Encounters at an End of the World

NB: I know I still have only published Part I of the epic trip to Xinjiang, but thesis anxiety and general being busy have caused a fair deal of writer's block that a research trip to the Russian Far East seems to have loosened. So, to celebrate, here's something on Vladivostok:

I don’t know if it was the feeling of stepping off a bus for the first time in 4 hours, after 22 straight hours of travel on a night train, a taxi, a bus, another bus, and another taxi partially over only nominally paved roads to make it from Harbin Xiangfang Station to central Vladivostok. Or maybe that after three quarters of a year in China, the homesickness that had quietly been simmering had finally decided to burst in the open; and therefore it was the way the combination of late romantic architecture mixed with 60s social housing reminded me of my own far-off hometown of Gmunden, Austria, or maybe how the smell of the Pacific Ocean brought back memories of Los Angeles’ own June Gloom and long walks through the fog on the beach. Maybe it was the niceness of the small pedestrian zones that positively reminded me of Rekjyavik with their small cafes and shops (or maybe that was just the mist caressing your face in the way it did in Iceland’s February). Or maybe it was the scenery - the beautiful fog-wrapped hills surrounding the city, one of the cable-stayed bridges built for the APEC summit so high as to almost disappear into the low-hanging clouds, the combination of romantic European town centers with industrial port landscapes in the way that little flairs of Hausmannian constructions still frame seaside towns in Normandy. It might have been the smell of the first good hot chocolate from a cafe I’ve had in a year. Maybe it was just the fact that probably the most audacious of my start-of-the-year travel plans (Xinjiang, Tibet, and Vladivostok) had actually came true, something I truly thank my amazing fellow travelers (and researchers, for this trip!) for. I don’t know which it was, or what combination of the above, that brought immense contentness to me upon reaching Vladivostok, a feeling that seemed to completely overpower the voice of the urbanist in me that would otherwise cringe at a pedestrian environment that made you walk underground to cross a two-lane road or lower emissions restrictions that made every tailpipe hurt the back of your throat (and there were many of them in the almost constant traffic jam). Somehow I even managed to not be bothered by the fact that our apart-hotel we had booked had not told us the location of our place and stopped answering our phone calls and thereby threatening us with a night literally left outside in the rain (though the one hour spent on the phone with hotels.com may have). I will say that being surrounded by cyrillic may be even more disheartening than traveling in China - at least reading Chinese for me gives me a feeling of accomplishment at the little bits of comprehension I manage, but cyrillic has enough similar-looking letters to Latin to endlessly frustrate my brain as it tries to form recognizable words or even recognizable sounds out of Pectopah and Уссурийск.

View from our balcony onto Aleutskaya ul.

The end of the Trans-Siberian, 1km out from Vladivostok Station

But whatever it is, Vladivostok has a special atmosphere, one that I am incredibly happy to have been able to experience. I imagine most European and American tourists probably see Vladivostok primarily at the end (or start) of a Trans-Siberian journey, but we arrived at a dumpy little bus station at the outskirts of the center city, giving us a travel gap that required a bit of negotiation with cab drivers to bridge (“traffic jam. Don’t want to go.” said one after hearing our destination downtown). Our trip had allowed us to fully appreciate the transition to a more urbanized area from the empty fields of the border region. After Ussuryisk (which, with a likely causal relationship, reminded me a bit of the parts of Hungary in which I have family - the Southeastern smaller cities defined by Soviet planning ideas), small towns began to regularly dot the landscapes, though the highway mainly revealed dark warehouses and such, with only the occasional small spire of an Orthodox church popping out of a cluster of buildings. By the airport, the environment and become semi-industrial exurb, and gave us a first glimpse of an inlet of the Pacific Ocean, in the distance. Finally, we reached city limits, though another twenty almost endless minutes would pass until the city widened from a small strip between mountains and ocean consisting mainly of the highway and a few housing developments. But once we hit Aleutskaya ul. in our cab Vladivostok gave its best impression of a mid-sized city in Europe with a storied past. Posters advertised the Mariinsky Far East Festival in July. But Vladivostok is not just a European city plopped down in the Far East. Chinese signs abounded, and the presence was felt at least the third time I had to 对不起 my way into a supermarket aisle. A giant modernist skyscraper with a Russian flag flapping loudly in the wind graced the “Square of the Fighters for the Soviet Powers.” And then, there was of course the Russian Pacific Fleet (well, most of its fighting craft. The submarines are in Petropavlovsk if I’m not mistaken), all five destroyers and one cruiser, plus the first Russian warship in the region, a 1923 steam/sailing ship that still fires its guns once a day as a museum.

But don’t get me wrong--this is the most remote large city I have been to in my life. The next closest city of similar size in the same country is found nearly 800km North in Khabarovsk, and any closer destinations of that magnitude would involve crossing that same border that took us 4 hours twice (and honestly, I don’t know how much Mudanjiang is worth a trip…). I can’t begin to imagine what life is like here, an area that ‘European’ Russians regard with a certain mythology of a ‘wild wild East’ removed from their normal consciousness and that the Kremlin only pays attention to every once in a while when its leaders remember they want to be a player in the Asia-Pacific sphere and promise major infrastructural and developmental upgrades (that, spoiler alert, usually seem to disappear and fizzle out soon after their announcements). The closest borders are with China and North Korea, with anti-Chinese sentiment having flaring up in strong ways in the 90s, and still doing so occasionally. Putin received 6 percentage points fewer votes in the last presidential election than nationally.And yes, it is isolated. Sure, there’s an airport, and Aeroflot offers four flights a day to Moscow (9 hours), but the hinterland of the city looks more like Europe would if it had 1/10th the population, and ties with neighboring countries seem to amount to little more than shuttle traders importing cheap consumer goods from China (the hard way, via the Suifenhe-Pogranichny border crossing we came in on) and cars from Korea and Japan (resulting in many taxis having the driver’s seat on the right and dials in Japanese). Allegedly, a local joke about the Lenin statute determinedly pointing South-East in front of the train station has him pointing the way to a better future… by suggesting a move to Japan.

Pedestrian zone on ul. Admirala Fokina

The business end of Vladivostok Station,
with evening commuter traffic

Either way, my first trip to Russia has been an eventful and fascinating one. I ran into a European city on the Pacific Ocean, though one with many more signs in Chinese than you would find West of the Urals. I found a beautiful old town, sandwiched between hills and a port landscape to rival the best of them. I experienced a June fog and low-to-mid tens temperature ranges that felt incredible after weeks of the hot and humid mess that is summer in Beijing. And I found a city I would like to return to, understanding how useless I would be on my own without a Russian speaker with me. Was it worth the $200 in visa fees and the intense 麻烦 required to be allowed in this country? Current Kevin, who decided to worry about future budgeting when he gets back to Beijing, thinks so at least as he stares contemplatively down Aleutskaya ul from his 5th floor walk-up’s balcony.


