Living with vulnerabilities and opportunities in a migration context: Floating Children and Left-Behind Children in China 9789463007832, 9789463007849, 9789463007856, 9463007830, 9463007849

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Living with Vulnerabilities and Opportunities in a Migration Context

SPOTLIGHT ON CHINA Volume 3 Series Editors: Shibao Guo, University of Calgary, Canada Yan Guo, University of Calgary, Canada International Advisory Board: Yanjie Bian, University of Minnesota, USA Qing Gu, University of Nottingham, UK Ruth Hayhoe, OISE/University of Toronto, Canada Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce, Monash University Malaysia, Malaysia Baocun Liu, Beijing Normal University, China Allan Luke, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Gerard A. Postiglione, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Barbara Schulte, Lund University, Sweden Rui Yang, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Qiang Zha, York University, Canada Jijiao Zhang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Li Zong, University of Saskatchewan, Canada Scope: Over the past decades China has experienced unprecedented economic liberalization, industrialization, mass migration, urbanization, and privatization, which have contributed to the rise of China as an emerging economic superpower. At the same time, China is also facing unprecedented challenges, including rising unemployment, socio-economic disparity, corruption, and environment degradation. Spotlight on China aims to bring together international scholars with contributions from new and established scholars to explore the profound social and economic transformation that has resulted from the market economy and its concomitant impact on education and society in China. The series includes authored and edited collections offering multidisciplinary perspectives and most contemporary and comprehensive analyses of recent social and educational changes in China. Contact Information: Shibao Guo, PhD Werklund School of Education University of Calgary 2500 University Dr. NW Calgary, AB T2N 1N4 Canada Phone: 403-220-8275 Email: [email protected] 

Living with Vulnerabilities and Opportunities in a Migration Context Floating Children and Left-Behind Children in China

Guanglun Michael Mu Queensland University of Technology, Australia and Yang Hu Central University of Finance and Economics, China

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6300-783-2 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6300-784-9 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6300-785-6 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands https://www.sensepublishers.com/

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2016 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prefacevii Acknowledgementxvii List of Tables

xix

List of Figures

xxi

Chapter 1: Urbanisation and Migration: Histories, Patterns, and Challenges

1

Background: China in a Snapshot 1 A Penetrating Overview of Urbanisation in China 3 Household Registration System in China and the Institutionalised Class Distinction10 A Synoptic Review of Migration 15 Chapter Summary: Framing Floating and Left-Behind Children Together 22 Chapter 2: The Wellbeing of Floating Children and Left-Behind Children: Conceptual Foundation and Empirical Knowledge

25

Revisiting the Notion of ‘Rurality’ Conceptualising Wellbeing The Wellbeing of Floating Children and Left-Behind Children Chapter Summary: Time to Shift from the Medical Deficit Model

26 31 33 44

Chapter 3: Coming into an Inheritance: Intergenerational Social Reproduction through Class-Based Pedagogies

47

Different Roots and Routes 49 Social Reproduction through the Classed Pedagogy at Home and in School53 Empirical Coda: Some Quantitative Evidence on Social Reproduction 71 Chapter Summary: Challenging the Determinism Claim 74 Chapter 4: Rural Dispositions of Floating Children in Urban Fields: Accent, Deportment, and Bodily Hexis

79

Research Sites and Research Participants 80 Rural Accent and Deportment of Floating Children 83 Bodily Hexis: A Set of Durable and Transposable Rural Dispositions 88 The Modification of Rural Dispositions and the Counter-Training of Habitus91

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Rural Habitus: Its Marginalisation and Misrecognition The Shifting of Field Structures and the Recognition of Rural Habitus Empirical Coda: What Do We See in the Larger Picture? Chapter Summary: Enabling the Nurture Instead of Reshaping the Nature

93 95 97 98

Chapter 5: Living with Kin Caregivers: Special Needs of Children Left Behind101 Rearing a Child: Traditions in Diversity Research Site and Participants Informal Alternative Care by Kin Caregivers: Why Did They Step in? The Needs Model of Children Left Behind in Rural China Children Left Behind: How are They Seen as Different? Multiple Figures: Their Roles in Addressing the Needs of Children Left Behind Chapter Summary: Restating the Needs of Children Left Behind

102 106 107 111 113

Chapter 6: Education and Personal Development of Children Left Behind

123

Educational Needs of Children Left Behind Go beyond Education: Children’s Personal Development Education and Personal Development: What Do They Mean for Rural Children Left Behind? Chapter Summary: Education as a Core Need

124 130

115 121

138 141

Chapter 7: Floating Children and Left-Behind Children as Resilient Agents: A Strength-Based Pathway to Wellbeing

143

Revisiting the Notion of Resilience Disadvantaged Children, Tenacious Creatures Chapter Summary: An Ecological Approach to Resilience Building

144 146 162

Chapter 8: Conclusion: A Call for System-Level Change A Recapitulation of What We Have Learned so Far Implications for Policy and Practice Scholarly Contribution: Rethinking the Deficits through a Strength-Based Perspective Final Remarks

165 166 169 171 173

Appendices175 References177 Index191

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PREFACE

On 9 June 2015, four children from a rural family in Tiankan village, Guizhou Province committed suicide by drinking large doses of pesticides. The 14-year-old boy and his three sisters, aged ten years old, eight years old, and five years old respectively, were found dead at home. News report about the death of the four flooded social media: The mother deserted the family in 2013 and the father left home in 2014, working away from the rural village and leaving the four children behind. The oldest son had to look after his three siblings. Without appropriate parental care and love, the four children reportedly had eccentric dispositions and strong sense of stress, depression, anxiety, helplessness, and hopelessness. Unfortunately, the four children were not able to live through their traumatic childhood and ended their lives in despair and pain. In 2013, five children were hit by a truck while making their way back home from school. Dead at the scene, all the five children were rural kids brought to the city by their parents. All these migrant parents were engaged in long-hour labour work and did not have time to pick up their children after school. Unlike urban children who are often escorted by their (grand)parents to and from school, the five children had to go to school and go back home after school on their own. Without due road safety awareness and adult escort, the five children died of the accident. It is with great sorrow that we have to open our book with two tragic cases that claimed nine young lives. We wonder whether the children’s lives could have been saved if their parents had not migrated but lived with the children and provided them with proper parenting. Although the lack of parenting should be (partly) responsible for the death of these children, it is over-simplistic to put the full blame on these migrant parents. After all, there are a multiplicity of reasons behind the deaths of these children. Having said that, the tensions and predicaments emanating from migration were inextricable to the misfortune of these children. Although the two tragedies are extreme cases, there are millions of children in China whose fate is inseparable from the life politics of the migration era. These children are what we call ‘floating children’ and ‘left-behind children’. We will define these two terms momentarily. Our point of departure is the concern for the wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children in the massive surge of the rural-to-urban migration in China. It is this very concern that prompts us to research floating children ad left-behind children. In this book, we grapple with the potholes and distractions of these children in a migration context in China. We also wade into the responsiveness of these children to the challenges emerging from the migration context. In this respect, we recognise the vulnerability of these children while at the same time considering them to be capable and resilient agents when faced with difficult and adverse situations.

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In what follows, we set the scene of our book through a panoramic overview of migration in China and a snapshot of a child whose fate is entangled with migration. Over the past two decades, the social prosperity, cultural diversity, and economic success in China have continuously struck the world. The rapid, consistent development of China is accompanied by a dramatic increase of the urbanisation rate, and hence sees the rises of numerous metropolitan cities across the country. Of all these cities, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou are the three largest, busiest, wealthiest, and the most developed. Figure 1 captures the magnificence of the three cities. The sheer vastness, huge population, unique history and culture, and robust economy of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou become irresistible temptations for many Chinese, in particular those from rural, remote, and underdeveloped regions.

The CBD of Beijing1

The Bund of Shanghai2

The Night View of Guangzhou3

Figure 1. City view of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou

Each year, massive numbers of internal migrants are attracted by the beauty and wealth of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and many other metropolitans. They leave their hometowns and move to work in urban centres for personal and/or family good. As shown in Figure 2, the population of internal migrants across China has continued to grow. By 2020, the estimated population of internal migrants will exceed 290 million (National Bureau of Statistics, 2014). Living and working in cities, internal migrants spend most of the year away from their hometowns. However, they maintain a strong connection with their origins through frequent tele-communications (e.g., phone calls and text message), regular updates on social network media (e.g., micro blog and wechat), and generous financial support to family members in the form of remittances. In this respect, internal migrants do not simply leave their hometowns happily behind and desperately integrate into their new urban homes. Instead, they remain strongly attached to their hometowns. The Chinese word for hometown is 老家, which connotes the root of a clan, a native place where one’s ancestors originated and were buried. The Chinese word signifies not only the physical place and the geographical location but also the genealogical connections and the deep attachments to the land, traditions, customs, and compatriots, forged through generations of shared ancestry, heritage, history, culture, and language (Mu, 2016). As such, internal migrants are associated with viii

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Figure 2. The increase of migrant population by year

two homes – the ‘economic home’ in the urban and the ‘cultural home’ in the rural. Due to their belongingness to both homes, they engage with regular seasonal journey between the two. Every Chinese New Year, most migrant workers choose to return to their rural hometowns, enjoying an ephemeral reunion with their family members and friends. Hence, the pre-Chinese New year period each year in China sees the most sizable migration in human history. This grand migration is depicted in Figure 3.

Beijing Railway Station4

Shanghai Railway Station5

Guangzhou Railway Station6

Figure 3. Crowds at railway stations right before Chinese New Year

Despite their massive population and significant contribution to urban development, internal migrants are largely disregarded and marginalised. They often engage in the most labourious and the worst paid jobs, struggling to survive and hoping to thrive in the cities. The lives of their children are by no means any better. Some children are separated from their migrant parents, being looked after by grandparents or relatives in their rural hometowns. These children have to learn to grow up separated from their birth parents, living through a childhood without decent ix

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parenting. We term these children ‘left-behind children’. Some children are brought to the cities by their parents. Since the registered rural household residence of these children barely accrues any value in the cities, these children are often deprived of the social benefits and educational opportunities enjoyed by their urban peers. We term these children ‘floating children’. Similar terms, such as migrant children, are also used in the literature. However, we prefer the use of the adjective ‘floating’ to describe these children because of the transient nature of their lives. This term captures the connotation of the ‘rootlessness’ of floating children and takes account of their inaccessibility to sound social welfare and equal educational opportunities in urban China (Mu et al., 2013). To help formulate a preliminary impression of left-behind children and floating children, we now depict the rural-urban transitional experiences of a migrant family that we studied. The family has one child called Dongdong (pseudonym). Dongdong was born in a rural village of Henan province. For economic reasons, Dongdong’s parents decided to move to work in Beijing after Dongdong was born in 2004. Brought up by his paternal grandparents, Dongdong has been separated from his parents since his birth. Right after the Spring Festival in 2014, Dongdong was brought to Beijing by his parents. The city of Beijing has ever since become his home away from home  – a complicated social space abounding with attraction and distraction, affection and disaffection, as well as empathy and apathy. This rural-to-urban movement is probably the most challenging transition in Dongdong’s life – he has become one of the floating children after being left behind for ten years. When Dongdong first moved to Beijing in 2014, his parents were reportedly the most familiar strangers in his life. In the high summer of 2015, we visited Dongdong’s home – a rented dilapidated townhouse located in the outskirt of Beijing. His family has seemingly settled down in the metropolis. Nevertheless, when we leaned against the windowsill upstairs in the townhouse, intently listening to Dongdong’s life stories, we found the townhouse being not only a physical place where the family worked and lived but also an emotional space that accommodated Dongdong’s nostalgia for the rural past – his “missed grandparents, friends, and pets”, and Dongdong’s dream for an urban future – his “hope to become a true Beijinger”. As Dongdong’s stories unfolded, we found ourselves inadvertently approaching his inside world – a secret, subtle microcosmos that has never ever been touched before… When I was very small, my dad and mum came back home only once a year. They only came back during the Spring Festival. They bought me gifts, like snacks, toys, and picture books, but I thought they were strangers. I hid myself somewhere, trying to stay away from them. Dongdong’s experience is not unusual among left-behind children, whose parents are busy with their work in the cities throughout the year. As Dongdong recounted, his parents “came back home only once a year” and they “only came back during the Spring Festival”. The repeated use of the word ‘only’ here has a connotation of x

