Xiong Chunwen, "The Education of Migrant Workers' Children

Xiong Chunwen, “Polarization: The Structure of the Education System Behind the Culture of the Migrant Workers’ Children”[1]
 
Introduction by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Xiong Chunwen is a professor in the School of Humanities and Development at the China Agricultural University, and has been an active and productive scholar for some years (you can see his CV, in Chinese, here).  In the text translated here, Xiong talks about fieldwork he has carried out among the children of migrant workers in a Beijing suburb, as well as offering certain observations about the state of education for migrant youth elsewhere in China.
 
Migrant workers have played a huge role in China’s development during the period of reform and opening, leaving their villages to work—technically illegally—on the countless construction sites through which China’s urban landscape and its entire economy have been transformed.  Their status is China is the rough equivalent of that of illegal migrants in the United States and elsewhere, and employers in China, like employers elsewhere, have taken advantage of their precarious status to exploit and underpay them (see Qin Hui’s essay comparing China’s migrant workers with Black migrant labor in South Africa for a systematic treatment of the issue).
 
Many migrant workers of course have children.  As Xiong points out, the first generation of migrant workers, who began moving to the cities in large numbers in the 1990s, left their children behind in the villages, an unsatisfactory solution to a difficult problem, particularly when both husbands and wives began to abandon the villages, leaving their children in the care of grandparents or other relatives.  More recent migrant workers have tended to bring their children with them, despite the fact that their at best semi-legal status in the cities has meant that their children had no formal right to attend school there. 
 
Over the years, this situation involved in at least two directions.  First, educational “entrepreneurs,” often migrants themselves, have opened private, informal schools to cater to the children of migrant workers (for an extended discussion of these schools, see Yuan Ling’s non-fiction piece called “Outside Beijing’s Sixth Ring Road”).  Many of these schools have a best a precarious legal status, and could not issue diplomas accepted by the school system, but they kept children off of the streets and pretended to offer an education that parents hoped their children would receive.  Second, over the years, some public schools came to accept the children of migrant workers, despite their lack of status.
 
Xiong’s investigation of the school culture of these migrant youth reveals two key insights:  First, children who stayed in the private schools established specifically for them eventually realized that there was no real educational purpose or possibility attached to these schools, but they nonetheless built a meaningful social life through peer groups.  Xiong began his study looking for the kind of “anti-school ideology” Paul Willis found among underprivileged school-age groups in England, but did not find it.  Second, migrant youth educated in public schools could succeed, which in many cases radically changed their lives, but they were often stigmatized by non-migrant children and by teachers and parents, while left them in a state of fragility. 
 
All of this suggests that the deep-rooted prejudices of Chinese urban dwellers toward their rural counterparts have yet to go away.  Freya Ge’s reflections on Xiong’s text are instructive in this regard:   
 
I worked as an intern in a local legal aid center during the winter vacation when I was in 10th grade. There, I saw many cases of juvenile delinquency, which left a deep impression on me. The young offenders were more or less my age, living in neighborhoods that were familiar to me, but leading very different lives. In fact, at first I thought that they were morally flawed, but then I realized that society as a whole had dealt them a different set of cards from “privileged students” like me and my friends.
 
In the last decade, China has developed rapidly, but problems of juvenile delinquency have become more serious. To understand these crimes, however, we must look at the underlying social realities. For instance, more and more rural families’ parents go to the cities to work and leave their children at home, creating a class of “left-behind children.” These children can't communicate with their parents, lack parental care, discipline, and guidance and live lives in suboptimal conditions. Compounding this is the general impressionability of youth.
 
Many juvenile offenders are left-behind children. Left-behind children and migrant children, two groups lacking in social welfare and rights protection, are facing problems such as social stigmatization and limited opportunities for further education.
 
I went to a public primary school. Although I no longer remember exactly which students were migrant children, some of them are studying in vocational high schools now. Most of their posts on internet focus on things other than their studies: girls like to show off their make-up, while boys like to send pictures of smoking and drinking. They take great pride in skipping classes and forming their own groups, ways of establishing their independence and proving their individuality. This article offers a more positive explanation that this is their way of building a social life and giving their lives meaning. However, limitations still exist. Although they can find a way of life with a sense of belonging and identity, this might not be enough in the long run.
 
