origin, which are shaped by institutional and cultural transformations in China. The intensified intergenerational transmission leads to exacerbation of horizontal housing inequality, that is, some achieving homeownership at a younger age while others being shunned from homeownership in the context of worsening housing affordability.

Parental support has become increasingly important to the housing opportunities of young Chinese households. The gender dynamics of support practices, however, have not been well understood. Drawing on a survey of Shanghai households, this study investigates the role of parents in shaping the housing outcomes of young couples, focusing on gender differences in intergenerational transmissions. Employing generalised structural equation modelling, our analysis illustrates that support from both husband's and wife's parents can affect the household's housing outcomes, directly and indirectly, but with some critical differences. The socioeconomic characteristics of husband's parents, such as educational level and employer type, are more relevant to housing outcomes than those of the wife's parents. While for women, having homeowning parents with local hukou indicates a higher probability of the couple becoming homeowners, for men, the association is inverse. In exploring these differences, we unravel how parental support intertwines with broader social norms and practices concerning family and gender norms.

In the past two decades, migrants' homeownership has received increasing attention, as migrants have become increasingly heterogeneous in terms of socio‐economic status and choice of the destination city. However, how migrants move across the urban hierarchy and thereby affect their housing consumption has received scant attention. Using the 2017 China Migrants Dynamic Survey, this study examines the relationship between migrants' socio‐economic status and their geographic mobility along the urban hierarchy, as well as the impacts on their housing outcomes in the destination city. Employing generalised structural equation modelling, the results show that migrants with higher education levels and higher family income are more likely to make an upward movement, through which they accumulated their capital and advantages to overcome difficulties and settle in the destination. However, the steeper they climb along the urban hierarchy, the less likely they could own a home in the destination city. This study contributes to the existing literature by highlighting the divergence in migrants' geographic mobility and its importance in understanding the variegated housing outcomes among the migration population.

This paper constructs a mobility network of Chinese scientists and a cooperation network of scientific research based on data on mobility and research cooperation in China at the urban scale. Through several methods, including spatial analysis, network analysis, and regression analysis, the nodes and bilateral relations in the two networks are found to be highly coupled. Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River Delta are hot spots for the mobility and scientific research cooperation networks of Chinese scientists. Only a few cities in the two networks play important roles, and most of the cities serve as a foil. The spatial mobility and scientific research cooperation activities of Chinese scientists are concentrated in the eastern region, the Chinese scientists’ mobility and scientific research cooperation networks are rhombus structure, the two networks both are compact and hierarchical network with Beijing as the single dominant city, and the power‐law distribution in the bilateral relationship of two networks shows a “pyramid structure”. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for the spatial co‐location relationship between the mobility and scientific cooperation of scientists.