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Dongdong’s strong eagerness to have parents around him. However, Dongdong is probably not the most miserable. Many migrant workers are not able to reunite with their family for consecutive years because going back home is too time-costly and expensive for them. For their children, a reunion with parents, even for a couple of days during the Spring Festival, becomes a luxury. Let’s return to Dongdong’s story. When asked about his urban life, Dongdong voiced his nostalgia: Now I live with my dad and mum but I miss my grandma and grandpa in my hometown. They (my grandparents) really like me. I also miss my friends there. One of them was really funny. Sometimes when I was alone, I often recalled playing with him. He was very funny. Once we played on top of a stack of sand. Right beside the stack was a mire. There was dirty water in there. You know how funny he was. He lost his step and fell into the mire, upside down. He was really in the mire. His entire head was in the dirty water. Hahaha…How I wish I could play with him again. Apparently, Dongdong’s urban life is larded with pleasant rural memories – living with beloved grandparents and playing with funny friends. These rural experiences are largely absent in his new urban space. Dongdong’s account here strongly aligns with what is documented in the literature – the loss of social capital in schools, neighbourhood, and community of origin constantly thwarts floating children (Liang & Chen, 2007). When Dongdong’s parents first came to Beijing in 2004, they had to work long hours, from nine in the morning till midnight. They did not have time to look after Dongdong themselves and were unable to afford to have Dongdong living with them in Beijing. So they had to make the decision to leave Dongdong behind in the hometown – a hard and sad decision for many migration parents in China. Dongdong’s mum confided, Each time we left home for Beijing, Dongdong cried to death. He gripped my sleeve tightly. I saw streams of tears running down his face. He roared, “Don’t go! Don’t leave me behind! You can’t treat me like this!” My heart wrenched. My tears flowed. The idea of moving Dongdong to Beijing hovered around the minds of the young couple for a long time. It was not until 2013 that Dongdong’s parents opened their own business – a hairdressing shop located downstairs in the townhouse that they rented. The improvement in their living conditions in Beijing soon led to their decision to move Dongdong to Beijing. This decision was justifiably a crucial one, as Dongdong’ mum told us, Our living conditions are much better. Now we have some spare time and we can look after him. We decided to bring him to Beijing. We found there were so many things that Dongdong wasn’t able to do by himself. We never taught him xi

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properly and his grandpa and grandma tended to spoil him too much. He didn’t know how to dress himself and how to tie his shoelaces until probably when he was seven. There are many things we need to teach him now. But at the very beginning he wasn’t very tied up with us and didn’t talk to us that much. Now I try to spend as much time as possible with him. Apart from all the ‘daily training’, Dongdong’s parents soon realised that moving Dongdong to Beijing was never a simple thing. On the contrary, it was laborious and costly. One of the biggest problems when Dongdong first came to Beijing was to find a school for him. Dongdong’s mum noted, They (The school) asked for a lot of things. I can’t remember how many things they needed, but I still have that list, a whole page long list. The list is still attached to the fridge door. You would be dumbfounded if you see that. I have to say that back then I was very stressed. All the formalities nearly drove me mad. To send Dongdong to school was truly not simple. I did all that I could. I even had to leave my business behind those days. I visited a lot of government departments, like the police station, the community centre, the social welfare office, the education bureau, and…I was so flat out. That was crazy. A background note is provided here. Dongdong was not born in Beijing and hence is not a registered Beijing resident as identified by the Household Registration System (Chapter One introduces the system in detail). Funds for public schools are allocated according to the number of school-aged local children formally registered in the Household Registration System. Admission of non-local children to public schools is only possible when required paperwork is completed. To collect all the required documents, Dongdong’s mum spent much time and put in a great deal of effort. Despite all the difficulties, Dongdong’s parents were desperate to move Dongdong to Beijing. After all, the family could no longer afford to live in separation. The investment of Dongdong’s mum seems rewarding. The family relationship has been dramatically improved since Dongdong moved to Beijing. As Dongdong confessed, My mum is very nice to me and I really like her. I try to be a good kid because each time I did not do well in school or did not behave, mum said she will send me back to our hometown. I don’t want to go back. I want to live with my mum and dad. I like my dad too, though he doesn’t talk to me that much. He’s always busy cutting hair for clients. Once the Chinese teacher asked parents to write a letter to us, my dad did a short one for me. I can remember every word he wrote. Listen, I can recite it! “Time flies. I feel gratified that you have grown into a big boy…” While Dongdong repeated every word of the letter, we realised how much Dongdong cared about his parental engagement in his school activities. The rural-to-urban transition is no doubt a learning process for Dongdong. This socialisation process xii

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has constantly shaped and reshaped Dongdong’s identities. Dongdong is no longer a left-behind child, but there is nothing to celebrate because he has become a floating child. His previous identity as a grandson has been recast into the current identity as a son. He has to repeatedly negotiate the tensions between his past identity as a rural kid and his imagined identity as an urban kid. This negotiation requires many reworkings around identity and much investment in the ‘becoming a legitimate urban citizen’ project. The excerpt below connotes such transition. Sometimes I missed my friends in hometown. We often played on the farm. We played with clay. We made the clay into a ball and left it outside for one night. It became hard the next day, like really really hard. We had a ball-throwing competition. It was really funny. But it is different here (in Beijing). Here in school, teachers always tell us not to do this and not to do that. My teacher always asks us to wash hands and keep our hands clean all the time. I have to behave because I want to get that little red flag thing. My teacher will only give that reward (the little red flag) to those who do well in school. Some of my classmates have got many (flags) and I want them too. I want to study hard and I want to become a Beijinger when I grow up. Dongdong’s story is an epitome of millions of left-behind children and floating children in China, who are suffering from the potholes and distractions along their life journey, while at the same time living with opportunities and benefits brought about by their life experience. That is, these children are constantly negotiating emergent forms of being, thinking, and doing in the migration context. It is by no means our intention to treat all left-behind children and floating children as a monolithic whole, assuming that they all have exactly the same experiences as Dongdong. In contrast, our intention here is to debunk the nature, dynamics, and complexities behind the socialisation and learning of these children. In particular, we take stock of the ways in which left-behind children and floating children negotiate their vulnerabilities and opportunities through learning and socialisation in the migration context. In this book, we make an attempt to bring up unheard voices from people involved in migration – voices from left-behind children and floating children, their parents and teachers, as well as their significant adults (e.g., grandparents, extended family members, caregivers). Such an attempt allows the unheard voices to be acknowledged and understood and makes the invisible visible. It also enables us to respectfully hear, observe, and feel the living, learning, loving, and being of people in migration; to willingly understand their voices, dispositions, and social practices; and to skilfully explore the manoeuvres that could make a difference, no matter how little it is, to their live. While there is a growing body of literature concerning left-behind children and floating children, most extant work is concerned with these two populations from a separate, dichotomous perspective. Nevertheless, the ‘left-behind’ and ‘floating’ phenomena are intertwined. Both are produced in the context of urbanisation and migration. A systematic, coherent account of left-behind children and floating xiii

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children within the same context is largely absent. Our book aims to make a contribution in this regard. The book opens with a penetrating overview of urbanisation and migration in China. The Household Registration System is also introduced in the opening chapter. It is arguable that urbanisation is (partly) responsible for the rural-to-urban migration. Our starting point is that macro level social forces, such as urbanisation and migration, construct the context for the ‘floating’ and the ‘left-behind’ phenomena. In this respect, the opening chapter helps set the scene for subsequent chapters, in which we come to grips with the schooling and wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children. Chapter Two establishes the conceptual and empirical basis of the book. Of particular contextual relevance to this book is the rural-to-urban migration. Hence in Chapter Two, we first revisit the notion of ‘rurality’ and succinctly debate the issue of living with rurality in China. This gives rise to our subsequent discussion of the wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children in the context of rural-tourban migration. This is followed by a panoramic review of extant work in regards to the educational, psychological, and physical wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children. The unsound wellbeing of these children raises our concerns about quality of life, social justice, and educational equity. In Chapter Three, we delve into the social politics behind inequalities, looking particularly at the classed pedagogies both at home and in school for floating children. We analyse the sociological dynamics and nature of social reproduction through the unconscious, hence taken-for-granted, intergenerational inheritance of inequality. However, it is by no means our intention to stress the deterministic view. Instead, we call for a change that can mitigate the social reproduction of inequality. In Chapter Four, we echo this call by zooming in on the rural dispositions of floating children. Specifically, we articulate the marginalisation of rural dispositions in the dominant social and cultural fields, and suggest potential pathways to restructure the fabrics of the school field and to recast the misrecognised rural habitus into recognised cultural resources. In Chapters Five and Six, our focus shifts to left-behind children. The diverse and special needs of left-behind children are debated in great detail. Chapter Five starts with our in-depth examination of kin caregivers’ participation and engagement in raising left-behind children when the birth parents of these children migrate to cities. We first provide a succinct discussion of left-behind children’s general and specific needs. We then focus on these children’s emotional needs and explore the roles that different people can play in improving these children’s wellbeing. This examination reveals caregivers’ child rearing practice and attitudes. On the basis of this examination, we present a multi-dimensional model of the needs of left-behind children in China. In Chapter Six, we provide insight into the education and personal development of left-behind children in a Chinese context, and further explore the cultural impacts on adults’ perceptions of left-behind children’s diverse needs. xiv

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In Chapter Seven, we frame floating children and left-behind children together. Specifically, we draw on an ecological perspective to examine the resilience of floating children and left-behind children. This work points to the importance of building the individual and environmental capacity to promote wellbeing in spite of adversities. By highlighting the strength of the traditionally marginalised groups of children, floating children and left-behind children in this case, the chapter deviates from the medical deficit model and the psychological stage-based development model. The chapter provides a transformative view that attempts to recast vulnerabilities into opportunities. Weaving the knowledge built and the lessons learnt throughout the pervious chapters, we conclude the book in Chapter Eight with a rethinking of new social orders emerging from contemporary, idiosyncratic Chinese neoliberalism and socialism. We hope to call for a systematic change that engages schools, communities, families, public sectors, and governments in better accommodating left-behind and floating children. We also hope to provide readers with some theoretical and empirical tools to speculate and facilitate the wellbeing of left-behind children and floating children in China in particular, and the betterment of school-aged children in a wider context in general. NOTES Source: https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih= 960&q=beijing+cbd&oq=beijing+cbd&gs_l=img.3..0j0i30j0i24l3.6615.9605.0.9909.11.9.0.1.1 .0.408.1351.2-4j0j1.5.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..5.6.1360.rlIoBX31_Ck#imgdii=k34w2wqMLKeEjM% 3A%3Bk34w2wqMLKeEjM%3A%3BxQohtocbZLUGEM%3A&imgrc=k34w2wqMLKeEjM%3A 2 Source: https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih= 960&q=beijing+cbd&oq=beijing+cbd&gs_l=img.3..0j0i30j0i24l3.6615.9605.0.9909.11.9.0 .1.1.0.408.1351.2-4j0j1.5.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..5.6.1360.rlIoBX31_Ck#hl=en&tbm=isch&q=%E4% B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E5%A4%96%E6%BB%A9&imgrc=FwwgPRm8-CrXpM%3A 3 Source: https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih= 960&q=the+bund+of+shanghai&oq=the+bund+of+shanghai&gs_l=img.3..0.2095.5491.0.5735.20.8 .0.7.7.0.383.1034.2-1j2.3.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..10.10.1073.YxjoJL0PqDc#hl=en&tbm=isch&q=% E5%B9%BF%E5%B7%9E%E5%A4%9C%E6%99%AF&imgrc=DOwTRB7usLGw9M%3A 4 Source: https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih= 960&q=beijing+cbd&oq=beijing+cbd&gs_l=img.3..0j0i30j0i24l3.6615.9605.0.9909.11.9.0 .1.1.0.408.1351.2-4j0j1.5.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..5.6.1360.rlIoBX31_Ck#hl=en&tbm=isch&q=%E5% 8C%97%E4%BA%AC%E6%98%A5%E8%BF%90&imgrc=0KKdrCVgGE1xIM%3A 5 Source: https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih= 960&q=beijing+cbd&oq=beijing+cbd&gs_l=img.3..0j0i30j0i24l3.6615.9605.0.9909.11.9.0.1 .1.0.408.1351.2-4j0j1.5.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..5.6.1360.rlIoBX31_Ck#hl=en&tbm=isch&q=%E4% B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E7%81%AB%E8%BD%A6%E7%AB%99%E6%98%A5%E8%BF%90&i mgrc=L1uUAkJBM6fLvM%3A 1