I have a large family, and some of my aunts and uncles are just not very educated. They live in their own social circles, which are largely composed by people at the bottom of society. They say things that seemed childish even when I was small, and they can be strangely smug and arrogant.
 
But it's not really their fault. Just as the author said, this group is vulnerable to stigmatization due to environmental and cultural factors, and far more likely to to drop out of school and even engage in criminal deviance. As migrant children, they are labeled negatively from the very beginning. The majority of people in society believe that migrants have neither knowledge nor ability. I've been in private school since junior high school. I found that private schools often stigmatize students who get into vocational high schools, and they will do anything to ensure that a smaller percentage of their students choose vocational high schools each year.

Of course, in quality schools, this is not done out in the open, but the attitude of teachers is quite telling. Once, my Chinese teacher in junior high school found that the uniforms of a school for migrant children were very similar to those of our school. She said: "I saw a few students wearing uniforms that are very similar to ours, but they are very creepy. I took a close look, those are not our uniforms, so I felt relieved. Those students have no spirit, they are not like our students."
 
In addition, compared with migrant children, my friends and I enjoy very different conditions. One of my best friends went to high school in the UK. She didn't do well in junior high school, so her father immediately sent her abroad. Another friend didn't do well on the high school entrance exam and was about to go to a vocational high school, but his mother used her connections and got him into go to a private school in another city. Another friend, whose mother is a teacher and father is a civil servant, has always been the top student because of the atmosphere her parents created at home. Now she is studying in the best high school in our city.
 
Some students have a lot of resources and pay a much lower cost for making mistakes, while the migrant children can't possibly just have the basics that we have to start with. I'm not suggesting that people born with privilege should be ashamed of it. At the summer school I attended last summer, Professor Zhou Lian taught us that no one should be ashamed of where they come from, even those from privileged backgrounds. But I personally think people in high places should be compassionate instead of judgmental. Ironically, I know there are some students in international schools who volunteer to help migrant children just to pad their CVs.
 
It would be wrong to judge those juvenile offenders as morally bankrupt. I now find it very important to understand the social situation as a whole. We should offer understanding, support and help to groups that lack of protection and are underserved.
 
Translation by Freya Ge
 
In recent years, my research has been focused on the children of migrant workers, and I have been doing fieldwork to try to understand their group culture from the perspective of cultural sociology. On the surface, group culture might appear to be something subjective, but it is deeply related to the larger social structure and institutional setting.
 
Children of Migrant Workers:  The Size of the Group and Certain Trends
 
Structurally, there is a two-sided relationship between migrant children and left-behind children. Their parents are all migrant workers, but some of the children moved to the city with their parents, while others stayed in the countryside. This phenomenon is closely related to China’s process of urbanization, and there is no doubt that the household registration system separating urban and rural areas has had a hindering effect on the flow of the agricultural population to the cities. Since reform and opening, many rural people have moved to the cities for work, making an important contribution to China's rapid urbanization, but they have not received the social benefits this contribution might have merited. One of the most important of these benefits they have not received is the education of their children.
 
The number of children in this group is huge, and its evolution illustrates certain characteristics and trajectories.  The first generation of migrant workers basically stormed the cities alone, leaving their children in the countryside, while the second and third generations of migrant workers increasingly moved toward family migration. According to statistics, between 2000 and 2010, numbers of both migrant children and the migrant population as a whole continued to grow rapidly. Migrant workers grew from about 100 million in 2000 to 221 million in 2010, and, as a subset of migrant workers, the children of migrant workers grew from 19.82 million to 35.81 million.

However, new trends have emerged since 2010. First, the growth rate of the migrant population as a whole decreased significantly from 2010 to 2015, and beginning in 2015 began to decline slowly, and the number of migrant children began to decline beginning in 2010. This phenomenon is especially obvious in such large cities as Beijing and Shanghai. This means that the national slowdown in the growth of the migrant population was first driven by migrant children leaving the city beginning in 2010; then, since 2015, the migrant population has left the city together with migrant children.
 