Простите, Я не говорю по-русски. До свидания.

一路向西 Part 1: Beijing to Lanzhou

NB: This is Part 1 of a 4-part series on 8 incredible days traveling from Beijing to Ürümqi by train, nominally at least over the May 1st and May 4th holiday period. Keep tuned for the rest, will be coming soon.

NB2: It has come to my attention that some kind things have been said about DftNC on the 2016 Yenching scholars page - so welcome to any incoming Yenching Scholars, I hope you guys find this blog useful or fun, and if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the comments or find me on Facebook!  

We left Beijing West Station the day before on our first sleeper of the trip. To my slight chagrin, we rolled South out of the station, and so turned over the North China Plain instead of cutting straight through the mountains towards Inner Mongolia. And so, our first several hours took us through what I consider the most incredibly boring landscape the entire country has to offer - still-rising suburban developments outside of Beijing gave way to unending acres of flat, nondescript farmland quickly fading into the smog that seems to permanently hang over the fields of southern Hebei province. Nevertheless, we were in good spirits. We were heading West, following the paths of literary figures and silk road traders alike, traveling over 3,000km by train along almost the entire East-West axis of one of the largest countries in the world. Our traveling packs were stowed above our sleeper berths, and we were comfortably hanging around, enjoying the hum of activity on the train - the ubiquitous passing of conductors peddling everything from the always necessary fangbiangmian (instant noodles) to little toy robots, the radio playing Chinese pop (and, strangely, a Danish soft rock band called Michael Learns to Rock that sings in English and is primarily known in East Asia), the patter of steel wheels on unwelded track.

I retired to my middle bunk a bit early. I may have used some diplomacy to switch from the top bunk written on my ticket, but given that my continuing jet lag (I just came back from a brief trip to the US) makes it likely that I'm the first one up, I didn't feel that bad - the middle bunk allows the best view lying down in hard sleeper compartments. Under me, friends were watching the Fellowship of the Ring for another few hours as I drifted off to sleep.

On waking up, I rolled over to look outside, and my first glance could've as well been on the moon. In the early twilight (we'd be at least one time zone over already if China had time zones), ghostly mountains and hills faded into view, dotted with a bare minimum in vegetation, separated by dirt valleys with dry streams carved into them by the last rains. A few villages blended into the mountains, dark and unlit, the same color as the surrounding terrain. This was the same Loess Plateau that covers much of Ningxia and Shaanxi, and whose caves provided refuge to the Red Army in Yan’an during the Long March.

Early morning on the Loess (apologies for the quality)

6:20, and the train is waking up. A benefit of slight jet lag is making it to the sinks before the morning rush. At 6:30 on the dot, the radio comes back on, with morning greetings from China railways (”女生们先生们，早上好！”) and morning music (some inoffensive pop rock song with choruses such as "heeeey 早上好" repeated over and over, one that we would grow to, um, ‘resent’, by the third time we’d hear it on this trip).

We arrived in Lanzhou, the gate to the Northwest, at the mouth of the Hexi Corridor, straddling both sides of the (very) Yellow River. Very urban, very dense, Lanzhou at ground level makes a good case for being much larger than it actually is. While ‘only’ having 2 million inhabitants in its built-up/urban area, the steep sides of the Yellow River valley forces the city into a long, thin, but tall ribbon on both sides of the river.

The first thing that stood out to me as we began making our way into the city was the high visibility and large number of mosques. It’s frustratingly difficult to find statistics on local demographics, but some numbers suggest around 1 million Muslims in Gansu Province as a whole (total population around 30 million), with a bit under 3,000 mosques. Living in Beijing, it’s not all that easy to imagine many prominently placed religious institutions (barring Daoist and Buddhist temples mainly maintained as touristic and cultural destinations) - not that they don’t exist, but it’s hard to accidentally turn a corner and be faced with a giant mosque or church facade. Lanzhou has no such qualms, and fifteen minutes by bus from the train station, we turn onto a road split by the Lanzhou Xiguan Mosque (西关清真寺) confidently placed in a square in its middle. We got off the bus and were able to get a glimpse inside at a mosque with pretty modern-looking architecture and facilities (the current iteration is from 1990 - a mosque has been at this location since the Ming Dynasty), with kids playing out in the back, and a beautiful old tree in the courtyard.

Our first destination was the Gansu Provincial Museum. Every Chinese province and region has one of these in its capital - they’re usually free, and are often a decent first look at a new province. The Gansu provincial museum is actually the home of some pretty famous Silk Road relics, including the “Galloping Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow” (马踏飞燕 Mǎtà fēiyàn), a 1900-year-old Han Dynasty sculpture that’s become the symbol of the city of Lanzhou (the traditional sculpture on the square outside the main train station is a large replica of this statue). But, it was not to be, the Silk Road collection was closed for refurbishment. We instead saw an exhibition on the Ancient Tea Horse Road (commonly 茶马古道), another influential trade route, passing from Yunnan’s tea-producing regions to Burma in the West and Sichuan (and Lanzhou?) in the North.

Beautifully carved artifact in the Gansu Provincial Museum

Spot the Ted Cruz lookalike

More curious, at least to the non-Chinese observer, was the “Red Gansu” (红色甘肃) exhibit. Given the important role the area around Gansu province played in the Chinese Civil War and the history of the Communist Party, the motivation for the exhibit seems pretty clear, both in the context of local pride and to help out local propaganda efforts (The Provincial Museum was a “Patriotic Education Center”, after all). Rows of grainy photographical portraits of local and transient military leaders lined the walls (including that a certain Xi Zhongxun 习仲勋, Xi Jingping’s father and a prominent member of the first generation of PRC leadership until his multiple purgings later in his career). Dioramas of important military engagements (including a battle for the first Yellow River bridge in Lanzhou) decorated corners of the exhibition, accompanied by a soundtrack of soldiers yelling. We did find some interesting artifacts, like a surviving early party member card (one of its forms to be filled out asked for a ‘description of struggle’), and some old handwritten news bulletins.

Lunch was Lanzhou La Mian (拉面), or pulled noodles, a pretty common staple local dish, prepared by pulling dough out until thin enough to be considered noodles (watching the process is pretty fun; experienced makers can go from a lump of dough to a large bowlful of noodles in a few minutes just by stretching the noodles out in a midair dance). We got a bit of unwanted photographical attention from the patrons of the restaurant, including from the owner, immortalized as the ‘兰州老板’ (the Lanzhou Boss), who has been gracing Keshav with videos of random foreigners failing at eating noodles at his shop ever since he took one for the team and gave up his wechat ID in exchange for a group photo….

Our afternoon brought us down to the Yellow River, where we mainly whiled away the time until our next night train on its shores. Turns out a scenic(-ish) speedboat ride starts at 35RMB / person! Finally, a quick climb up to Lanzhou’s White Pagoda gave a good last look from above at this not unphotogenic city.