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PREFACE Source: https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1920&bih= 960&q=beijing+cbd&oq=beijing+cbd&gs_l=img.3..0j0i30j0i24l3.6615.9605.0.9909.11.9.0.1 .1.0.408.1351.2-4j0j1.5.0....0...1ac.1.64.img..5.6.1360.rlIoBX31_Ck#hl=en&tbm=isch&q=%E5% B9%BF%E5%B7%9E%E7%AB%99%E6%98%A5%E8%BF%90&imgrc=idcolykfQcbImM%3A 6

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

It is with rich feelings that we wrote this book. First and foremost, we feel privileged for having had personal histories and life trajectories contextualised within the social dynamics of urbanisation and migration. The first author spent his childhood alternately in different cities due to the mobile nature of his parents’ work. His highly mobile childhood brought him as many challenges as opportunities. Each time he moved, local children constantly challenged his identity on the grounds of his different ways of doing things and the traces of non-standard local accent in his speech. Since his childhood, he has engaged with numerous relocations for educational and career opportunities, both cross-provincially within China and cross-continentally in a global context. Up to now, he has studied, worked, and lived in China, Canada, and Australia, and visited dozens of countries and regions in the world. Over the years, he has learned to negotiate the subtle, inter-nested social identities and to cope with the nuanced, multi-tiered cultural tensions in the context of migration. The second author was born in a small town called Siping in northeast China and spent a lot of time with his grandparents during his childhood. He has worked hard to break the rural-urban boundaries and achieved upward social mobility through his higher education experiences both in urban China and in Australia. Over the years, he has enjoyed his urban life while at the same time he has been impressed by the class structure and the social stratification in the context of urbanisation. In this respect, urbanisation and migration have both benefited and challenged us – the two authors – all through our educational and career journey. It is these personal histories that prompted us to research and write about people who survive and thrive against the backdrop of urbanisation and internal migration in China. Specifically, in this book, we are concerned with the schooling and wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children in China, whose fate is germane to the social forces and social orders of urbanisation and internal migration. Second, we feel thankful for our research participants who have worked with us over the years. These participants include floating children and left-behind children; the parents, caregivers, and teachers of these children; as well as many other relevant educational professionals. These research participants generously volunteered their time to engage in our study, openly shared their life stories and learning experiences with us, and helped us make sense of the distractions and attractions brought about by urbanisation and internal migration in China. We have extended our gratitude to the participants in our qualitative study when we worked with them on a face-to-face basis. However, we have to owe thanks to those who chose to anonymously participate in our quantitative study, because there is no way to thank these participants in person. We feel privileged to have the opportunity that

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

the research participants have given us to work with them. Their valuable time and effort spent helping with our study, as well as their insightful perspectives on the problems with which we grapple inspired us to work even harder on this writing project. By publication of this book, we show our respect for, and recognise the contribution of, every participant in our study. Last but not least, we are indebted to our beloved family members and chums, who accompanied us through the ups and downs along the writing journey and taught us never to give up. Without the help, support, encouragement, concern, trust, and love of these people, we would have been unable to complete this writing project. Here we would like to take this unique opportunity to name these people: from the first author’s side – Ms. Weiming Li (李伟明), Mr. Shuhuai Mu (穆书淮), Ms. Jing Xue (薛静), Mr. Shizhuo Gui (桂士卓), Ms. Marion Welburn, Mr. David Welburn, Dr. Cassie Welburn, and Professor Allan Luke; and from the second author’s side – Ms. Guihua Xing (邢桂华), Mr. Zhonghua Hu (胡忠华), Professor Bob Lonne, and Dr. Judith Burton. By publication of this book, we hope we have not failed the love and expectations of these people. Both authors of the book have received over twenty years of public education, from primary school, through secondary school, to university. The expenditure on supporting and funding our academic work and life can amount to over half million dollars. The taxpayers in the community have spent hugely on us over the years. When neoliberalism gradually erodes public good and upholds private good, we feel that we have been long overdue in returning something to the community. By publication of this book, we hope to make changes, no matter how small they are, to the life and future of floating children and left-behind children. In this way, we hope to reward the community that has long nurtured us.

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Predictors of children’s aspiration for the future: Model summary Table 2. Predictors of children’s aspiration for the future: Coefficients Table 3. Interview participant information Table 4. Internal consistency of the subscales of social relationships Table 5. Comparison of social relationships between the discriminated group and the non-discriminated group

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73 73 82 98 98

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. City view of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou viii Figure 2. The increase of migrant population by year ix Figure 3. Crowds at railway stations right before Chinese New Year ix Figure 4. The charisma of Mao and the scenes of the Grand Leap Forward Campaign6 Figure 5. Urbanisation rate in China (1949–2015) 9 Figure 6. The journey of mankind 17 Figure 7. Home and work of Xiaobao’s family 51 Figure 8. The growth of floating children in number in Beijing (2004–2011) 81 Figure 9. The needs model of children left behind in China 112 Figure 10. Picture work sample: “My Wish” by a ten-year-old boy 147 Figure 11. The heartbreaking moment of separation  148 Figure 12. Picture work samples: Learning-related wishes 153 Figure 13. Mediation effect of resilience on the relationship between children’s participation in family work and their academic engagement (standardised direct effects) 154 Figure 14. Mediation effect of resilience on the relationship between adverse life events and children’s aspiration for future (standardised direct effects) 157 Figure 15. Picture work sample: “My wish is to have a clock” from a ten-year-old boy 160 Figure 16. An ecological pathway to resilience building 162 Figure 17. Ecological model of resilience building 164

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CHAPTER 1

URBANISATION AND MIGRATION Histories, Patterns, and Challenges

Increased unaffordability of urban space and basic amenities, negative policy perspective towards migration and various rural development programmes designed to discourage migration are responsible for this exclusionary urban growth and a distinct decline in urban rural growth differential, with the major exception of China.  (Kundu, 2009, p. 1) Large cities in the developing world, with populations of more than 5 million people, on the other hand, did not experience such high growth rates in the 1990s; the average annual growth rate of large cities was 1.8 per cent, with the exception of those in China, which grew at the phenomenally high rate of approximately 4 per cent per year.  (UN Habitat, 2008, p. 16) Urbanisation and migration are global phenomena. Such phenomena vary from country to country and from region to region in terms of histories and trends, patterns and pathways, as well as alternate policy frameworks and ideologies. Interestingly, urbanisation and migration in China, as indicated in the citations above, seem to have unique sociocultural textures and fabrics, which have shocked, and will continue to shock, the rest of the world. As Kundu (2009, p. 20) suggested, “one must analyse internal migration in China in some detail as this is the most discussed subject among quantitative demographers as also this is one of the very few Asian countries which reports acceleration in urbanisation and migration”. In this opening chapter, we echo Kundu’s call by an in-depth review of Chinese urbanisation and migration. When this chapter unfolds, it will become clear how the social-spatial interpeneration play out within the context of urbanisation and internal migration in China. Specifically, we will discuss how Chinese history, culture, and politics come to shape the unique attributes of urbanisation and internal migration in China, and how this uniqueness influences the lives of thousands of millions of internal migrants in China. BACKGROUND: CHINA IN A SNAPSHOT

China continues to speak to the world about its sheer vastness, its huge population, its fascinating history and culture, its idiosyncratic Chinese socialism, and its rapid 1

Chapter 1

economic growth. Currently, the country has the world’s largest population (with 1.36 billion citizens in 2016), the world’s second largest economy (with a Gross Domestic Product of US$ 11.38 trillion as of 2015), and the world’s third largest territorial area of 9.60 million square kilometres. The internal diversities are huge in this country. Among 56 distinct ethnic groups, Han Chinese account for 91.59% of the overall population. Despite the demographic prominence of Han Chinese, the diverse ethnic groups have created multicultural dynamics across the country. China’s cultural dynamics are mirrored in its linguistic diversities. There are currently 300 living languages in China, with 297 of these being indigenous/ethnic minority languages (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig, 2015). China is composed of four directly controlled municipalities (Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing), 23 provinces (including Taiwan), five autonomous regions (Inner Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang, Guangxi, and Ningxia), and two self-governing special administrative regions (Hong Kong and Macau). As a socialist state, China is governed by a single party, namely, the Communist Party of China. Besides this party, there are eight minor parties which participate in the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the National People’s Congress. The latter and local People’s Congresses constitute the electoral system in China, whereby the representatives of the People’s Congresses at different levels represent the voters’ civil and political rights. The central decision making cascades through six administrative levels: the state, province, prefecture, county, township, and village. Parallel bureaucracies have been established from the national level to the local level. At village level, rural residents vote for a Village Committee which manages all the local affairs. Before China was established as a communist nation in 1949, it had experienced World War II (Anti-Japanese War) and the Civil War between the Communist Party of China and the Chinese Nationalist Party. The whole country was recovering from civil chaos in the 1950s. From 1953 when the first Five-Year Plan began to 1978 when the Reform and Opening-up Policy was initiated, the government had persistently implemented a centrally planned economy. Under the planned economy, the central government directed and controlled economic output and resources distribution. Most products in the markets were produced by state-owned enterprises. The advantages of the planned economy were obvious, as it stimulated industrialisation and alleviated poverty. Also during this period, the government pushed the national land reform, through which peasants obtained land ownership. Historically, Chinese peasants were a vulnerable group and exploited by squires. Before the land reform, approximately 90% of rural residents were peasants, but they only owned less than 30% of the total lands in China. The national land reform was not only conducive to promoting peasants’ material wellbeing, but also catalytic to increasing agricultural productivity. At that time, the agricultural sector dominated the Chinese economy, but problems remained. At least to some extent, the centrally planned economy and the unstable political situations failed to balance social production and social needs. This also had strong implications for urbanisation and migration, which we will discuss in subsequent sections of this chapter. 2

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Since the implementation of the Reform and Opening-up Policy in 1978, political and economic development in China has gradually progressed. Since then, the Communist Party of China has been establishing political stability through political institutionalisation, which also contributes to the economic boom. Despite the fast annual growth in GDP (6.9% in 2015), the huge population drags down the per capita GDP to approximately US$ 8,000 in 2015, which is about the average level in a global context. Although the economic boom in the general picture is laudable and merits commendation, the general picture does not tell the whole story. The unbalanced regional development has seen the looming polarisation between the coast and the inland, the east and the west, the developed and the remote, the urban and the rural, and the rich and the poor. The dramatic development gap has become a significant macro level factor behind internal migration. Of particular relevance to this book is rural-to-urban migration. Such migration works in tandem with urbanisation. These two social phenomena have created the context for the being and doing of internal migrants. In this book, we are concerned with the wellbeing and schooling of children of internal migrants, that is, floating children and leftbehind children. Currently there are gigantic populations of left-behind children and floating children in China. According to the sixth national census data, the numbers of floating children and left-behind children were 36 million and 61 million respectively (National Bureau of Statistics, 2010). These numbers will continue to grow with the rapid pace of urbanisation and the dramatic extension of internal migration. In this regard, ‘floating children’ and ‘left-behind children’ phenomena are unique populations generated by urbanisation and internal migration in China. The heterogeneity and complexity of these populations, coupled with their vulnerability and capability as well as their associated educational, cultural, social ramifications are constantly shaped by the social structures and cultural dynamics of the era of urbanisation and internal migration. In order to construct the contextual basis of the book, the opening chapter wades into some of the defining attributes of Chinese urbanisation and migration. A PENETRATING OVERVIEW OF URBANISATION IN CHINA

More than half of the current population of China lives in urban areas. This percentage may not be striking as many other countries in the world have much higher urbanisation rate, for example, Singapore, 100%; Belgium, 98%; Israel, 92%; Australia, 89%; Denmark, 88%, Brazil, 85%; the UK, 82%; Korea, 82%; Canada, 82%; the US, 81%; Mexico, 79%; Russia, 74% (World Bank, 2015). What is noteworthy about Chinese urbanisation is its consistent, dramatic growth since the initiation of the Reform and Opening-up Policy in 1978. While the urbanisation rate was only 13.3% in 1953 (National Bureau of Statistics, 1954), it rose to 54.8% by the end of 2014 and will continue to grow at a rapid speed (National Bureau of Statistics, 2015). 3