In this context, we might note that cities clearly need more young workers, and at the same time, cities truly need to provide more public welfare, such as education, for the children of migrant workers. The state is actually aware of this problem. For example, over the course of the implementation of China’s 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020), China “urbanized” 100 million migrant workers, most of whose household registration had previously been in the countryside.

However, there are two factors that are not stable. First, the policy liberalization permitting the change in household registration has for the most part occurred in cities with a population of less than 3 million. The conditions for resettlement in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai remain strict, meaning that these large cities contribute little to China’s attempt to move peasants to the cities. Second, even when rural dwellers change their household registration and settle in the cities, they retain their rural land contract rights, homestead use rights, and collective income distribution rights.

This policy design is for the sake of social stability, and on the surface, it appears to guarantee the rights and interests of migrant workers. In fact, however, it is an apt illustration of the relatively low status of the migrant workers who settle in cities.[2] This also illustrates that the process of urbanization is unstable. The entire situation leads us to pay attention to the migrant children and left-behind children, who are bound to be groups that lack social welfare and rights protection.
 
Migrant Children:  Institutional Settings and Regional Differences
 
These urban-rural structures and population trends are clearly reflected in the institutional arrangements for the resettlement of migrant populations and the educational enrollment of their children in major cities. As mentioned above, cities with a population of less than 3 million are more inclined to liberalize their residency policy. On the one hand, they need to attract talented young workers, and on the other, they need to strengthen the economy through attracting migrants. Therefore, these cities also have a strong incentive to solve the problem of migrant workers and migrant children. But megacities such as Beijing and Shanghai have not liberalized their policies, and instead have tightened conditions, causing large numbers of migrants to leave because of precarious working and living conditions.
 
The policy of access to education for migrant children is directly related to the household registration policy.  One study[3] analyzed 16 cities in terms of their “friendliness” to migrant children’s education, and found that these policies can be roughly divided into two systems, one that emphasizes the personal qualities of the applicants, and one that measures the number of “points” they or their families have accumulated.[4] Among the cities emphasizing personal qualities, the cities in central and western China are friendlier than those in eastern and northern China. The Pearl River Delta is friendlier than the Yangtze River Delta among cities that emphasize points. In general, Beijing and Shanghai have the most stringent enrollment and residency policies.
 
Table 2 [not reproduced] presents educational data on migrant children in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen in 2015. It can be seen that the proportion of migrant children in Beijing and Shanghai in the total migrant population is much lower than that in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The total number of students in compulsory education in the four cities is similar, but in terms of the proportion of migrant children, Beijing and Shanghai are far lower than Guangzhou and Shenzhen. These data show that there are significant regional differences in institutional arrangements. Relatively speaking, the Pearl River Delta region has adopted more tolerant education policies than Beijing and Shanghai.
 
Table 3 [not reproduced] shows compulsory education data in Beijing since 2010. We can see that the total number of students in the city has been increasing, but the number of primary schools has been basically decreasing. The number of non-Beijing students and their proportion in the total number of students have been decreasing since 2013, mainly because many migrant workers' children's schools have been consolidated. At the same time, the proportion of the migrant population in Beijing's permanent population has not declined significantly, basically staying at about 38%. This once again shows that Beijing's efforts to remove migrant children from the municipal school system exceed similar efforts directed at young adult migrant labor.
 
Comparing the four cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and taking the number of sixth grade graduates as the denominator, we can see that Beijing still has the highest loss rate in the early period of primary school education, which is 18.25% in Beijing, 14.76% in Shanghai, 12.56% in Guangzhou and 9.26% in Shenzhen. Looking at specific age groups more closely, in 2015, for example, there were 687,000 migrant children aged 0-14 in Beijing, of which 267,000 were four years old or younger, 247,000 children aged between the ages of 5 and 9 years, and 173,000 between the ages 10 and 14 was 173,000. 