Lanzhou's skyline (PC: Keshav Kelkar)

Because of our underestimating of the traffic (the subway system won’t open for a few years, and it shows), we had to sprint to get our luggage from the staffed lockers and were waved through the ticket barriers that had already emptied of travelers. We dropped off our stuff in our compartment, and a few of us made our way to the restaurant car to see the Western suburbs of Lanzhou slowly fade into rural scenes of the Loess Plateau over a good plate of 大盘鸡 (lit. ‘big plate of chicken’, a Western Chinese staple, and prepared in a pretty decent manner by the train chefs). Leg one was over, and our real adventure, towards the frontier and past the Chinese ‘core’, was about to begin.

4.5 Months - A Retrospective

(NB: Posted retroactively because I'm occasionally pretty lazy. Most of this comes from January 15th)


It's -18 degrees C outside, the 'no smoking' signs are about as honest and useful as the 'no bargaining' signs in Chinese department stores, and I've just eaten a caviar crepe for breakfast. I'm in Moscow, or, more accurately, the international part of Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport (protip: don't fly Aeroflot unless you *absolutely* have to, like for an intra-Russian connection that S7 doesn't operate on. If you're flying China - Europe on a tight budget, do yourself the favor and fly LOT Polish instead... I didn't know I could even *have* cramps in some of these muscles), and I've just left China for my winter break. This seems as good as any to (at least in an abridged form) list some things I learned from my first 4.5 months in YCA and living in Beijing.


1) It turns out that bad air quality actually affects your concentration and productivity. This is *definitely* noticeable if you forget to turn on your air purifier during essay-writing season.
2) PKU has mastered the art of late-night college food. Starting at around 10pm and until later than I've ever been up, there's chuar (any sorts of meat on a stick), malatang (boiled meat and vegetables served with peanut sauce), the best fried noodles I have ever had in my life (my Chinese teacher passed on a rumor that street noodles occasionally are spiked so you get addicted and come back often, but if you can afford to spike noodles for less than the 10RMB price, there are probably some more pressing drug problems that should be looked into...), and cheap beer at stands all around and just outside of my part of campus.

3) If the air is clean, Beijing is absolutely gorgeous. You can see the mountains in 2+ directions, you can go hiking, you can go to one of the many beautiful parks (Yuanmingyuan being my favorite), you can go for long walks to explore random neighborhoods, and it's more or less always sunny...

4) ... but the air is only clean around 1/3 of the time. This usually happens when the wind shifts and powerful gusts come through the mountain passes to the Northwest of Beijing from more sparsely populated Inner Mongolia. In the spring, so I'm told and will likely find out soon enough, these winds bring sandstorms (in the words of a frustrated Soviet planning advisor in the 50s, "Beijing lacks sufficient water resources, and is plagued by wind and sand [and jesus, why would you build a city here, why?]"). Otherwise, the air runs the gamut from 'eh, this sucks, but I can go outside', to 'I can literally not see the next block over'. The airport gets shut down in the latter case sometimes because jets literally can't see the next jet ahead of them on the taxiway.

5) The Beijing accent is instantly recognizable, and almost universally vilified outside of Beijing. It primarily consists of changing any -ng, -n, -uan, and similar syllabic endings to words to a guttural 'arrr' sound, though depending on how BeijingRen someone is, they might even change -ou and other vowel-ish endings as well. You get used to it pretty quickly, and it's fun to use (actually a necessity on occasion, I've had several cab drivers not understand "Xizhimen" as a destination but understand "Xizhimarr" instead). Non-Beijingers will however make fun of you when you call a gate a 'marr' instead of a 'men' or a bottle a 'piaarrrrr' instead of a 'ping'.

6) Taobao access is crucial. My life pre-Taobao was filled with frustration. My life post-Taobao includes a fluffy red rug in my room (~$10), my air purifier (~$18), a sound system coming in next week... In short, much of modern life in Beijing requires online banking and an Alipay or at least a WeChat Wallet account.


7) I honestly love this place. I'm incredibly excited for my second semester, in which I will hopefully start digging deeper and really start to get to know the incredible number of unique neighborhoods this city has and will continue to develop in the future. I have some really cool research opportunities coming up (I'll likely dig much deeper into Beijing's urban development and infrastructure planning in my master's thesis, and there might be some posts on here about a certain trip to the Russian Far East in June.....), and I'm incredibly thankful to the Academy and to the people I've met here for giving me this opportunity to get to know, at least a little bit, this fascinating city and country.

Ruminations on Someone Else's National Day (A Story of October 1) OR Entropy OR A Night in a City That Does Sleep

‘”If the city was dreaming," he told me, "then the city is asleep. And I do not fear cities sleeping, stretched out unconscious around their rivers and estuaries, like cats in the moonlight. Sleeping cities are tame and harmless things." "What I fear," he said, "is that one day the cities will waken. That one day the cities will rise.”’ —Neil Gaiman, World’s End

The wind welcomed us at the start of our journey, blowing from the West, taking with it the pollution that had meekly tried to come creeping back into the sky above Beijing that evening. The wind was the perfect early fall wind, its large sweeping gestures didn’t cut through the single layer of additional shirts we had on, but rather pushed us forward towards our destination, as if to try make us fear being left behind. Its the kind of wind that motivates you, that makes you jog every few minutes because you feel like it, the kind that shows up at the start of a college year and briefly convinces you that this year will be ‘the year’ for something. 

We turned onto Haidian Road, and walked down the middle of the street. Why shouldn’t we? It was 2 in the morning, and all quiet residential streets were completely devoid of movement not caused by the fall weather rustling loudly through the trees and our own brisk marching. We climbed the pedestrian bridge that takes Zhongguancun Beidajie over the 4th Ring Road, and even that usual clogged, tired behemoth seemed to be flowing along in an easy sleep caressed by the gusts, with only a handful of cars making their perennial journey around the city. 

Zhongguancun passed by us, its massive towers showing no sign of the tech workers and venture capitalists that fill the area during the day. The last subway had reached its terminus several hours ago; only single cars and the occasional night bus meandered their way through the office center; Beijing stirring in its sleep, small against the backdrop of the 10-lane avenue. Right now, this city belonged to us. 

We passed the Third Ring Road and cheered. Our journey had hit its first major milestone. We had reached the next concentric square deeper into the historic heart of the city. We left the office towers and grandeur of China’s technological present behind us and turned left, starting the zigzag pattern designed to use any minor flaw in the grid pattern to cut off a small bit of the ten-mile journey to the ultimate center of the city. The wind, which until now had played freely with the open roads of Zhongguancun and the economic centers of Haidian district, couldn’t quite make it into the smaller residential street we were now wandering down. The streets we took slowly became smaller and quieter, with shuttered shops making way for 10-story apartment buildings, their windows covered in cages up to the 3rd or 4th floor to keep burglars out and laundry in. We passed through a residential security gate, ubiqituous across the city and as usual without much indication as to which side is ‘out’ or ‘in’. The streets became paths between slender complexes, winding through backyards of silent houses. At 3am, Beijing was deep asleep. 

