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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