Chapter 1

In fact, the urbanisation rate in China had remained low throughout Chinese history until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Over a two thousand year period of feudal times in China, agriculture had been the primary component of the Chinese economy. As a result, the urbanisation rate oscillated around 5%. For example, in the Tang and the late Qing dynasties, the urbanisation rate was 5.2% and 5.9% respectively (Rozman, 1973). During this period, it was not uncommon to see urban residents having one foot in rural areas due to their private land property beyond the urban centres. Although the then handicraft sector was highly developed, it never challenged the dominant contribution of agriculture to the economy. Therefore, an overwhelming proportion of the then Chinese population was involved in agricultural sectors, engaging with farming and pastoral work in rural areas. The period from the inception of the People’s Republic of China to the implementation of the Reform and Opening-up Policy saw an oscillation of urban population. The increase rate of urban population was relatively high during the period from 1958 to 1961, a period when the Chinese Communist Party launched the Great Leap Forward Campaign (大跃进). The campaign, led by the then Chairman MAO Zedong, aimed to rapidly transform an agricultural economydependent country into a socialist society through massive industrialisation and collectivisation. This campaign, though blatantly criticised as the “killing fields” (Dikötter, 2010, p. 33) for many Chinese, remarkably promoted urbanisation in China. The urban population growth dropped significantly, however, as a result of the Rustication Movement (上山下乡运动) during the Cultural Revolution years from 1966 to 1976. During this period, it was estimated that 18 million urban youths (were) moved to rural areas. Since the Great Leap Forward Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and the concomitant Rustication Movement dramatically shaped and reshaped urbanisation in China, we now spend some space to revisit these social upheavals. The Great Leap Forward Campaign The Great Leap Forward Campaign, as its name suggests, aimed to contribute to rapid development of the Chinese economy. However, mistakes of the campaign aborted its ambitious aim, or probably the campaign was failed by its own overambitious aim, for example, to surpass the UK and the US within 15 years. The Great Leap Forward Campaign had adverse impact on both rural and urban areas. On rural sites, a number of radical, controversial, and unscientific agricultural innovations were promoted at the behest of Mao. Close cropping, deep ploughing, and over-use of the most fertile land with the moderately productive land left unplanted led to decreases in grain production rather than increases. Ironically, local leaders were pressured into falsely reporting ever-higher grain production to the authorities. There were various reasons behind this false reporting. On the one hand, the local leaders felt obliged to please their superiors and win plaudits and awards 4

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(like the chance to meet Mao in person); on the other hand, they were also afraid of being criticised or even punished for not being able to achieve the pre-empted goals of the agricultural innovations. In this respect, the Great Leap Forward Campaign formulated an institutionalised force imposed on local leaders to exaggerate grain production. Such force was not only a ‘symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1984) but also a real violence in certain situations. To facilitate the agricultural innovations, substantial effort was expended on large-scale irrigation projects. These projects were implemented through excessive use of rural corvée and poorly planned works without the involvement of professionals and engineers. As a result, the irrigation projects claimed the lives of many exhausted, starving peasants, and hence reduced the rural population at least to a certain extent. On urban sites, steel production projects were launched to pillar economic development and industrialisation. Without sound knowledge of metallurgy, Mao claimed that steel could be produced from scrap metal and hence encouraged the establishment, if possible, of small backyard steel furnaces in each urban neighbourhood. To fuel the furnaces, the local environment was denuded of trees. In some urban communities, even wooden furniture and doors were burned. Pots, pans, and all tangible metal artefacts were requisitioned to supply the ‘scrap metal’ so that the wildly optimistic production targets could be met. Many peasants were diverted from the farms to help with the steel production as were professionals from many other sectors, such as schools and hospitals. The massive rural-to-urban move of labour force saw an increase in urbanisation during this period of Chinese history. Urbanisation was further expedited by massive government investment in large state enterprises. Such investment created huge demands for industrial workers and hence drained millions of peasants from farms to industrial sites in urban China. During this rapid industrial expansion, the loss of the labour force on the farms in conjunction with the unrealistic agricultural innovations severely reduced food production, whereas an increasing number of new industrial workers in the cities awaited to be fed. This rural-urban tension placed major stress on the food-rationing system and brought up critiques against Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign. Resultantly, the moderate camp within the Communist Party of China led by LIU Shaoqi and DENG Xiaoping gradually rose to power, with the radical camp led by Mao marginalised. Mao’s shaky power within the Party urged him to initiate the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution The Cultural Revolution was launched in May 1966, after Mao alleged that the capitalist and the traditional, outdated elements had infiltrated the Party, the Government, and the society at large. Mao labelled these capitalists and traditionalists as ‘revisionists’ and called for the purge of the remnants of these revisionists through class struggle. China’s youth proactively responded to Mao’s call and actively 5

Chapter 1

supported Mao’s class struggle by forming the so-called ‘Red Guard’ around the country. On 18 August 1966, over one million Red Guards gathered in and around Tiananmen Square for a personal audience with Mao. In subsequent years, over 10 million Red Guards travelled around the country to exchange their revolutionary experiences, with the expenses borne by the Government. The engagement of the Red Guard supported Mao’s war against his own dissidents within the Party, leading to a massive purge of the moderate camp led by LIU Shaoqi and DENG Xiaoping. Therefore, the Cultural Revolution not only marked Mao’s return to a position of predominant leadership after the Great Leap Forward Campaign, but also developed Mao’s personality cult to immense proportions – a form of ‘symbolic power’ (Bourdieu, 1989) that preserved, transformed, consecrated, or legitimated objective principles and rules of the social space according to Mao’s own interest. Figure 4 evidences Mao’s charisma over the Cultural Revolution Years and also demonstrates some typical scenes of the Grand Leap Forward Campaign.

Figure 4. The charisma of Mao and the scenes of the Grand Leap Forward Campaign

Mao’s political gain, however, accrued at the cost of the loss of social orderliness. What was previously a youth movement was upgraded to a nationwide campaign. Universities and factories were shut down, and employment opportunities became increasingly grim. More and more young people joined the Red Guard and took to the streets. At the political level, the Red Guard blatantly opposed and cruelly attacked any ideology that they viewed as deviant from Mao’s epistemology and political discourse; at the cultural level, the Red Guard destroyed any element claimed to be the Four Olds, namely old customs, old cultures, old habits, and old ideas. With Mao’s acquiescence to the Red Guard’s destructive actions, the campaign soon lost control and became a social turmoil. Against this backdrop, Mao began the Rustication Movement to move the Red Guard from the urban to the rural, where they would cause less social disruption. The Rustication Movement In December 1968, Mao initiated the Rustication Movement, or the so-called ‘Down to the Countryside Movement’. In the Rustication Movement, Mao ordered all urban intellectuals and young people to go to the countryside (Wu & Riskin, 1999). Mao’s charismatic leadership was translated into symbolic and real 6

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political power. As a result, the Red Guards strictly adhered to Maoist doctrine and they actively participated in the Rustication Movement. In addition to the Red Guard, thousands and thousands of young intellectuals, for example, high school students and tertiary education students, were sent to the countryside. Since Mao’s camp considered the education that these young intellectuals had received to be potential threats to the communist regime, Mao wilfully intended to eradicate the inclinations of democracy and freedom from these young people through imposed participation in the Rustication Movement. In this vein, the Movement was an astute manoeuvre to counter-train all the unfavourable dispositions that stood in contrast to Maoism. This massive population moved from the urban to the rural saw the regression of urbanisation. It was not until the dismantlement of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 that these young people regained the opportunity to return to their urban homes. The Great Leap Forward Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, and the Rustication Movement were rife with “coercion, terror, and systematic violence” (Dikötter, 2010, p. x). These social upheavals worked in complicity with one another and contributed to an expensive disaster that significantly shrank the economic development and damaged the social ecology. Nonetheless, these social turmoils arguably had remarkable impact on the Chinese urbanisation in many different ways. The Reform and Opening-up Policy and Onwards Since the early 1950s, China had suffered from successive waves of political movements and social unrest. Following the death of Mao in 1976, DENG Xiaoping regained political power in the Communist Party of China. Under the new leadership of Deng, the Party sought to rebuild the shattered economy and social orders. In 1978, the Reform and Opening-up Policy was initiated. This policy brought a Spring Season to China. From 1978 to the late 1980s, urban population growth began to accelerate. This jump was resultant of a combination of economic and social factors. First, it was estimated that approximately 20 million people who participated in the Rustication Movement during the Cultural Revolution years returned to cities soon after the Reform and Opening-up began. Second, the restoration of the University Entrance Examination in 1978 gave millions of rural youth the opportunity to study and later remain in urban places for work after their graduation. Third, as China opened her door to the world, a massive injection of foreign investment into the Chinese market created a multitude of employment opportunities, particularly in urban areas. These opportunities saw a large rural population bent of flooding urban areas. Next, the central economic policy favoured and supported the development of township enterprises, which fostered the growth of small towns. In conjunction with this economic policy was the decision to strictly control the size of big cities (those with a population over 500,000), to develop medium-sized cities (200,000 to 500,000) and small cities (100,000 to 200,000); and to broaden the criteria for 7

Chapter 1

classifying an area as a city or town. Following this decision, the medium-sized and small cities grew fast and the number of towns meeting the new urban criteria increased more than twofold. In this respect, the decision on the development of medium-sized and small cities and the urban reclassification brought a significant jump of urban population. Furthermore, the proliferation of free markets in the ruralurban conjunction zones saw a large-scale influx of rural venders into cities and small towns, producing a large population of temporary urban residents. In this vein, the urban growth during the period from 1978 to the late 1980s resulted primarily from the development of small- and medium-sized cities and towns rather than from an expansion of existing large cities. From the late 1970s to the late 1990s was the period when China transformed from state socialism to market socialism. This transition had far-reaching effects on urbanisation. The restructuring of the state-owned enterprises commenced in the early 1990s. Many poorly managed, inefficient, and wasteful state-owned enterprises that failed to survive in the economic market were either closed down or transformed. Resultantly, at least half of employees from the state-owned enterprises were laid off. The dire employment situation in the cities somewhat mitigated the urbanisation of the then China. Almost at the same time, the economic market was burgeoning along the east coast of China. Such economic prosperity was boosted by the rapid development of private sectors in the coastal area, particularly the establishment of small- and medium-sized businesses in the newly created exportprocessing zones. This economic opportunity saw many farmers, most of whom were women, move to work in factories and workshops in city suburbs. To earn more money, they had to work long hours. To save more money, they had to live frugally, suffering from precarious lives in company dormitories or shantytowns. Nevertheless, the economic benefit seemed to triumph, and hence waves of (female) farmers migrated to work in the urban areas. Since the beginning of the new century, urbanisation has further accelerated. Over the past decade, the average growth rate in urbanisation is around 1.3%. Figure 5 summarises the urbanisation rate from 1949 to 2015 (Data were drawn from China Statistical Yearbooks). As shown in Figure 4, over the eight years from the founding of the People’s Republic of China to 1957, the accumulative urbanisation rate growth was less than 5%; while during the Great Leap Forward Campaign, urbanisation rate increased from 16.25% in 1958 to 19.29% in 1961, generating a 3% growth within three years. Upon the conclusion of the Great Leap Forward Campaign, the urbanisation rate dropped to 17.33% in 1962 and marginally grew to 17.98% in 1965. Urbanisation rate remained consistently low during the Cultural Revolution, oscillating around 17.5% during the period from 1966 to 1976. The recent four decades, however, have seen dramatic increase in urbanisation. While the urbanisation rate was 17.92% at the inception of the Reform and Opening-up Policy in 1978, it exceeded 58% by the end of 2015.