We hit a closed back gate. No guard was to be found, and the chain-link door was padlocked shut. We backtracked around several corners, and hit another dead end. The security gate we had passed to enter this quarter was deceiving; the seemingly arbitrary dance of ‘staffed’ and ‘unstaffed’, ‘open’ and ‘closed’, ‘outside’ or ‘inside’ played out at every security hut in the city had led us astray and left us trapped. We wandered through some more streets, watching the residential buildings morph into a university campus, just as quiet and asleep, save for some lonely lights in scattered top-floor offices, easily imagined to be filled with veterinary graduate students using the only workspace around their dormss with electricity this late to slave away over a paper. We reached the Southern edge of the wall that enclosed this continuity of buildings that we had unwittingly entered so long ago. Faced with the prospect of backtracking for a half hour, we glanced at the security camera menacingly hovering over the large iron gate spanning what quickly turned into a wide, tree-lined avenue behind the wall, and promptly climbed over anyways. It seemed that once again, we had reached the outside. 

But at the end of the avenue was another security gate, of the open, but staffed variety. The two night guards looked at us with the mild interest that comes from staring at the darkness for eight hours each night and seeing something break their monotone. We passed unchallenged. Was it now that we had returned to the outside? In Beijing, it’s never clear what that means. Not every gate forms an enclosure, and not every open road leads to another. The medieval walls that used to form concentric squares around the Forbidden City are gone, but in their place rise freeways and avenues, oftentimes just as impassable. But for now, we had managed to escape the more obvious confines of the campus we were trapped in, and continued our journey unhindered. 

Our pace quickened. We had lost time, and besides, we had hit a major avenue, and the wind came roaring back into our consciousness, resuming its push in our backs. Daliushu Road boldly cut through the grid, and signs for landmarks we wanted to pass became more commonplace. Road signs started pointing towards Xizhimen, the rail and bus center that marked the North-West corner of the 2nd Ring Road, and with it, the border to the Inner City. We crossed the Nanchang River, between the Beijing Zoo and the Beijing North Station exit tracks. On our left was another cluster of massive office buildings that had sprung up around the transport hub. On our right, we saw our first hutong of the night. A few blocks had somehow survived the building boom thus far, and still showed the dark, single-story construction that defined the city a few decades previously. With it came the smells and sounds of Beijing’s alleys. A stray dog barked. A public washroom made its presence known from a block away. Chuar wagons, abandoned for the night, were comfortably watiing for their owners to return and fill the area with the smell of grilling meat, maybe even attracting workers from across the street in the modern Xizhimen high rises. A lonely Chinese flag waved above a low-rise building. 

Continuing South on Beilishi Road, we went down a tree-lined avenue, with apartments rising on the right and the PKU Hospital filling the space between us and the 2nd Ring Road on our left. The wind had started to die down, and even the occasional car, the first few seen since leaving Haidian, rumbled past. We walked on until Fuchengmen Outer Street, and finally turned East into the Inner City. Our last major landmark before Beijing’s ultimate center had been reached. 

Right after crossing the Ring Road, we turned right onto Minkang Hutong, a name reminiscent of an alley in old Beijing and in denial of the Beijing Financial Street which had replaced the neighborhood in favor of banks, investment bureaus, and the occasional InterContinental. Where old men likely used to sit outside their doors and play cards or smoke, watching a lively pace of life roll by was now filled with impeccably clean sidewalks, large bilingual directional signs pointing to such local landmarks as the Yinglan International Financial Center or the Beijing Equity Exchange, and cold, dark skyscrapers rising above even the tech hubs of Zhongguancun, seven miles behind us.

It was getting late. Though the Beijing Financial Center was still a ghost town, the distant rumble of the Second Ring Road was getting louder and more sustained. Beijing stirred again. We left the ultimate expression of the modern Chinese economy behind, and turned East, on a collision course with the Zhongnanhai governmental complex, likely easily visible from above through the windows of the corner offices of the capitalist behemoths behind us. The average building height steadily decreased, signifying as it only could in Beijing that the center of the city was drawing near. 

Along Linjing Hutong, our path became more red. As we went on, Chinese flags became more and more plentiful, until they were hanging above every doorway and on every gate. To what degree these were put up as a grassroots sign of patriotism was put in doubt by their incredible uniformity - the closer the Forbidden Palace, the denser the occurrence of equally sized flags looking down from every possible location. From Linjing Hutong, we turned onto Fuyou Street. The midrise apartment buildings and occasional clusters of skyscrapers that had accompanied us for most of the night were now replaced with 2-story, likely unaffordable, condominuims and mansions on the right, and a dark red wall topped with black and green shingles on the left. This was Zhongnanhai, the communist party complex, where the real political authority of the country resided. The change in importance of the neighborhood was subtle; similar security gates lined the red wall as they did so many others in the city. But a closer glance at the streetlights and trees revealed cameras, pointed down the street and at every nook and cranny, blending in withe the foliage. Though cameras were ubiquitous in Beijing, as in every other major Chinese city, a sense of cool, dark judgement emanated from this setup, quietly reminding the casual walker that there are some lines that could not be crossed here. 

The sky was beginning to lighten. Our walking had almost turned into a jog, quiet and determined in face of the knowledge that the sun wasn’t far from the horizon. The sky had turned from black to a dark, rich bluish purple; Orion, which had been so easily visible throughout the impeccably clear night to the Southeast had faded away. Lights and movement in the distance signaled that the long sleep of Beijing we had witnessed was soon to be over. 

Finally, we reached Chang’an Avenue, the central axis of Beijing, a street with a name power few others can match. The avenue lay before us, stretching out towards the horizon in both directions, perfectly straight, early morning traffic already thundering down its many lanes. Intricately designed yet massive lightposts still illuminated the way, reminiscent of oversized Parisian fixtures. But a closer look banished that thought. What from far away looked like extra ornate design quirks next to the lamps were in fact a dozen cameras on each lamppost, fixiated on each and every square inch of roadway and sidewalk. The top of each pole wasn’t a shiny visual effect, but a bank of loudspeakers capable of yelling orders at crowds bigger than could be imagined. So these lamps lined the street, a double row of power projections reminding the souls that passed under them of their place, but yet a symbol of weakness, of a desire for control, of a fear that never truly left its designers since those many fateful moments in its past. Beijing’s nighttime dreams that we had wandered through for the past four hours were coming to an end; the powerful West wind playing uncontrolled as it pleased with the wide avenues had died down, the lonely stray vehicles that could be followed along intricate stories of their own were replaced with the anonymous, fluid workings of one of the biggest cities on Earth.

We turned East onto Chang’an Avenue. Under the stern gaze of a guard, we passed a pedestrian barrier, a few metal fences designed to control the flow of pedestrians along Beijing’s most famous road. We passed another. And another. We passed a last one, this time with an X-Ray machine, and reached Tiananmen, the gate of heavenly peace, presided over by the Mona Lisa smile of Chairman Mao.