The differences in the numbers of the three cohorts suggests the number of students drop out at these ages, generally by returning to their home villages to study.  The age range in question is between the fourth grade and the eighth grade. In my fieldwork, I also found that the fourth grade and the sixth grade are the two peak points for students to return to their hometowns. Children in the fourth grade are about 10 years old, the age at which parents believe that they can start to take care of themselves, so they can return to the village a little early and adapt to the education there. The sixth grade marks the beginning of junior middle school, and also involves the transfer of school registration.

For the three years of junior middle school, the loss rate in the first year is relatively low, that of the second year is the greatest, and that of the third year is also quite large, and taken together, the loss rate in junior middle school is almost 41%. Those who remain in school general have two options after junior middle school.  One is to get a job, and the other is to go a vocational high school in Beijing.

The vocational high schools in Beijing are very different from those in the Yangtze River Delta and Pearl River Delta. The vocational high schools in Beijing basically have no majors linked to manufacturing, so the most popular vocational high school majors are chiefly education, culture and arts, medicine and health, information technology, etc.  In vocational high schools in the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze River Delta, there are many majors in processing and manufacturing and in civil engineering. These differences also help to determine the final career direction of migrant children.
 
Polarization: The Group Culture of Migrant Children
 
Group cultures might seem to be invisible, intangible, subjective things, but they often have structural and institutional causes. Once these cultures have taken shape, they will in turn affect the micro behavior of individuals in the social group, and finally have an objective impact on structural and institutional reforms. Paul Willis of the Birmingham School called this process "cultural production".
 
I began to pay attention to a particular group of migrant workers in 2005, and carried out fieldwork in a suburb called Eight Family Village 八家村, close to Beijing. Prior to 2010, Eight Family Village was known as a magnet for migrants, mainly migrant workers from Gushi 固始 county in Henan province, who bought scrap materials. At that time, this group was heavily stigmatized; media said that they "would pick up anything."

In order to create better conditions for participatory research, my team did its fieldwork by giving free tutoring to the children of this village. Eight Family Village had four [private] schools for the children of migrant workers and one public school. When the village was razed in 2008 and 2009, some of the children of these schools were transferred to nearby public schools, while others moved with the migrant workers to new areas. Our fieldwork on these migrant children thus had two dimensions: one focus was on the migrant children who moved with their parents and the other was on the migrant children who moved to public schools.
 
Group culture in the schools of the children of migrant-workers: "positive" rather than "anti-school culture"
 
In my initial research I was mainly inspired by Paul Willis, and I tried to use his idea of "anti-school culture" to understand the group culture of the schools of the children of migrant workers. But as we dug deeper, we found this concept inadequate.  In general, the group culture of these schools follows a journey from institutional self-selection to institutional self-abandonment, and the second year of junior high school is a crucial turning point for the group culture..  Before the second year, there is a high degree of mobility, and there are two clearly marked moments where students leave the schools. 

However, from the perspective of the students’ willingness to learn, they do not leave because they are abandoning their studies, but rather because they have consciously chosen a better institutional way to continue their studies.  Therefore, the educational behavior of the children of migrant workers is not so much "institutional self-abandonment" as "institutional self-selection." At this stage, the core culture of migrant children is still "school culture," and not "anti-school culture".
 
During middle school, especially after the second year middle school, the children who continue to study in the schools for the children of migrant workers basically give up on learning.  At the same time, since there is no formal school culture as commonly understood in these schools, there is no object for the children to rebel against. Not only do the children themselves gradually realize that the current school is not a place to study or make progres, but teachers and parents think the same thing.  Some schools and teachers even let the students in on the joke by giving them exam questions beforehand or being lenient in other ways.
 
Even more important, even if these schools are not places of learning, children have to stay there until they are 16. This is very important, because if people do not have a positive sense of belonging, they will not stay.  We could see this as "muddling through," but when we got close to these students we discovered that this “muddling” was not negative time-wasting in their eyes, but was endowed with positive meaning, and they greatly valued their ability to “muddle through.”