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Figure 5. Urbanisation rate in China (1949–2015)

Emergent Challenges With the continuous growth of urbanisation in China, various problems have emerged. At the macro level, urbanisation has lagged behind the rapid economic development. While the quantity of urban population is huge, the quality of this population and the quality of life of this population beg improvement. Increasingly visible environmental problems, challenges of water supply and waste treatment, overcrowded traffic, underdeveloped urban infrastructures, high living cost, unaffordable price of housing property, high intensity of employment competition, flawed medical care and social welfare system, and inadequate educational resources have troubled and will continue to trouble Chinese cities. Cities in the eastern part are facing more challenges given the uneven pattern of internal development and settlement, strongly weighted toward eastern China. Metropolitan cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou in particular, will have to urgently address the tensions between the rapid growth of urban population and the healthy development of urbanisation. At the micro level, problems brought about by urbanisation are also becoming increasingly visible. Rapid pace of urbanisation generates social forces that uproot established ways of life, entrench individualism, and undermine collectivism. Since 2011, the urbanisation rate in China has exceeded 50%. However, it should be acknowledged that such percentage is based on the census data that uses the population of urban residents as an indicator. Interestingly, the rate can drop down to 35% when household registration data is used. That is to say, not all urban residents

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Chapter 1

are registered urban citizens. Due to the uniqueness of the residence registration system in China and its particular relevance to the topic of this book, we now turn to an introduction to the Household Registration System. HOUSEHOLD REGISTRATION SYSTEM IN CHINA AND THE INSTITUTIONALISED CLASS DISTINCTION

The Household Registration System is an institution required by law in China. The system officially registers, records, and recognises a Chinese citizen as a legitimate, usual resident of a particular area. Identifying information is recorded in the Household Registration Book (户口簿) issued per household, and usually includes each family member’s demographic information, such as name, gender, nationality, date and place of birth, blood type, body measurements, marital status, education qualification, religion, occupation, current residency, and history of moves. Since the Household Registration System entrenches social strata, especially the stratification between rural and urban residency status, it is often considered to be an institutionalised instrument of class distinction in China. History The Household Registration System has a long history in China. It can date back to as early as the Xia Dynasty (2100 BC – 1600 BC). The Household Registration System continued to develop in the centuries that followed. As seemingly a population documentation system, the then Household Registration System was matter-of-factly complicit with taxation, conscription, and monitoring, management, and control of internal migration as well as immigration and emigration. Since 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party came to power, the government promoted a centralised, hierarchical regime. This regime was pillared by a multiplicity of policies, including the Household Registration System that was officially promulgated in 1958. The movement of people between urban and rural area was controlled. Chinese citizens were broadly categorised into the dichotomy of ‘rural’ versus ‘urban’ workers. A rural worker who sought to move to an urban area and take up non-agricultural work would have to apply through layers of bureaucracies. The number of workers allowed to make such moves was strictly restricted. Internal migrant workers would require a set of passes to work in provinces other than their province of origin. People who worked outside their registered geographical area would not qualify for grain rations, employer-provided housing, and health care in their temporary resident area. In addition, there were controls over education, employment, marriage and so on through the Household Registration System. Over the years, the household registration status of Chinese citizens does make a difference to their life. During the mass famine of the Great Leap Forward Campaign, being an urban versus a rural resident could mean the difference between life and death. The then rural population was approximately 600 million. During the 10

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mass famine years, most rural residents were collectivised into village communal farms, where they engaged with agricultural production. Their only source of food was the after-tax agricultural output. Unfortunately, state taxes during those years confiscated nearly all agricultural output in many rural areas. This can be attributed to two factors: (1) the institutionalised exaggeration of grain production imposed by the politics of the Great Leap Forward Campaign, and (2) the actual dramatic declines in grain production brought about by the mass famine. These two factors resulted in mass starvation and claimed the life of many. Desperate, starving rural residents had to flee to cities to beg for food. To maintain the social order and ensure public security in the cities, police conducted regular inspections of residency document on the streets and deported those of rural residency, which led to subsequent death of most of those deported. This is commonly known as the ‘Custody and Repatriation’ (收容遣送) policy, which authorised the police to detain people without ‘movement permit’ in detention centres, and later repatriate them to their registered residency location. The 100 million urban residents, however, were fed by fixed food rations established by the Central Government. Although the food supply was limited, it still allowed the survival for almost all urban residents during the famine years. With the suppression of news dissemination, many urban residents were unaware of the devastating situation in rural China. Such news control was essential to preventing organised opposition to Mao’s policy of the Great Leap Forward Campaign (Becker, 1998). However, the increasing death toll during the famine years raised serious concerns within the Communist Party, which pointed to the flaw of Mao’s Great Leap Forward Campaign. These concerns consequently shook the dominant power of the Mao-inspired left-wing and eventually forced Mao to end the Great Leap Forward Campaign. The stark contrast between the fate of the rural and that of the urban during the mass famine years was the most extreme demonstration of how much impact that the Household Registration System could have on the lives of Chinese people. Significant interference of the Household Registration System in all aspects of life continues even till today. Of particular relevance to this book is the impact of the Household Registration System on educational opportunity, which will become clear in subsequent chapters. From the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 to the late 1970s, the Household Registration System adopted a typology to classify and label Chinese citizens by domicile. Such system implicitly created the binary status of the rural versus the urban, institutionally endowed urban citizens with various social welfares that farmers did not enjoy, and resultantly disadvantaged rural citizens by marking them as second-class citizens. Things changed, however, when DENG Xiaoping – the successor of Mao – came into power and initiated the Reform and Opening-up Policy in 1978. Since then, constraint on population movement has relaxed. As a result of the relaxation of the population movement control, internal migration has become increasingly visible in contemporary China. 11

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The growing prosperity in the urban space has captivated more and more people, attracting them to move from the west to the east, from the inland to the coast, from the rural to the urban, from the underdeveloped to the metropolitan centres like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Such migration has been portrayed in the photos at the outset of this book. Despite the Government’s intention to relax the Household Registration System, the system continues to function well in terms of monitoring and control of population movement. Such success is also indebted to technology that has made it easier to manage population migration as now the public security departments have a national database of household registrations, which can be shared across police authorities in the country. Functions of the Household Registration System The previous section has indicated one of the major functions of the Household Registration System – population monitoring and control. However in practice, the system has much more impacts on the Chinese society and its citizens. Generally speaking, the Household Registration System registers citizens, collects and documents their demographic information, provides personal identification of each family member, and certifies family relationships and residence status. Having said that, the understanding of the function of the system only as the population management by the Government is oversimplified. Beyond the commonly understood and accepted functions of documentation and record keeping, the Household Registration System makes it possible for the Government to distribute social resources, control population mobility, monitor certain people, maintain the political stability of the state, and hence scaffold the governance of the Communist Party. These covert functions of the Household Registration System are discussed below. First, the Household Registration System is the basis for resource distribution and subsidisation for selected groups of the population. For example, the funding system of education in China is decentralised. This means that local governments are responsible for (partly) funding their local educational institutions – public kindergartens, schools, and universities. This matters, inter alia, for school-aged children in compulsory education years (Year One to Year Nine) – only children with their residency registered in a particular local region can enjoy free compulsory schooling of that region. Children from other regions have to have their tuitions paid by their parents, even if these children are at the compulsory education level. From the local government’s point of view, this policy does make sense when local policy favours its ‘legitimate’ residents who contribute to the community development through tax paying. That said, such policy pains people with high mobility. Paying onerous tuition fees for their children’s schooling is just one of their pains. Those who are unable to afford the tuition fees have to either send their children to unlicensed schools in the cities run by migrant workers and charging nominal, affordable tuitions; or leave their children behind in the rural hometown, being looked after by 12

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grandparents, extended family members, or even neighbours. These two groups of children are termed ‘floating children’ and ‘left-behind children’ respectively in this book. Although recent policies have relaxed school admission that used to be based on the residence status, many problems remain. These problems will be elaborately debated as the following chapters unfold. Second, the Household Registration System allows the Government to monitor, regulate, and control internal migration, especially the rural-to-urban migration. In this respect, the Household Registration Book functions as the ‘internal passports’. Since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, this function has shaped much of the economic development by politically affecting the movement of human resource and its associated capital, goods, and knowledge. On the one hand, mobility of people is only allowed to ensure an adequate supply of low cost rural workers to the plethora of state-owned businesses in rapidly developing urban regions. On the other hand, the restriction formed by the system is relaxed in order to increase the mobility of skilled workers to serve the economic development in urban areas. In this vein, it is arguable that the Household Registration System heavily favours the urban centres with investment and subsidies. The logic and politics of the Household Registration System, however, have been increasingly questioned and criticised by the social inclusion and equity discourses. These discourses blatantly point out the complicity between the Household Registration System and social stratification. Third, what is even less visible, but equally important, about the Household Registration System is its function of social control involving the management of the so-called targeted people – drug users, former criminals, and political antagonists of Communism in particular. These targeted people are considered to be politically dubious by the Government’s and the Communist Party’s standards. With the Household Registration System, the public security departments, the police included, maintain a confidential list of the targeted people in each community. Such focused monitoring and control of selected segments of the population have made different political opinions difficult to survive and develop. On the one hand, this function of the Household Registration System has contributed significantly and effectively to the political stability of China. On the other hand, such approach has been continuously challenged by the human rights movements. The aforementioned latent functions of the Household Registration System point to the institutionalised management that helps to organise the Chinese population. Despite its contributions to the Chinese economic growth and political stability, the Household Registration System is confronted with significant ethical problems. In response to these problems, the Central Government and the local governments at various levels have engaged with the reform of the Household Registration System. Nevertheless, the reform is a complicated one since it involves the fundamental restructuring of political and social systems that impact every aspect of Chinese society including employment, education, social welfare and security, as well as human rights and property rights. Despite these challenges, the gradual breakdown of the dual-type urban-rural household registration status has started. This movement 13

Chapter 1

aims to provide rural residents with equal access to public resources as enjoyed by their urban counterparts. Since the beginning of the new millennium, some provinces such as Fujian, Liaoning, and Shandong have abolished the dual-type Household Registration System and issued identical household registration status to both urban and rural residents. In December 2014 the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council released a draft residence permit regulation. The draft proposed the dismantlement of the Household Registration System in small cities and towns, gradually easing restrictions in medium-sized cities while retaining substantial restrictions in large metropolitan areas. The draft was followed by rounds of calls for public comments and a high-level official discussion at the Communist Party Congress. It is estimated that the national Household Registration System reform will be completed by 2020. Although recent political initiatives have shaken the well-established Household Registration System, reformation of the system has always been controversial, with the serious concern that the liberalisation of the system would lead to massive movement of people into urban areas, overloading cities with excessive responsibilities for provision of employment opportunities, social resources, and civic services; while increasing the risks of social unrest and crime in the cities. In this respect, reformation of the Household Registration System should follow an active yet prudent approach. Control of Internal Population Movement in Other Countries China is not the only country that has ever placed control over the internal movement of its population. Many other countries have historically employed an ‘internal passport system’ to monitor and control the movement and residence of their people. These countries include, but are not limited to, Confederate States of America (1861–1865), South Africa, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, 1922–1991). Internal passports were used in the Confederate States of America. These passports were applied to freed blacks in the slave states and allowed their discretionary travel within the Southern slave states (Neely, 1993). Similar control of movement of black people was historically applied elsewhere. For example, in South Africa, Pass Laws formed the legal basis for internal passport that was designed to segregate population, manage urbanisation, and allocate migrant labour (Johnstone, 1976). This internal passport limited the movements of citizens and institutionalised racial discrimination against black people. Such limitation and discrimination were some dominant features of the apartheid system in South Africa until the system was dismantled in 1986. In the Soviet Union (1922–1991), control of the population’s internal movement was realised through ‘propiska’, a regulation that permitted a person to reside in a given place and recorded any personal history of internal moves (Zavisca, 2012). Similar to the Chinese Household Registration System, a valid 14

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propiska was used to guarantee the access to a wide range of social resources, such as higher education and medical treatment. The propiska was formally abandoned soon after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In Russia, however, the propiska was replaced with the ‘residency registration’, which, in principle, was simply the documentation of one’s place of residence. Unlike the propiska, it is not an offense not to have the residency registration. It is only an offense to fail to register the residence in a particular dwelling for more than 90 days. Russia de facto has no restriction on its citizens’ residency, but certain civil rights, such as the right to vote, is still dependent on the residency registration. Currently, the ‘internal passport’ is still valid in some parts of the world. China, Russia, Iraq, and Ukraine, just to name a few here, all apply population registration regulations to their citizens. These regulations, different in terminology across the countries, have similar functions in terms of managing the internal movements of residents. Behind the internal passport system we see power relations, social stratification, and emergent human rights issues, which are beyond the scope of this book. Our starting point is that currently people are on the move as they have never ever been before. Despite the fact that many countries in the world intent to control population movement, a myriad of citizens of these countries continue to move across subnational borders. It should be acknowledged that population moves have never been constrained within a country’s border. A sizable population in the world has engaged with international moves for various reasons. The following section discusses both international and internal migration, with a particular focus on the internal migration in China. A SYNOPTIC REVIEW OF MIGRATION