I had held off on writing about our experience at Tiananmen for weeks. On the one hand, at 6 in the morning after ten miles of walking, my brain was slowly shutting off to new epxeriences. But, additionally, compared to the strong impression the journey itself had left, the ritual we witnessed at Tiananmen seemed more distant. This wasn’t my national day. I saw the red flag go up behind the thousands of selfie sticks and children on their parents’ shoulders. People probably cheered, but I honestly don’t remember. We had room to move, but across Chang’an Avenue on the side of the square hosting Mao’s Mausoleum, I only saw one gigantic mass of people stretching out as far as I could make out in my limited view within my own crowd. A few minutes after the flag reached its position and the sun finally showed itself above the buildings of Chang’an avenue, I escaped the faction wanting to stay on the square and tiredly slogged back to the subway with some like-minded friends. We didn’t talk much on the hour ride back; we had all been up for close to 24 hours by now. We got back to BeiDa around 9, and I instantly stumbled to my bed to spend the rest of the morning there. 

But what I do remember is an undercurrent of energy in this city. Twenty-two million people combine in unlimited interactions, dealings, friendships, disputes, crimes, heroisms, and actions, banal, world-changing, and everything in between. They are penned in to some extent, but no amount of control can stop the disorder that will still exist and work its mischievous interventions along every step of the way. Beijing knew this. It was written on the crowd barriers and the lampposts lining Chang’an Avenue. It was written along every little security station across the city, on every little deviation from what looked like a perfect grid, a perfect city plan from afar. The little hutongs and alleyways had life that can’t be controlled, the actions of individual scooter drivers jumping sidewalks and weaving through lanes to save several seconds off their trips cannot be constrained by the forced guides of ring roads and avenues. And I get to see all of this happen. I think that’s pretty cool.  

24 Manchu Hours

(PS (pre-script, I guess): if anyone knows how to better manage posts with lots of pictures in blogger, any help would be much appreciated >.< ) 

Ahhh, November in Beijing. The days grow cold, the air grows thick (“it’s just fog, guys, we swear!”), and the roads constantly seem to have a few inches of puddles in them. Though a beautiful freak snowstorm (auspiciously timed to the start of the Beijing Forum) briefly turned our campus into an early winter wonderland, opportunities for outside experiences had returned to the state perfectly encapsulated by the words on the online summary of most Beijing landmarks, “uhhh, November probably isn’t the best time to visit here…”

So, there is but one thing for the restless student to do — bust out of the city! And that’s we did a few Wednesdays ago. In my searches for day trips around Beijing, I came across a TIME article entitled “Five Reasons to Visit Chengde”, and was instantly captivated. Being a Yuanmingyuan aficionado myself, the promise of a summer palace, but with mountains (!) was quite appealing to me. We got together our solid traveling crew, and booked our trip.

We would be taking the night train to Chengde - 6 hours of sleep were the theoretical upper limit, but we were confident that the promise of sightseeing and walking through the snow would keep us fueled for the day. Our train left from Beijing Zhan (Beijing Station — I’m only missing Beijing BeiZhan now in my travels out of the four main stations in the city!), the oldest and most classically beautiful train station in the city. Built by the PRC as part of its ’10 Great Buildings’ to showcase the strength of the new regime and opened in 1959, it was within the former old city wall and boasted some beautiful high-ceilinged waiting rooms that we skipped in favor of a quick (if shitty) burger at the McD’s on the first floor. The roof of the main passage over the tracks was still in full Olympic flair, with murals depicting every continent’s major landmarks dimly seen in the late night lighting. It was roughly midnight; a few night trains were still scheduled to depart, but the station was about as empty as a major piece of transportation infrastructure could get (in that there was a crowd of several hundred around the entrance to our track, but few others milling about). 

BeiJingZhan at midnight

Early morning in the southern suburbs of Chengde

Naoya had pulled the short straw as assigned by the booking algorithm and was banished to the next soft sleeper compartment over (we were five, soft sleepers only have 4 beds a compartment and hard sleepers with 6 were sold out), but for now, until we got too tired, we all gathered in one compartment, sitting on the lower bunks and waiting for the train, K7742, to leave. The compartment was relatively well put together; four bunks, two to a side, framed a small table by the winter with a kettle for boiling water. The door out of the compartment locked and had a mirror on its inside. Access to the top bunk was through a foldable foothold by the door, and each bunk and a little reading light to itself. The space above the corridor could be used for luggage storage if one looked past the crumbs and dirt of many train trips that covered it. The sheets were more or less clean, if one looked past the occasional off-colored stain. 

We left on time, at 12:25 am, passing slowly through the Eastern suburbs of Beijing before turning North towards the mountains. I accidentally gave my ticket to the conductor in exchange for a thicker credit-card-shaped token (apparently a service for the safekeeping of tickets during the night, since they were needed to exit the station). Chips and drinks passed the time before we one by one retreated to our bunks (Naoya to his exile in the next room over). Thankfully the top left bunk that I chose was long enough for me, and honestly, pretty comfortable. I fell asleep very quickly, and woke up to a grey, snowy morning as we rumbled by a series of equally gray new skyscrapers. We had entered the outskirts of Chengde.

It was too foggy to see the mountains around us, but for the last twenty minutes we passed through a town that already felt different from Beijing. Due to geography, the high-rises did not follow the same permanent grid pattern in Beijing, and the architecture became slightly more angular. We arrived in Chengde on time at 6:30am. Outside the station, a socialist statue welcomed us. Hungry, we got some beef noodle soup breakfast at a small restaurant on the train station square, and made our way onwards.

If you ask me, this is the perfect weather to visit this place

Our first destination was the Qing Summer Palace in Chengde, the 避暑山庄 (lit. “mountain villa for escaping the heat”), closer to the dynasty’s Manchu homelands North of the mountains. Though it was cold and snowy out, morning old folk dancing was going as strong as ever in the first square inside the park, Chinese dance pop blasting out across the moving crowd of roughly a hundred. We quickly realized (to our happiness) that we were likely one of only very few tourists who dared make the trek in the winter; almost all other park guests seemed to be locals with season tickets.

The park was fantastic. The light blanket of snow coupled with the lack of crowds gave the whole area a dreamlike quality; palace buildings faded into the fog and small side buildings were perfectly reflected in the absolute stillness of the lake at its center. The mastery of Chinese landscape architecture was once again on show - the terrain itself was used as part of the garden aesthetic, with the mountains both framing the gardens and allowing for pagodas to pop out of their forests to add a background as well. Everywhere in the palace were little reminders that the Qing Dynasty did not tick the same way that most other historical rulers over China did. As presumptive conquerers (they were Manchu, originally speaking a different language, composed of a different ethnic group, and from an area somewhat separate from the main Han-dominated historical region of China), their foreignness followed them throughout their regency. The Qing tried to embrace it as an example of a multicultural China; most of the inscriptions and steles here are written in Manchu, Tibetan, and Mongolian in addition to Chinese (an attempt which ultimately proved to be futile - one of the somewhat incredible abilities of Chinese culture was to completely Sinicize more or less any invaders: today, the Manchu language is all but non-existent, and the last Manchu emperor was said to only speak it at a very basic level. There are currently estimated to only be around 10 native speakers left). 

