The Politics, Practices, and Possibilities of Migrant Children Schools in Contemporary China

Min Yu

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137509000
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

?Winner of the AERA Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award This book examines the dynamics surrounding the education of children in the unofficial schools in China's urban migrant communities. This ethnographic study focuses on both the complex structural factors impacting the education of children attending unofficial migrant children schools and the personal experiences of individuals working within these communities. As the book illustrates in careful detail, the migrant children schools serve a critical function in the community by serving as a hub for organized collective action around shared grievances related to issues of education, employment, wellbeing, and other social rights. In turn, the development of a collective identity among teachers, students, parents, and other members in the migrant communities makes it possible for activists to begin to working to address multiple forms of discrimination and maltreatment while simultaneously moving towards the possibility of more profound social transformation.

© The Author(s) 2016

Min YuThe Politics, Practices, and Possibilities of Migrant Children Schools in Contemporary ChinaPalgrave Studies on Chinese Education in a Global Perspective10.1057/978-1-137-50900-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Min Yu¹

(1)

Wayne State University, Detroit, USA

End Abstract

Chun sat silently in the very back row of the classroom, her head tilted downward, her shoulders slumped, avoiding eye contact with me as if her life depended on it. At 16, she was the oldest in my sixth-grade class. One day, I asked Chun a question about the stories the children read and, predictably, she didn’t say a word. Instead, she looked down at her feet, grabbed her shirt tightly, and her ears, peeking through her hair, turned red.

“She is always like that,” said her mom, a 40-year-old woman working temporarily at the garbage recycling station outside of metropolitan Beijing. “I don’t know what to do,” Chun’s mom continued, “we moved to Beijing five years ago, but we couldn't get her back to school until this fall. She was a quiet kid before, and now she doesn't even talk to me. I owe her five years of schooling, but I don’t know how to make it up for her.”

At the beginning of the next semester, all of the sixth graders contributed something for the traditional Lantern Festival. I found a gorgeous painting within the collection of submissions. It was simply entitled, “Spring.” Printed on the back of the painting was a poem from the Tang Dynasty ¹ :

A good rain knows its proper time;

It waits until the Spring to fall.

It drifts in on the wind, steals in by night;

Its fine drops drench, yet make no sound at all.

The paths between the fields are cloaked with clouds;

A river-skiff’s lone light still burns.

Come dawn, we’ll see splashes of wet red –

The flowers, weighed down with rain.

(好雨知时节,

当春乃发生。

随风潜入夜,

润物细无声。

野径云俱黑,

江船火独明。

晓看红湿处,

花重锦官城。)

Chun’s name was written under the poem. I found her in the classroom after recess. For the first time, she talked to me and showed me many pieces of her artwork, smiling with a mélange of emotions radiating from her eyes.

I taught 40 children that year, in a migrant children school in the slum-suburban area outside of Beijing. At the end of the school year, two of my students went back to their parents’ hometown to attend middle schools in a rural area. Only one student transferred to a public school at the other side of the city—he passed the “entrance exam” designed for migrant children instituted by the public schools. His parents were able to collect all the required “certifications” and pay the “donation” fees to the school for his transfer. The 37 remaining students, including Chun, ended their education that the sixth-grade year. For many children who attended schools for migrant children in the cities, their education was likely to stop after completion of grade six. Although I do not know what has become of this special young woman, I keep a painting that Chun created for me. In the picture, she is holding my hand, and she has a sunny smile on her face.

Chun’s story is one of millions of stories of the children from migrant workers’ families whose children have become a unique subgroup in contemporary China. Over the past three decades, Chinese society has been undergoing profound social and economic transformations. Under the historical conditions of “late socialist” China (Zhang, 2001, p. 2), new social phenomena—including unprecedented domestic migration and the accelerated restructuring of social institutions—have led to the emergence of various new kinds of social spaces and practices.

One of the most prominent social phenomenon is the hypermobility of people and their labor. The rapidly booming urban economies, combined with the gradual relaxation of state policies toward migration during this era, enticed large numbers of rural residents to leave their villages and move to cities to look for better work and living opportunities. In China, this demographic group is known as “the floating population” (liu dong ren kou). ² The presence of this large mobile population ³ in the cities has initiated a very different kind of relationship between the state’s control and local communities, which created the conditions for a variety of grassroots movements, especially those around fair wages for the mobile population’s work, improvement of their living environment, and the education of their children.

As a former teacher at schools for migrant children, as well as an observer at many other such schools during my research of education, I saw a distinct need for a critical examination of these issues. Given the increasing globalizing flow of people, capital, language, and ideas, it has become critically important to learn from the experiences of migrant communities such as those in China. Not only is this of importance given the challenges and suffering experienced by the Chinese as a result of social and economic inequity, but it is also increasingly relevant to other nations throughout the world as they face concerns relating to the education of children from migrant and immigrant families. The lessons learned from the struggles in China will help to provide a broader understanding of the complex realities in which many migrant communities are situated.