Migration is a social phenomenon that generates, and is generated by, human movements. However, not all human movements are regarded as migration because human movement is ubiquitous, and hence is a much broader concept than migration. In general, all temporary human movements for the purpose of travel, tourism, pilgrimage, or commute are not regarded as migration, because these movements happen in the absence of an intention to live and settle down in the visited places. Different from people engaging with temporary movements, migrants often have complex reasons to move out of their original place and a clearly defined objective to remain in the place to which they migrate and call this destination place ‘the home away from home’. There are various factors behind human migration. Since these factors are often correlated and inter-nested, it is rare to see migrants moving across the borders for one single reason. Having said that, a distinction can be made between push factors and pull factors for migration. Push factors usually include unfavourable aspects about the origin place, whereas pull factors normally refer to potential, foreseeable benefits available in the destination place. In this vein, push factors 15

Chapter 1

may include, but are not limited to, dire career opportunities, loss of wealth, or poor medical care and housing; natural disasters, desertification, pollution, or famine; bullying, discrimination, slavery/forced labour, political persecution, or death threats by war; and in some cases, poor chances of marrying. Pull factors, on the contrary, often include career and education opportunities, social services and welfare, attractive climates, high level of security, family links, as well as desire for more political or religious freedom. It is the co-work of pull and push factors that generate migration. A distinction can also be made between voluntary migration and involuntary migration. Voluntary migration usually involves shifts of population for economic reasons, for example, the migration of labour force. Such migration, according to Castles and Miller (2003), is economically motivated by seeking monetary benefits, career prosperity, socio-cultural resources, and educational opportunities. Apart from these ‘economic migrants’, some voluntary migration may be generated by symbolic factors. In North Africa, for example, having an immigrant experience in Europe is considered to be a sign of social prestige. Such social prestige accrues symbolic value and results in recognition by others. The recognised value associated with the social prestige is what Bourdieu (1984, p. 291) means by ‘symbolic capital’ – “a reputation for competence and an image of respectability and honourability”. Involuntary migration, however, is often elicited by natural disaster, persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations, usually in the form of refugees fleeing disastrous situations in their home country and seeking asylum in a destination country. Such migration, according to Castles and Miller (2003), is forced and coerced rather than willingly produced. In every survey of human history, there is no inadequacy of evidence of human beings’ forced migration. The exclusion of Jews from Europe, the exile of Messenians under the Spartan rule, as well as the African trans-Atlantic and the Chinese trans-Pacific slave trade are all early forms of involuntary migration (Mu, 2016). Such involuntary migration continues in modern times. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (2015), the year of 2014 had the highest level of forced migration on record: 59.5 million individuals as compared with 51.2 million in 2013 and with 37.5 million a decade prior. As of 2015, one of every 122 humans is a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. Apart from the economically motivated and forced migrants, Castles and Miller (2003) call the third category of migrants ‘sojourners’. The migration experience of sojourners may be very different from that of the economically motivated or forced migrants since sojourners may stay only temporarily in the host place and may travel frequently between their origin and host place either regularly or irregularly. Many types of sojourners include business people, diplomats, technical experts, overseas students, missionaries, and migrant workers as described at the beginning of this book. Regardless its purposes, migration occurs either across the country borders (international migration) or within a particular country (internal migration). 16

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International Migration Human beings have long engaged with international migration. The prototype of such dates back a long time ago. It is widely recognised that Africa was the homeland of mankind (see Figure 6). Archaeological and genetic evidence shows that human beings originated in Africa about 90,000 years ago. They started to migrate out of Africa to Asia about 80,000 years ago, and then ‘colonised’ Europe about 50,000 years ago. Some continued their journey from Asia to explore Australia about 50,000 years ago and much recently North America about 15,000 years ago. Some early Australians further travelled to South America about 33,000 years ago; while some early North Americans travelled down to the south some 10,000 years ago. Given the shared genealogical root, human beings are all ‘Africans’.

Figure 6. The journey of mankind. This figure is created according to Gugliotta (2008)

In modern society, international migration is becoming increasingly visible, and hence has become a phenotype of globalisation. Over the years, migrants have been moving across regional borders in every part of the world, while some migration corridors are much more crowded than others. The most used corridors include, but are not limited to, Libya-to-the European Union, Mexico-to-the United States, east European countries (e.g., Ukraine, Kazakhstan)-to-Russia, Bangladesh-toIndia, Turkey-to-Germany, Chinese mainland-to-Hong Kong, and China-to-the United States. According to the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs – Population Division (2013), there were 232 million international migrants in 2013, 17

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which doubled the number in 1990. The growth of international migration from 1990 to 2013 has several attributes. First, much of this growth has been achieved in the new millennium. Second, international migrants tend to target developed regions. For example, in 2013, developed regions received 59% of the total migrants whereas developing regions hosted the rest 41%. Third, of all migrants, those from developing countries are associated with marginally higher mobility than those from developed countries. For example, between 2000 and 2013 the average annual rate of change of migrant population in the developing regions (2.3%) slightly exceeded that of the developed regions (2.1%). Fourth, the south hemisphere outpaced the north in the annual growth rate in international migration, although the north had the largest gain in the absolute number of the international migrants over the past two decades. Fifth, women claimed almost half (48%) of all international migrants worldwide in 2013, which is one of the most significant migrant-pattern changes in the last half century. However, compared with male migration, female migration tends to be more associational rather than independent, although complex and manifold reasons behind female migration do exist. With the continuous growth in the quantity of international migrants, their life quality and wellbeing in the immigration country has gained increasing scholarly attention. Of particular interest to extant research are the challenges, tensions, and politics that immigrants have to constantly negotiate. For example, following the social justice model (Fraser & Honneth, 2003), Guo (2013) proposes the Triple Glass Metaphor to conceptualise the downward social mobility of immigrants: (1) the Glass Gate that denies immigrants’ entrance to guarded professional communities; (1) the Glass Door that blocks immigrants’ access to professional employment at high-wage firms; and (3) The Glass Ceiling that prevents immigrants from moving up to management positions. Despite the Triple Glass Effect that establishes multiple barriers, immigrants resiliently rise up to the challenges and struggle to survive and thrive in the immigration country. Internal Migration Different from international migration, internal migration refers to human movements within one geopolitical entity, usually within one country. Early models of migration are largely descriptive in nature. For example, Ravenstein (1885) proposed several attributes of migration within the limits of the United Kingdom: (1) Every migration flow generates a return or counter-migration; (2) The majority of migrants move a short distance, while longer-distance migrants tend to target large cities; (3) Resultantly, large cities grow by migration rather than natural increase; (4) Technology and economy bolster migration; (5) Given the urban-rural disparity in technology and economy, rural residents are often more migratory than those of urban areas in order to obtain a wider range of technological and economic resources; (6) Families are less likely to move than individual young adults; (7) Most migrants are adults; and (8) Many migrants reach their destination by stages, 18

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gradually working their way through a complex trajectory instead of a direct, oneoff route. Though descriptive in nature, some dimensions of Ravenstein’s model still ring true today. Most relevant to this book is the regional disparity in various forms of resources that elicit internal migration. Such migration has contributed hugely to urbanisation in many countries, and at the same time urbanisation has remarkably enhanced the rural-to-urban migration. For example, in the United States, a massive population migrated from the east coast and inland states to the west coast during the mid-19th century, and there was a similar large-scale migration from the agricultural south to the industrialised northeast in the early to mid-twentieth century. In the United Kingdom, there have been historical migrations from the north of England to the south, and also from Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales to England. These migrations were most prevalent during the industrial revolution (from the second half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th century) and also in the aftermath of the Irish potato famine (from 1845 to 1852). In New Zealand, the drift to the north has gradually caused population loss in the south, with massive population moving up to the urban centres – for example Auckland – in the country’s far north. In China, the internal migration mainly involves massive population shifts from the countryside to the cities (urbanisation), but historically and contemporarily we have seen reverse population shifts. Such reverse refers to migration out of the cities into rural regions, or the so-called ‘suburbanisation’. Suburbanisation is instantiated in the Rustication Movement mainly driven by the political power during the Cultural Revolution years and the rejuvenation of some rural areas in recent years due to economic factors and emergent problems of urbanisation, for example, the rejuvenation of Wuzhen in Zhejiang province (Qiu, 2015). Although internal migration in China, irrespective of being generated through urbanisation or suburbanisation, may share some similarities with other countries, some unique attributes do remain. It is these attributes to which we now turn. Internal Migration in China Internal migration in China is likely the most extensive and the largest in the world (Chan, 2013). There are two primary sources of this migration, namely the rural-tourban migration and the interprovincial migration from the interior to the coastal and/or from the west to the east. These two sources are not independent but internested. The rural-to-urban migration is often interprovincial while the interprovincial migration usually engages with population moves from rural areas in one province to urban centres in another province. Both the rural-to-urban migration and the interprovincial migration are largely economy-driven. Regarding the interprovincial migration, provinces with robust economies and favourable geographical location are likely to become major migrant-receiving places, for example, Guangdong and Fujian on the southeast coast; Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Shandong on the eastern coast; the national capital Beijing; as well as 19

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the most developed northeast province Liaoning. Major migrant-sending provinces, however, are relatively economically underdeveloped and usually located inland, for example, Anhui, Henan, Guangxi, and Sichuan. To counteract the population flow and to gradually close the regional disparity, the Chinese central government has developed many policy initiatives. For example, the Grand Development Plan for Western Regions (西部大开发) uses economic and political manoeuvres to ‘pull’ skilled workers out of the relatively developed eastern and coastal regions and to ‘push’ them to the relatively underdeveloped western and remote regions. In addition to the interprovincial migration, the rural-to-urban migration produces another large population of floating people. The adjective ‘floating’ here has a connotation of ‘rootlessness’. Because these migrant workers do not have household registration status of their destination city, they are excluded from many local resources, for example, city-wide social welfare programs and free compulsory education for their children. It is the lack of these critical local resources that disadvantage migrant workers. Forms of disadvantage, as explicitly pointed out by Gorski (2014, p. 15), “include not only unequal access to educational opportunity, but also unequal access to healthcare, safe and affordable housing, and living wage jobs, among other commodities – among other basic human rights”. In other words, inequalities often work in collusion with one another, entrenching the social reproduction of disadvantage. Our book is concerned with the children of migrant workers who engage with both interprovincial and rural-to-urban migration. These children are what we call ‘floating children’ and ‘left-behind children’. The schooling and wellbeing of these children will soon become clear in the subsequent chapters of the book. For the time being, we return to the discussion of internal migration in China. The unique Chinese Household Registration System distinguishes internal migration of China from that elsewhere. The system was officially established in 1958. As argued earlier, the system is seemingly a population monitor system but de facto a population control mechanism and an institutionalised approach to class distinction. After the Great Leap Forward Campaign, the Central Government formally promulgated the Household Registration System, with the aims to tie farmers to rural land, secure agricultural supply, and support industrial sectors in cities. The Government allocated housing, jobs, food, and other life necessities based on the Household Registration System, which made it almost impossible for rural people without urban household registration status to live in cities. In this respect, the Household Registration System during Mao’s era successfully functioned as one of the instruments for the then government to place strict controls on intra-country mobility. Since the Reform and Opening-up Policy in 1978, the Household Registration System has been gradually relaxed. Such relaxation has seen an increasing population of internal migrants moving from the rural to the urban. Large volume of rural-to-urban migration has become phenomenal since the new millennium, and hence the rural-to-urban migrant workers have a significant presence in China’s 20