The multi-ethnic focus of the Qing was also present in the architectural styles of the palace; slightly more varied than one would find in a traditional Han palace, as exemplified by the highest pagoda on the grounds. Octagonal, beige, brick, with a gilded round spire on top, the pagoda did away with the flourishes of earlier Chinese architectural styles and incorporated a Buddhist stupa top. Its courtyard retained a more traditional collection of stone steles carried by large Bixi (stone tortoises that I’m convinced were the inspiration for the Lion Turtles in Avatar), but inscribed in multiple languages as opposed to the traditional (at least for royal palaces) Mandarin.  

The Qing Mountain Resort

Unfortunately, the mountain paths seemed to be closed for the winter (come on, you have a place called the “Pagoda for Watching Snow” and you don’t let people watch snow from it!?), so we had to make do with the “Plains Area” of the palace, still enough for a few hours of leisurely strolling. 

Lunch was the most famous Manchu restaurant in Chengde, and did not disappoint. Deer with vegetables, fried rabbit, and camel meat pancakes (friggin’ amazing) filled the table, accompanied by a thin and flaky Machu-style pancake that tasted more or less like a better fortune cookie that we bought a few packs of for snacks back home. 

Fake, but honestly pretty aesthetically pleasing windows

Two Chinese-style pavilions on top of the Little Potala,
facing the back wall of the Mountain Resort

What's that? This was supposed to be a
Tibetan-style building? Well, this is China. So deal with it.

After lunch, our way took us to the next valley south, to two of the “8 Outer Temples”, built by the Qianlong Emperor (just like everything else in the Qing Dynasty, it seems) primarily to host traveling monks and guests. Our main goal was the “Little Potala Palace,” a small-scale replace of Tibet’s most famous building. Once again, the multi-ethnic composition of the Qing worldview was on full display. From far away, the compound is clearly modeled on Tibetan architecture - the Qianlong Emperor frequently used this place to host Tibetan envoys (though Tibet was no longer the massive empire that could militarily threaten China as it did in the 7th-9th centuries and was now a protectorate of the Qing, it was still an important region to the empire both strategically and culturally). 

View over the valley of the 8 Outer Temples

The campus of the Little Potala. In the background
you can see the ski slopes that the Qianlong Emperor
used to access the temple more quickly.
He was quite the avid skier [citation needed].

But the inside of the palace was unequivocally Chinese. Chinese-style pavilions crowned the building, and the inside of the primary red structure could be mistaken for a Confucian temple in Beijing, barring its larger height. But its status as a replica was clear. Nearly all windows were fake - parts of the wall painted red to mimic the shutter style of the original - and most buildings didn’t even pretend to have a door to enter their empty shells. In a sense, this was once again representative of the struggles the Qing felt - never fully integrated, and having to spend massive amounts of resources to give at least the appearance of a multi-cultural empire that the majority Han were uncomfortable with accepting. The Qing finally fell, and with it Imperial China, after a series of revolts, rebellions, and, most importantly, foreign colonizations, in 1912. 

The way back was on a normal day train, K7712, an old workhorse consisting of double-decker carriages, 5 seats across. Unfortunately, the seat backs themselves felt as if they made less than a 90 degree angle with the seat, so my advice would be to avoid these trains for longer rides. Thankfully, the lack of too many other passengers (no doubt the fact that the train is currently slower than a bus trip to Beijing by a fair bit until the opening of the Beijing-Shenyang High Speed Rail Line in a few years contributed to the low occupancy) meant that we could spread out and nap across the seats (well, this mainly meant I had to enjoy the Yanjing bottle I bought on the way to the train station myself…). Beijing was reached around midnight. Our 24 hours had been successful. 

Last order of business: update the wikitravel page to reflect that no, visiting Chengde outside the summer isn’t ‘depressing’, and also that there are more trains than the 5 listed there. 

Migrant Schools and the Effect of Rural-to-Urban Migration on Education

Hey all! Just a warning: this post is incredibly long, and deals with serious issues and academic quotes. So, if you're not into that, I have a great post on a 24-hour trip to Chengde coming up soon, with pretty pictures and all. 

Deciding what content to put on this blog isn’t always easy. So far, I’ve focused on some of the little things about my current life in China; hospitals, fun propaganda videos, and hiking trips have actually taken up much of my experience. For most of these topics, I’ve tried to dig deeper after the fact in writing my summaries—one of my main motivations for writing here is to frame my own experiences in a way that makes them more meaningful or enlightening for myself. This focus has also probably slowed down my update frequency; I have several drafts at various stages of completeness, but have lacked the motivation necessary to morph them into something that not just blandly or humorously describes what I’ve been experiencing, but to try and allow me to understand how those experiences came to be (this is an apology as well, I see from site statistics that people actually regularly check this blog for updates, so many apologies for the long delay :p Also I'm flattered, thanks guys).

It is for this reason that I’ve held up on talking about more serious or complex issues, such as, for example, college housing, or the topic of this post, migrant schools, things that I have definitely had experiences with, have definitely fascinated me, but things that I don’t feel comfortable talking about yet. I am acutely aware that having grown up and lived for my whole life elsewhere coupled with my own relative lack of decent Chinese skills deprives me of much of the sociocultural context that would allow me to fully examine these issues. If there is one thing that I’ve learned since coming to China it is that the differences in culture and society between “the West” and China (ignoring for a moment the inadequacies of that broad categorization) are large enough so as to severely hamper the accurate study of societal themes for casual observers. 

However, I think I’m going to start digging deeper once more. Writing on this blog has really allowed me to understand various phenomena better than I would have without doing the (admittedly superficial) research necessary to put together these posts. So, I hope that in doing so, I will be able to get closer to how society, culture, policy, and government work in China, and hopefully share that a little with those of you who haven’t yet been here. 

"From here on in… I may be as woefully wrong as Humphrey Belcher, who believed the time was ripe for a cheese cauldron." - Prof. Dumbledore

I will start with the case of migrant schools.

(NB: the following developed out of a group project for one of my classes, ‘we’ refers to the research group I was in)

The Hukou System

The vast majority of social services in China are tied to an all-encompassing household registration system known as the Hukou system (户口簿). A Hukou record contains birth, death, marriage, parents, and, most importantly in this present context, the identification of the record-holder as a resident of a specific area. This system is the basis of public resource allocation throughout state roles—the number of schools and teachers hired in a certain place is often based on how many people are registered in a certain place. 