A Brief History of Migration

In the first three decades of socialist China (1949–1979), domestic rural-to-urban migration was virtually eliminated by the state through the household registration system (hukou). ⁴ Under this system, the Chinese population was officially divided into two parts—urban hukou holders and rural hukou holders. Rural residents were prohibited from moving into the cities; their rural residential status denied them access to state-subsidized food, housing, employment, and other essential services reserved for only urbanites. This situation, however, has dramatically changed since the beginning of the economic reforms in 1978, leading to the rise of a mass labor migration unprecedented in modern China.

The floating population consisted of people with diverse backgrounds, but their primary goals were not very different: to achieve a better life by migrating to the cities. Some of the rural transients were able to bring a modest amount of savings with them to start small businesses; see, for example, the research by Zhang (2001) on Wenzhou migrants in Beijing. The majority of migrant workers who come to the cities, however, had nothing but their labor to sell. The lucky ones managed to find temporary hourly work in construction, restaurants, factories, housekeeping services, street cleaning, and other jobs that many urbanites were not willing to do (Zhang, 2001, p. 2). Still, many others could not find a job and thus drifted hopelessly from place to place. ⁵ They were not entitled to the same legal rights and social benefits as permanent urban residents and were subject to discrimination and periodic expulsion from cities.

Despite the fact that the low-cost but incontestable services provided by rural migrants were in high demand in the cities, the floating population was regarded by city officials and many urbanites as a drain on already-scarce urban public resources. In addition, frequently the migrant workers were blamed for an increase in crime and social instability. Appearing to be “out of place” and “out of control” (Zhang, 2001, p. 2), this extraordinarily large and mobile population challenged the existing modes of state control that were largely based on the assumption of a relatively stable population fixed in space. Migrants were too far away from their places of origin to be reached by rural authorities but, at the same time, were not integrated into the urban control system.

For many years, local urban officials were unwilling to extend their jurisdiction to rural migrants because they were considered “outsiders” in the cities and thus were not seen to be subject to urban regulations. However, it was this lack of official control that created opportunities for migrants to develop their own social and economic niche in the cities. The formation of migrant worker organizations and coalitions was a direct response to the lack of state regulation and welfare in certain areas such as migrant communities—most of which were newly established settlements in the suburbs. ⁶ Nevertheless, when the upper-level government at times decided to reclaim control over these new social spaces, it was still able to achieve its goal despite resistance from migrants, social activists, and some local residents who engaged in community actions. The challenges and struggles were particularly true for those who had built special schools for migrant children within the complex and uncertain social and political environments.

This book is based on research that examines the dynamics surrounding the education of children in the unofficial schools in China’s urban migrant communities. This ethnographic study focuses on both the complex structural factors that impacted the education of those who attended “illegal” migrant children schools and the local, personal experiences of individuals working within the communities. As the book illustrates in careful detail, the schools for migrant children served a critical function in the community by serving as a hub for organized collective action around shared grievances related to issues of education, employment, well-being, and other social rights.

In turn, the development of a collective identity among teachers, students, parents, and other members in the migrant communities made it possible for activists to begin working to address multiple forms of discrimination and maltreatment while simultaneously moving toward the possibility of a more profound social transformation. Specifically, this book focuses on addressing the following questions:

• What were the reasons for these parents and educators to establish the schools independent of public support?
• How did the schools get formed?
• What had the parents, teachers, and administrators been experiencing within the migrant children schools’ movement?
• What were some of the strengths and limitations they believed about their work around migrant children schools?
• What was the relationship between the schools and the migrant communities?
• What was the relationship between the schools and the larger society outside of the communities?

I use these questions as overarching themes in this book. First, I pay specific attention to China’s different political and cultural structures by laying out the conditions and circumstances leading to the formation and development of migrant children schools. I describe the basis of educational problems faced by the children of migrant workers in China. To understand the educational, social, and political transformations that took place, the chapters discuss questions and concerns about educational issues relating to the emergence of the unofficial schools for the children of migrant workers.

Nearly all the migrant children schools were located inside the migrant settlements in the metropolitan areas of China’s cities. Their relationship with the state had transformed from an early period of “no guidance, no regulation” to the present stage of intense oversight and criminalization. It took policymakers more than a decade to acknowledge the social and educational needs of migrant children in the cities. It was not until 1996 that the Chinese central government started to draft specific regulations concerning schooling for them.

As Chap. 2 documents, there have been two developmental stages in the evolution of educat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Mobile Children and Migrant Children Schools
• 3. Early Development: Geography and Social Networks
• 4. Curriculum, Contribution, and Community
• 5. Counternarrative of Work, Life, and Solidarity in Urban Cities
• 6. Demolition and Relocation
• 7. Mobilization and Actions
• 8. Conclusion
• Erratum to: The Politics, Practices, and Possibilities of Migrant Children Schools in Contemporary China
• Backmatter