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urban labour force. Most migrant workers are working in manufacture, construction, wholesale and retail, and service sectors (e.g., restaurants, barbershops, massage shops, hairdressing shops, and laundries). Compared with local resident workers, rural migrant workers often have less schooling and job-related skills. In addition, their higher job mobility often results in employers’ little incentive to provide them with professional training. This fails rural migrant workers in gaining human capital, enhancing their employability, and improving their capacity to compete in the labour market. Resultantly, rural migrant workers are stuck in the swamp of jobs with little symbolic value, low wages, poor working conditions, long working hours, and high risks of work-related illness, injury, and death. Within the vicious circle, discrimination against rural migrant workers can be institutionalised in conditions where there are unfair labour contracts, inadequate enforcement of labour law, employers’ overt or covert violation of labour rights, and migrant workers’ unawareness of their labour rights. Such institutionalised discrimination has a classbased implication for the Chinese urban growth and leads up to the potential creation of a ‘permanent urban underclass’ of millions (Chan, 2008). Interestingly, more and more of the rural population is moving to, or intending to move to, cities irrespective of the numerous challenges that they (will) face in their new home. In conditions like these, the driving factors behind the rural-to-urban migration merit some scrutiny. Early western models, for example, the Harris-Todaro Model (Harris & Todaro, 1970), consider the dramatic income difference between urban and rural regions to be the main pull factor of internal migration in developing countries. This western perspective seems to make sense in the Chinese context. For example, Cai (1996) hypothesises that an increase of the ratio of rural income to national average income will mitigate rural-to-urban migration. Further, Zhu’s (2002) study confirms the role of urban-rural income gap in migration decisions. The income disparity model does help make sense of the rural-to-urban migration, but fails to explain the incentives of rural migrant workers who take poorly paid jobs in cities. In addition, all economically motivated migration may be driven, at least to a certain extent, by the income gap between the origin and the destination, for example, the western-to-eastern and the inland-to-coastal migration in China. In this vein, a more robust model specific to rural-to-urban migration is required. Of all the multifaceted and inter-nested drives behind the rural-to-urban migration in China, labour surplus in rural agricultural farms and labour demand in urban economic markets are respectively considered to be the main push and pull factor of the Chinese internal migration. This labour force model (partly) explains the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration in China, but becomes problematic when faced with the high unemployment rate in urban China. The unemployment signifies the bleakness and recession of the labour market, and erodes the pull factor of internal migration. Therefore, the high unemployment rate in urban China challenges the labour force model for internal migration. Apart from the income-gap- and labour-force-related drives, migrant networks may contribute to internal migration in China. In places where there is a significant 21

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population of migrants from the same origin, migrant networks can be formed. Current migrants within the networks may influence the migration decision of their family members, relatives, and people of the same origin. Indeed, migrant networks reportedly encourage subsequent migration in different ways, such as providing job information and supporting migrant community relationship, and hence result in chain migration (Zhao, 2003). For example, migrant workers can easily find a job at a restaurant or in the garment industry run by migrants from the same origins (Liang, 2001). Interestingly, female migrants seem to be more reliant on developed migrant networks. This is instantiated in a study where many female migrant workers from Anhui were found to have long engaged with maid jobs because the migrant community to which these females belong have well established connections with the maid job market (Liang, 2001). This gendered outcome is supported by Huang (2001), who argues that female migrant workers are more likely to obtain genderstereotyped, family-related urban jobs compared to their male counterparts. This is due in part to the traditionally gendered Chinese value, particularly within rural communities. The male was supposed to shoulder the responsibility of carrying on the ancestral line and supporting parents. The role of the female, by contrast, was largely seen as to give birth, take care of all family members, and look after most housework. This gendered value in China is largely consistent with that in Western contexts. Some scholars in the UK have explored the identity of rural woman from a feminist perspective. For example, Little (1997) argues that, generally speaking, the roles of wives and mothers take priority over employment for rural women. As Hughes (1997) further points out, “domesticity was central to their gender identities and their feelings of self-worth” (p. 135). In rural USA, more frequent contact with kin has been found among older retired women than men. These women acted more actively and rated higher affectional closeness with kin families than men (Dorfman & Mertens, 1990). In the migration context, however, Liang and Chen (2004) stress that migration provides women with economic opportunities and a degree of freedom which would be inaccessible at their places of origin. As of yet, there is no scholarly agreement on the gendered effect of internal migration in China. By similar token, there is not yet a universal model that explains internal migration. After all, decisions behind internal migration are multifaceted, and hence complicated. CHAPTER SUMMARY: FRAMING FLOATING AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN TOGETHER

There are multi-tiered, inter-nested contributing factors behind urbanisation and internal migration. These factors interplay with one another across historical, cultural, social, economic, and political domains. This chapter chronologically reviews the emergence and development of urbanisation and internal migration in China. Macro-level social events, such as the implementation of the Household 22

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Registration System, the Great Leap Forward Campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the Rustication Movement, and the Reform and Opening up Policy have all placed significant impact on urbanisation and internal migration. Owing to these historical and historic events and their associated socioeconomic, cultural, and political dynamics and power relations, the trajectory of urbanisation and internal migration in China does not present a linear pattern but a complex curvilinear trend. The entanglements of urbanisation and internal migration are too complex to dissect, but the mutually constitutive effect between the two is apparent. The intersectionality of urbanisation and migration is replete with a multiplicity of social dynamics. Issues of gender, class, cultural inclusivity and diversity, as well as social justice and fairness all constantly emerge from the context of urbanisation and migration. These issues are too complicated to be framed within one volume. That said, one major argument we want to make in this introduction chapter is that macro-level political and social ecologies in the urbanisation and migration era can determine the allocation of resources for education and social intervention. While much recent work on adult migrants in China suggests the positive effects of urbanisation, there is much less clarity and agreement about the impact of urbanisation and internal migration on children. Our point of departure is that the social-spatial interpenetration should be (partly) responsible for the growth of children, particularly those who experience economic disadvantage and social exclusion in the urbanisation and migration context. In this vein, we make an attempt in the subsequent chapters to mirror some of these issues by wading into the schooling and wellbeing of children of internal migrants. Against the backdrop of urbanisation and internal migration, some migrant parents choose to bring their children when moving from the rural to the urban. These children are referred to as ‘floating children’. Some other migrant parents have to painfully leave their children in rural hometown and have their children looked after by other caregivers (e.g., grandparents, extended family members, or even neighbours in some cases). These children are what we mean by ‘left-behind children’. In subsequent chapters of this book, we discuss the psychological, educational, and physical wellbeing of these children; examine their life trajectories and the ways in which they negotiate past, present, and future; analyse their predicaments when moving across the urban and the rural spaces; investigate their special needs; and learn from their resilience that transforms vulnerability into opportunity.

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CHAPTER 2

THE WELLBEING OF FLOATING CHILDREN AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN Conceptual Foundation and Empirical Knowledge

Each time I went back to my hometown, wandering around the small alleys, I realised this town has become a familiar but strange place to me. Overhearing the most amiable accent imaginable, I was hit by a whole bunch of confusions. The belongingness to this place faded and a sense of alienation took hold of me. Ten years passed by quickly and the hometown is more like a host-town now. Who am I and where do I belong?  (From one of our parent participants) At the New Year Party, all other kids had their parents around, but my parents were busy at work. So I had my nana with me. When the show started, all the other kids were lifted above by their parents, like sitting on the shoulders of their parents, so they could still see what’s going on out there. I was blocked by the crowds and couldn’t watch the show. Nana is not strong enough to lift me up. At that time, I just want my parents to be with me.  (From one of our child participants) Urbanisation and internal migration have justifiably in-depth impact on the lives of thousands of millions of migrants. In response to the macro level social forces, migrants have to constantly negotiate subtle, multilayered identities through dynamic, inter-nested social practices in the migration context. What the two participants confided to us at the beginning of this chapter is just an epitome of their migration life. The complexities ingrained in such life can be more than what we could hear, see, and imagine, but the dialectical relationship between being and becoming is inescapable for all floating children and left-behind children in the era of urbanisation and migration. In this chapter, we make an attempt to debunk some of the potholes and distractions found along the migration journey of these children. Accelerating urbanisation has seen a growing number of internal migrants moving from the countryside to the cities. This migration is largely driven by the continuous industrialisation of farming that generates a massive surplus labour force in rural regions and the rapid growth of urban market that creates countless employment opportunities in the cities. As a result, there is an ever-greater rural population bent on moving to work and stay in urban regions. These internal migrants are on the move as they have never ever been before. They are making the decision on 25

Chapter 2

geographical relocation against their cultural dispositions of living and working on the farmland inhabited by their ancestors for thousands of years. Of course the reasons behind their decision making to migrate are too many to name here, but it is apparent that the economic force has attracted more and more rural residents to uproot themselves from their ancestral homeland and move to urban regions for economic profit and material resources. In this vein, rural-to-urban migrants seem to be calculative economists who join in the benefit-seeking and competition-based games in the labour market. However, underneath the neoliberal market are internested tensions and constraints, which have formulated layers of obstacles for rural migrants to be socially included and integrated into urban life. These obstacles thwart rural migrants in many ways. One prominent obstacle for rural migrants who are parents is the hardship in maintaining and promoting their children’s wellbeing and schooling in the migration context. In this respect, the economic benefits gained by these parents are at the cost of the loss of social welfare of their children. Although internal migrants have moved to cities, their rural past can neither be effaced nor be amended. No matter how far they travel, their journey of migration always starts from their rural origin. In this chapter, we first elaborate on the notion of ‘rurality’ and its associated sociocultural meaning to internal migrants. We then focus on the children of migrant parents – the floating children and the left-behind children, looking particularly at the wellbeing and schooling of these children. REVISITING THE NOTION OF ‘RURALITY’

The distinct division between rural and urban communities makes it difficult for rural residents to obtain a socially and culturally legitimate urban identity. This situation is partly attributed to China’s Household Registration System (Du, Park, & Wang, 2005), which not only constrains the mobility of rural residents but also limits their access to urban social services and resources. Even though rural residents can temporarily work in cities, their access to welfare is heavily restricted compared with their urban counterparts. For example, generally speaking, children of internal migrants cannot enrol in an urban school unless the children have a registered urban residency as documented in the Household Registration System. This is the so-called hukou (户口) in China. Recent initiatives have gradually relaxed the policies that strictly request hukou as a prerequisite for free compulsory education. Resultantly, children without an urban hukou may enter urban public schools for free compulsory education under the condition that migrant parents provide all the required documents, which we will introduce later in this chapter. Apart from the obstacles for rural children’s free compulsory education in the city, the high urban living cost often deters migrant parents from bringing their children to live with them in the city. Due in part to educational and economic reasons, enormous numbers of rural children have been left behind in their local communities, and have to live with their kin. 26

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Internal rural-to-urban migration is phenomenal and social problems emerging from such has received the attention of governments at various levels. Accordingly, the state has implemented several policies to protect rural migrants’ rights in cities. These policies aim to eliminate institutional discrimination against rural migrants. However, positive outcomes from these policies are reportedly limited (Meng, Manning, Shi, & Effendi, 2010). These limitations cannot be addressed without a good understanding of rurality in a broader context. An Open Door to Rurality: What Do We Look at? An increasing body of literature has investigated rural social work (Chenoweth & Stehlik, 2001; Pugh, 2003). The commonly studied areas include rural culture, geographical influences on rural residents’ life, and the problems that arise from limited resources (Saltman, Gumpert, Allen-Kelly, & Zubrzycki, 2004). These aspects emerge from the school of rural studies in the international academia, but knowledge built and lessons learned have strong implications for China. Rural residents are generally socially conservative (Edwards, Torgerson, & Sattem, 2009). As a result, they tend to protect their life styles as well as the reputation of their hometown. For example, homeless young people might experience social stigma if receiving allowances from the government, as this behaviour could be regarded as being against local ways of coping which emphasises individual selfreliance. The preferred coping strategies are underpinned by a strong tendency for cooperation and participation in the local community (Edwards et al., 2009). Connections within the local community, especially with kin, are generally reliable resources for rural residents. Seeking assistance from the government may involve the risk of being judged negatively by other community members (Owens, Richerson, Murphy, Jagelewski, & Rossi, 2008). Thus, compared with their urban counterparts, rural residents have lower expectations of social services (Pugh, 2003). However, rural communities typically have strong informal social support (Abebe & Aase, 2007; Beach, 1995; Shang, 2008). In Beach’s (1995) study, American rural parents preferred informal child care support. Since the link between rural cultural beliefs and rural residents’ actual choice of social services is not always obvious, rural residents’ participation in social services draws much scholarly attention. For example, the interview study conducted by Pullmann, VanHooser, Hoffman, and Heflinger (2010) about some rural American caregivers who foster children with emotional problems indicated that these caregivers often felt isolated and only half of them were engaged with social service agency. Although more specific services are usually provided, the stigma of receiving mental health services was the major barrier that resulted in the caregivers’ absence. This finding is consistent with Edwards and colleagues’ (2009) study mentioned above. Therefore, it can be argued that rural residents usually prefer informal social support rather than formal assistance, especially if formal services involve perceived stigma. Their social network involves kin, neighbours, and close friends. These 27