Most importantly, the hukou system prevents free movement of place of residence within the country. A Chinese family registered in a small village in underdeveloped Ningxia Province can’t just pack up and move to Shanghai on their own decision. Though it is possible to change the place where one is registered, this process is incredibly difficult and usually involves a point-based system designed to only let in educated, well-off rural-to-urban transplants. However, this system has not discouraged millions from seeking better job opportunities and quality of life in cities anyways. To put this movement into perspective, 54% of China’s population lives in cities, but only 36% of China’s population has an urban Hukou - in other words, roughly 250 million Chinese live in cities without being registered in cities. It’s pretty important to note that, ironically enough, Chinese economy growth would have been much more modest without this massive migration —for example, the World Bank estimates that labor allocation from (rural) agriculture to non-agricultural sectors has contributed 16% to Chinese economic growth 1978-2005. 

The consequences of this discrepancy between domicile and ‘official’ residence strongly affect the lives of rural-to-urban migrants. Only urban hukou holders are able to completely access government services, including welfare and pensions. And, as will be explained below, access to the official public school system is difficult or outright impossible for the children of migrant families. 

I won’t fully go into the origins of the hukou system or its original intents, since the history of the system is pretty complicated and beyond the scope of this post (for now). 

Barriers to Entering the Public School System as a Migrant Child

Because of their status as ‘illegitimate’, migrant children face significant administrative and financial barriers to enter the normal state-sponsored public school system. For one, public schools usually require a long series of documents that migrant families often can’t produce. One study (Goodman 2015) saw that up to 8 documents from parents were required before migrant children could be enrolled, including a state ID card, a temporary residence permit, an employment permit, both parents’ health certificate, population planning certificate (in the same vein as the One Child Policy), social insurance certificate, guardianship or birth certificate, and the child’s health certificate. Sometimes these documents are still in the family’s home county, and sometimes they are just physically unable to get them due to their own illegitimate status. 

In addition, public schools usually require extra fees from migrant families. The same study in Beijing found 2 official government fees for children without residential permits, an educational compensation fee （教育补偿费）of 1000RMB per semester, and a temporary schooling fee of 680RMB per semester, not to mention up to 15 other fees. Total fees can rise up to 8000RMB (around $1250) per year for primary school, with that number rising for junior and senior high school. The families in Beijing facing these fees usually have a monthly income of 700 - 1200RMB (around $100-180). All in all, migrant children are required to pay 5 to 6 times the fees charged local students. These numbers vary greatly depending on local policies; a lack of a coherent national policy (or at least a lack of compliance to any national policy) on the subject means that local governments have the ability to more or less arbitrarily set fees, including “donations”, and entry requirements.

Attending a Migrant School

As a result, only 12.5% of migrant children in Beijing could afford to attend state schools in 2002. These numbers can be very different depending on the location and year, being strongly influenced by local policies, but in general, across the country the majority of migrant children in urban areas end up in migrant schools—private schools of often dubious educational quality but which are significantly cheaper than their public counterparts. 

These schools are often defined by poor facilities (including missing blackboards, cracked chairs, lack of heating, in extreme cases the schools are housed in abandoned warehouses…), poor teaching quality (Goodman 2015 even recorded an English teacher who did not know what any of the words she copied on the board meant), usually no physical education, meal support, or health support (usually offered at public schools), and some schools are forced to relocate frequently to avoid getting shut down by authorities.

Source: Chen and Feng 2013

The graph above shows a couple of results from a study done in Shanghai and published in 2013. In general, teachers in migrant schools are less well-educated and have less experience, as can be expected given their unofficial status. The third statistic, showing the percentage of parents of migrant children who think that the urban school is better than the school their children left behind back in their rural origins, is important in light of the incredible disparity in educational quality between rural and urban China, which will be briefly covered below. Finally, the percentage of families with incomes of over 3000RMB in the study group in Shanghai in public and migrant schools shows how the current system exacerbates income inequalities in education, as is to be expected given the barriers to entry to the official system.

Consequences

Because of barriers to entry into the public school system and the lack of quality migrant schools, the problem of migrant education results in undereducated migrant children (at least compared to their urban counterparts) and an exacerbation of urban inequality. 

Source: Chen and Feng 2013

The above graph, from the same study in Shanghai, shows scores in a standardized test the researchers gave to migrant and local students in public schools and migrant students in migrant schools. The differences are clear; the education gap between migrant students in public and local schools is much greater than that between local and migrant students in public schools. However, the above graph also provides hope; the top two rows show that migrant students are capable of catching up to urban students when given the chance.

Finally, the hukou system directly interferes in even migrant education in underground schools. Since higher education examinations must be taken in the district of one's home hukou, most migrant children without urban registration status cannot continue their schooling in urban areas after their graduation from junior high school. One study on several schools in Beijing showed that 60% of migrant children reported they wouldn’t continue their education in Beijing after graduating from junior high schools, with the vast majority blaming the hukou system as main obstacle for uninterrupted schooling experience (Liu and Jacob 2011).

Migrant Schools in Perspective

Now, as you may have noticed, I have so far focused primarily on the gap between urban and migrant students in urban areas, and ignored the disparity in rural to urban education. In general, migrant students, despite the low quality of their schooling, often have a significantly better education in migrant schools than in their home villages. A recent study (Xu and Xie, 2015), the first to use left-behind children (children whose parents have left to migrate) and rural families who haven’t migrated as control groups, showed that in general migration had a significant positive effect on childrens’ objective well-being (academic outcomes, overall health and nutrition) with no measurable aggregate negative effect on their subjective well-being (depression, self-perspective, etc.). This result speaks to the incredible disparities between rural and urban areas in China in government attention, basic services, development, and most other measurable categories, composing the reasons that motivate rural families to move to cities, even when their status or destination is uncertain. (An interesting extra conclusion of the paper is that left-behind children and non-migrant children are roughly equally well-off because of the strong Chinese family structures that normalize the raising of children by grandchildren completely or as a supplement to a one-parent household)

Conclusions

Where does China stand on the problem of migrant education? This question isn’t easy to answer; by objective measures, migrant children, despite their disparity with their urban counterparts, are almost exclusively benefitted by movement towards cities, showcasing the complex multi-layered structure of inequality in Chinese society. However, migrant children are still often excluded from the educational opportunities theoretically granted to all urban residents, with the poorest most likely to be excluded. These migrants are here to stay; the current urbanization plan, as articulated by Premier Li Keqiang calls for an increase of the urban population to 60% of the country’s total, with 45% holding urban hukou status. China needs these migrants in their cities, especially now that the shrinking work force (a combination of the One Child Policy and similar policies and slowing birth rates from economic growth) is being more and more noticed by government statisticians and planners. In the long term, if hukou reform does go through and migrant children are given equal educational opportunities in cities, there is a danger that the current system will produce a generation of undereducated children unable to escape the lower class in the future distribution of inequality. 