The key to this was the organization of peer groups. These groups practiced the spirit of "justice and righteousness 义气," valued friendship, and involved all class members through an organizational structure of basic and subsidiary groups.  Students all belonged to different groups with different dimensions and meanings of social experience. The formation and dissolution of groups, the flow of members between groups, and the members’ individual strategies all reflect the dynamics of the operations of peer groups. These complex peer groups constituted the actual social basis of the schools of the migrant workers, and their rich activities occupied the main part of the school process, and served as the actual "center stage 前台" of these schools.
 
Through this "center stage," the social life of the children of migrant workers receives organization and meaning. The children of migrant workers are always eager to plan, organize, and participate in their own group activities, groups and activities that make the school its own little universe, in which migrant children develop their autonomy, initiative, and subjectivity, eventually becoming a kind of distinctive and unique group culture.
 
This culture is both their control over their school life and their practice of social life. Even if they give up on classes, homework, exams, and higher education, building and maintaining social relationships that they really care about is a much more important and positive experience. Through these experiences, they can better adapt to society and cope with the future. Several of the children's online chat groups that my team joined while doing fieldwork are still very active years later. They exchange information, organize activities, help each other and talk to each other in the group. This kind of group culture, possessing its own self-contained, "meaning, rules, and action system,” cannot be simply reduced to some kind of "anti-school culture,” but is instead much more positive, and this new perspective helps us to understand how this group of children seeks to give meaning to their lives and locate opportunities against the backdrop of larger structures and systems. 
 
The group culture of migrant children in public schools: positive and negative co-exist
 
My team's research on migrant children in public schools found that this is a highly sensitive group. From a negative perspective, this group is vulnerable to stigmatization due to environmental and cultural factors, so it becomes vulnerable and tends toward dropping out of school or even deviance. However, from a positive perspective, this group is likely to develop extraordinary academic aspirations due to exposure to the formal culture of the school. With proper guidance, this may cultivate excellent students and even achieve genuine class breakthroughs. For groups of children like these, the crucial point of education is to acknowledge their sensitivity, help them to avoid stigmatization and harm, and lead them to become more confident and to excel through patient and careful understanding of their group culture.
 
In recent years, my research team has held a "weekend growth camp" in China Agricultural University to try to develop measures of social intervention. Our main goal is not to help with classroom issues, but to design some activities around the social development of migrant children.  Themes include: peer groups, parent-child relationships, teacher-student relationships, relationships with strangers, games and hobbies, music and painting, management of emotions, healthy eating, gender culture, short videos, supplemental courses 影子教育, life under the pandemic, etc.
 
Overall, these activities have been very effective. Some of the children, who were shy at the beginning, have become lively and cheerful, and are eventually willing to talk with us about their dialect and hometown, their family stories, friends' "failures" and school "news." The most important thing is that these children are able to deal with "society" well, handle various relationships correctly, and have a better and healthier development in the future. Social development is an important part of the healthy growth of migrant children in public schools. Even though most of the children returned to their hometowns in fourth and sixth grades and became left-behind children again, some kept in touch with our team online to share their ups and downs. Some children remain confident, make new friends and get good grades; some of the children who stayed in Beijing were also named "merit students" and recommended to high-quality middle schools.
 
At present, our country, our schools, and our society still have much to do for these very special groups.
 
Notes

[1]熊春文, “两极化：流动儿童群体文化背后的教育制度结构,” 探索与争鸣, 2021.5:  31-34.

[2]Translator’s note:  The author’s argument here is that while allowing the former peasants to keep certain rights in their home villages appears to be a safeguard for them, in fact, it allows cities and employers to continue to discriminate against them on the pretext that “when things get bad, they can always return home.”

[3]Translator’s note:  For information on the study, see the following link:  https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/2020-12-01/doc-iiznctke4201471.shtml .

[4]Translator’s note:  In general, the “points” system takes into account items such as the amount of time the applicant’s family has been residing in the city, whether they have paid their taxes, etc., i.e., basic measures of social and legal compliance.  “Personal attributes, “which are also measured in terms of points, can be more arbitrary.  The “points” system appears to be more transparent, but either system can be manipulated by municipal authorities to achieve policy goals.