Things are slowly changing. Hukou reform is high on the agenda of several prominent officials, and technically migrant students are legally required to receive the same education are urban students in the same city (though this directive has rarely been followed). For the first time, these directives are by monetary resources, breaking the hold of the hukou system on local resource allocations. The government has begun more serious crackdowns on migrant schools, though such a policy can only be positive if the local system that prevents migrants from attending regular schools is correspondingly boosted, which is unfortunately not always the case.

But the only way to truly fix the education gap will require massive investments in rural areas as well, where schools and opportunities are so bad that even a one-room schoolhouse in a former warehouse in a big Eastern Chinese city feels like an improvement. Even now, migrant children who make it into urban public schools often face an educational deficit because of the subpar schooling they have so far received back home. Additionally, discrimination against migrants is rampant in both the urban society and bureaucracy, with frequent microagressions and even refusals of schools to allow migrants to gain academic honors. 

Postscript: Our Visit to a Migrant School

We wanted to put a more concrete face to the statistics and papers we had read, and an opportunity to do so presented itself when one of our group members knew a migrant school in Haidian district. A few days ago, we took a cab there to talk to one of its teachers. 

(NB: some location/place descriptors have been omitted or anonymized, while I *highly* doubt the Chinese government reads my blog, I’m not entirely sure how in danger this specific school is to unwanted authority attention)

We entered a relatively poor, older neighborhood. These are ubiquitous among many urban and semi-urban areas in China, and reminded me strongly of many of the alleys I walked through in Hangzhou my last time in China (except without the prevalent smell of stinky tofu (literally, 臭豆腐 chòu dòufu) that thankfully doesn’t dominate the alleyways of Beijing). A main, but narrow road stretched between a seemingly endless row of three-story buildings, a complex, almost overwhelming haze of gray house fronts and red text. The ground floors lining the road on both sides were invariably composed of various shops, restaurants, or food stalls, with the odd service store thrown into the mix—a pretty high-class barber shop seemed slightly out of place between a fruit stand and a second-hand electronics store. Flags and banners were strung across the street at irregular intervals. Trash usually ignored any designated receptacle, and the population of adorable stray dogs seemed as strong as ever. But what I think fascinates visitors most to these neighborhoods is that despite the poverty (especially its stark contrast to the towers of Zhongguancun, ‘China’s Silicon Valley’, occasionally visible only a few miles away), the streets were alive. What urban policy in the United States especially is enthusiastically rediscovering as ‘mixed-used development’ can be seen naturally (without the influence of zoning codes) arising in so many neighborhoods in the developing world — when work, home, and errands happen in the same space, public life naturally follows. People sold their fruit. Scooters screamed past, honking from a block away. Stall keepers were offering up pastries, butcher shops showed their raw meat, clothes stores were filled with casual shoppers (I almost got a much-needed belt). The neighborhood was more or less self-sustaining. 

And here it was that we found our destination. The school was placed onto a lot prefaced by a cracked driveway flanked by two rusted basketball hoops. We were welcomed by a cry of “外国人!” (foreigners), shouted by a small, cheerful kid in a fluffy blue jacket against the November chill. We soon saw two dozen other 4th graders milling around the complex, some of them greeting us with similar cries of “美国人!” (Americans) and one or two cries of “老外!” I slowly realized the futility of my presence as my companions with much greater Chinese skills took the lead in finding our contact person. We were told to wait, and proceeded to do so in the small yard between the school wings. We were instantly surrounded by several dozen hyperactive kids on what I assume was their lunch break. Without really any supervision or organized play, they amused themselves in ways that kids everywhere develop spontaneously, by running around, playfully (or not so) shoving each other, and yelling questions at us. “你是哪国人?” (where are you from?) was common, along with many things I couldn’t understand. The sheer number of students was a little overwhelming; forty were on average crammed into each of the classes. 

The school was not the worst migrant school in Beijing. It probably wasn’t even the worst one in the area, at least of the schools that survived the latest crackdown. The teachers seemed motivated, and the students seemed more or less cheerful. There was even a computer lab with less-than-a-decade-old windows desktops (which many public schools in the US can barely boast). Students from a nearby university came by to volunteer from time to time. 

But it is still clear to see that this school did not have the educational resources offered by the city’s other public schools. It’s hard to see how teachers couldn’t also be somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer density of students in the small school compound. Guided PE and health counseling, required at those schools, was likely nonexistent here.

Whether or not new policies mean the end of this migrant school remains to be seen. Every crackdown has so far only hit a subset of the remaining schools, and every policy officially designed to integrate migrant children into the public school system has so far failed at fixing the problem. As long as insurmountable barriers to entry to the official public school system exist, these migrant schools will likely continue to open their doors, providing a ‘better than nothing’ opportunity for children stuck at the whims of a registration system that doesn’t value them as ‘rural’ residents. 

References

Branigan, Tania. 2010. “Millions of Chinese Rural Migrants Denied Education for Their Children.” The Guardian, March 15, sec. World news. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/mar/15/china-migrant-workers-children-education.

Chen, Yuanyuan, and Shuaizhang Feng. 2013. “Access to Public Schools and the Education of Migrant Children in China.” China Economic Review 26 (September): 75–88. doi:10.1016/j.chieco.2013.04.007.

Goodburn, Charlotte. 2009. “Learning from Migrant Education: A Case Study of the Schooling of Rural Migrant Children in Beijing.” International Journal of Educational Development, Education and Development in Contemporary China, 29 (5): 495–504. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2009.04.005.

Hao, Lingxin, and Xiao Yu. 2015. “Rural-Urban Migration and Childrens’ Access to Education: China in Comparitive Perspective.” Background Paper ED/EFA/MRT/2015/PI/39. Education for All Global Monitoring Report. UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002324/232466e.pdf.

Liang, Zai, and Yiu Por Chen. 2007. “The Educational Consequences of Migration for Children in China.” Social Science Research 36 (1): 28–47. doi:10.1016/j.ssresearch.2005.09.003.

Liu, Jing, and W. James Jacob. 2012. “From Access to Quality: Migrant Children’s Education in Urban China.” Educational Research for Policy and Practice 12 (3): 177–91. doi:10.1007/s10671-012-9136-y.

McMahon, Diny. 2013. “Beijing Moves to Break Down the Urban-Rural Divide.” The Wall Street Journal China Real Time. November 15. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2013/11/15/beijing-moves-to-break-down-the-rural-urban-divide/.

Xu, Hongwei, and Xie Yu. 2013. “The Causal Effects of Rural-to-Urban Migration on Children’s Wellbeing in China.” 13-798. PSC Research Reports. Population Studies Center: University of Michigan. http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/pdf/rr13-798.pdf.

Zhou, Minhui, Rachel Murphy, and Ran Tao. 2014. “Effects of Parents’ Migration on the Education of Children Left Behind in Rural China.” Population and Development Review 40 (2): 273–92. doi:10.1111/j.1728-4457.2014.00673.x.