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groups are usually reliable resources when rural families are in need of assistance. Nevertheless, close ties in some small communities can be also detrimental. Some rural residents may feel stressed to be judged by other community members, or concerned about confidentiality of receiving social services. Drawing insight from rural studies in Western countries, it is arguable that living in rural China for caregivers of left-behind children may be somewhat like a doubleedged sword (Hu, Lonne, & Burton, 2014a). On the one hand, they are marginalised and disadvantaged due to their limited access to educational, social, and health care services. On the other hand, they benefit from frequent connections within local communities. Based on their close social networks, kin caregivers are able to receive a variety of assistance. The geographical features of rural areas also affect their residents’ lives and their provision of social services to their residents in many ways. These include the physical environment, economic basis, and the physical infrastructure within a community (Cheers, Darracott, & Lonne, 2007). Being isolated in remote regions, some rural residents have to travel long distances to obtain necessary services or goods. This is especially difficult if public transportation is not available (Pullmann et al., 2010). Moreover, living far from a metropolis often leads to significant increases in the cost of living (Zimmerman, Ham, & Frank, 2008). As a result, residents in remote areas can even suffer intense social isolation due to the vast space and low population density (Pugh, 2003). In addition, some literature also documents the shortage of committed practitioners in rural social work. For example, Lonne and Cheers (2000) reported a high rate of staff turnover and recruitment difficulties among Australian practitioners. Apart from the physical environment, insufficient support from employers and organisations are also reasons for the rural practitioner’s early departure. In brief, the geographic features of rural areas (Zimmerman et al., 2008) and hence the high cost of social services provision in these areas (Pugh, 2003) contribute to the inequality between the social services provided to rural residents those to urban residents. The economic base of rural areas can be affected by many factors. Physical environments as well as social and political changes all play important roles in altering the economic base. In this regard, rural economies often strongly rely upon government support, either in terms of labour force input or financial assistance (Roberts, 2003). It is not uncommon for rural areas to be in poorer condition than that found in urban environments (Pugh, 2003). For instance, American studies show that rural residents confront poor phone services in terms of coverage and price (Zimmerman et al., 2008), undeveloped public transportation (Edwards et al., 2009), as well as limited day-care centres (Beach, 1995). Similar findings have been found in Asian countries, such as China. Taking health resources as an example, fewer hospital beds and equipment are allocated to rural Chinese residents than their urban counterparts. Moreover, the disparity of quality of equipment between the urban and the rural is more significant than that of quantity (Li & Chang, 2008). It is the rurality in China to which we now turn. 28

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Living with Rurality in China Given the unbalanced development between rural and urban areas in China, the central government has implemented an array of policies that aim to improve rural residents’ wellbeing. For example, the rural cooperative medical service is a major strategy which addresses rural residents’ heavy financial burden for medical treatment. Participation in this service-like insurance is voluntary, and they can claim part of their medical treatment expenditure from the local government. Before its launch in 2002, around 90% of rural residents had been paying all the costs of medical treatment out of their own pocket. Hence, more often than not, rural residents would not go to see a doctor until they were seriously ill (Liu & Rao, 2006). The rural cooperative medical service has not only increased rural residents’ hospitalisation rate, but also improved medical infrastructure and service ability in rural areas (Jiang & He, 2009). However, due to the massive population of rural residents and the historically weak health care provision in rural China, most rural people are still troubled by the underdeveloped health care system. In addition to unsound health care services provided to rural residents, education is costly for many rural residents. Here we are not indicating that the absolute educational expenditure is high for rural residents, though this is true for some living in poverty who struggle to afford even nominal educational cost. We are arguing that investment in education may not be lucrative. Without certain quantity and quality of social capital required for success in the competition in the neoliberal market, rural residents may not make the best benefit out of their educational qualifications, and hence they may end up with a dire career (Ma, 2015). To shake the current social reproduction system and class structure, the government has announced the fee-waiving policy to exempt primary and secondary rural students from paying tuition and textbook fees. Nevertheless, the disparity between the rural and the urban remains obvious, as the government’s investment in rural compulsory education is much less than that in urban areas (Bao, 2006). When formal support provided through the education and health system is limited, rural residents in China rely heavily on informal support. Many rural residents have recourse to religion, and sometimes Western religions, when they need social support. For example, Gao’s case study of Mao village (1999) found that local Christians maintain close connections and provide assistance for anyone suffering from illness or debt. This phenomenon warrants some discussion here. Rural residents in some parts of China live with both rural traditional culture and Western religions. Western religions have a profound impact on these rural residents’ daily lives, even though some century-old Asian religions, such as Taoism and Buddhism, have existed much longer. Among the mainstream religions, Christianity has been dominant among Northern rural communities. The dominance of Christianity in northern regions is more obvious, whereas ancient folk religions and ancestor worship still actively influences rural families in South China (Sun Yefang Foundation, 2009). 29

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More important than the support from religious groups is the support from kin, neighbours, and friends. These sources of support may even play a more significant role than the government. Among these groups, kin are found to be more supportive in terms of finance, labour, and information (Chang & Feuchtwang, 1996). However, the coexistence of nuclear and extended families has been gradually replaced by the predominance of the nuclear family in China (Wang, 2003). This change has resulted in less available kin support in child care, which makes it more challenging to care for vulnerable rural children such as orphans (Shang, 2008). Even so, average family size in rural areas is still generally larger than that of the urban ones (Tang, 2005). Here we want to highlight the role of family structure in rural children’s wellbeing. For instance, nuclear family structures have reduced the complexity of family relationships and built closer emotional ties between children and their parents. At the same time, these children are often seen as the only hope in the family, so their parents have become increasingly prone to have higher expectations of the children’s achievement (Wang, 2009). The life of rural children is not constrained within the domestic milieu. Instead, rural children have been actively involved in local communities. Growing up in rural communities brings several benefits for left-behind children. For example, community members are familiar with the children, and they usually keep an eye on the children when they play in the village. In this regard, the village is a relatively safe environment for left-behind children, since many, if not all, members of the community are concerned with the safety of left-behind children. Moreover, frequent interactions in the village also create a lot of social opportunities for these children, with which they can develop effective and supportive peer relationships. These relationships are one of the most important emotional supports for left-behind children. Healthy peer relations not only distract left-behind children from missing their parents, but also relieve and support caregivers’ child rearing responsibilities to some extent. When caregivers are too busy to take care of children, they can temporarily place the children at their friends’ home. Hence, the community role in caring for children is important. These arrangements generally depend on caregivers’ relationships with other community members, but do indicate a community-based sharing of child rearing responsibilities. Having said the above, substantial numbers of left-behind children rely on kin families’ support, and the geographic distance between left-behind children and migrant parents makes parental engagement in children’s growth nearly impossible. Similar problems also trouble massive numbers of floating children. These children do not enjoy decent parenting in the migration context because most migrant parents in this case have to engage with long hours of work and have very little family time with their children. In addition to limited access to parenting, floating children and left-behind children are suffering from many other problems that encroach upon their wellbeing in the migration context. Before we discuss these problems, it will be useful to revisit the notion of ‘wellbeing’. 30

THE WELLBEING OF FLOATING CHILDREN AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN

CONCEPTUALISING WELLBEING

Research of human wellbeing emerged in the 1960s. Since then, the notion of wellbeing has received increasing attention from different schools in academia, with economists, educators, psychologists, sociologists, and health scientists using different vocabularies to conceptualise ‘wellbeing’. Cross-disciplinary reviews of these vocabularies are available in the literature (see Pollard & Lee, 2003; Soutter, Gilmore, & O’Steen, 2011). These different vocabularies used have seen a bewilderingly diverse family of concepts of, and approaches to, wellbeing. Accordingly, wellbeing is widely understood as an elastic concept, being stretched and moulded for the contexts, purposes, and foci of the research at hand. Rising up to the challenge of defining wellbeing, Diener (1984, 1994) proposes the notion of subjective wellbeing. Given its focus on subjectivity, this line of work stresses happiness, life satisfaction, and positive affect as well as the absence of negative affect. The point of departure of Ryff and colleagues (Ryff, 1989; Ryff & Singer, 2006) somewhat deviates from the focus on subjective wellbeing. These colleagues highlight the realisation of human nature and the performance of a healthy human life. According to this view, defining dimensions of wellbeing may include self-acceptance, positive relations with others, autonomy, environmental mastery, purpose in life, and personal growth. The distinction between the two views is apparent. The former is often referred to as the hedonic perspective of wellbeing, by which people self-perceive the degree of their sense of wellness; whereas the latter strongly aligns with the eudaimonic understanding of wellbeing, through which people are concerned with living well, actualising potentials, and realising true nature (see Deci & Ryan, 2008; Ryan & Deci, 2001; Ryan, Huta, & Deci, 2008). Although a universal consensus on the components of human wellbeing is still absent up to date, previous debates about the construct can be largely framed within the paradigms of eudaimonism and hedonism. Informed by the conceptualisation and theorisation of human wellbeing, research across the world has been concerned with child and youth wellbeing for decades. Similar to human wellbeing, the construct of child and youth wellbeing is also a complex one. Resultantly, research work has been trapped into an ironic paradox: There is unequivocal consent that it is essential to consider, monitor, and respond to chid and youth wellbeing; yet there is little consensus regarding the nature, dynamics, and dimensions of the construct. On the one hand, child and youth wellbeing is individually experienced and somatically construed. On the other hand, the construct is contextualised within the social and cultural matrices out of which each individual child grow. The latter view maps the association between a healthy body and a healthy society. Consequently, child and youth wellbeing is often used as an indicator for society wellbeing (UNICEF, 2007). Systematic reviews have been available to help better understand child and youth wellbeing. To provide updates on the previous work of child and youth wellbeing

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spanning 1974–1992, Pollard and Lee (2003) identified five distinct domains of the construct: physical, economic, psychological, cognitive, and social. Later, Bradshaw, Hoelscher, and Richardson (2007) portrayed an overall picture of child and youth wellbeing in the European Union by comparing the performance of EU Member States on eight clusters of child and youth wellbeing. These clusters include material situation, housing, health, subjective wellbeing, education, social relationships, civic participation, as well as risk and safety. These clusters are largely consistent with those used to measure child and youth wellbeing in the US. For example, Land, Lamb, Meadows, and Taylor (2007) historically reviewed the changes in child and youth wellbeing in the US, looking particularly at seven domains: family economic wellbeing, health, safety and behaviour concerns, educational attainment, community connectedness (participation in schooling and work institutions), social relationships with family and peers, and emotional and spiritual wellbeing. International organisations also come to grips with child and youth wellbeing. For example, UNICEF (Martorano, Natali, Neubourg, & Bradshaw, 2013; Martorano, Neubourg, Natali, & Bradshaw, 2013; UNICEF Office of Research, 2013) adopts a six dimension framework to gauge child wellbeing, which includes material wellbeing, health and safety, educational wellbeing, family and peer relationships, behaviours and risks, as well as subjective wellbeing. OECD, however, does not include ‘family and peer relationships’ and ‘subjective wellbeing’ in their child and youth wellbeing framework. The reason for the omission of these two dimensions is not because they are not important, but because it is unclear “how governments concerned with family and peer relationships and subjective wellbeing would go about designing policies to improve outcomes in these dimensions” (OECD, 2009, p. 29). Attention has also been paid to the wellbeing of children and youths from disadvantaged backgrounds. For example, Lyons and Cassebohm (2012) put forward a research-based conceptualisation of subjective wellbeing of students with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities in Australia. Cheng and Lam (2010) followed the three-dimension model of Diener (1984, 1994) and examined the subjective wellbeing of street children in Shanghai. This line of research calls for a wellbeing framework sensitive to the inclusivity of students with a broad range of backgrounds and special needs. Specifically, this call intends to address the special interests of indigenous students, students with disabilities, students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, male and female students, students living in rural and remote areas, and students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (Australian Catholic University National & Erebus International, 2008; Skattebol et al., 2013). In response to this call, we review empirical studies of floating children and leftbehind children, aiming to understand the status quo of these children’s wellbeing. Drawing insight from the current wellbeing literature, we look particularly at the educational, psychological, and physical wellbeing of floating children and leftbehind children. 32

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THE WELLBEING OF FLOATING CHILDREN AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN

According to the most recent census data, there were 35,810,000 floating children (ranging in age between 0 and 17) nationwide by the end of 2010 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2010). Major host provinces of floating children include Guangdong (with approximately 4,080,000 floating children), Zhejiang (2,800,000), Jiangsu (2,140,000), Shandong (1,940,000), and Sichuan (1,910,000). At the time of the census, these five provinces accounted for 35.94% of the total population of floating children in China. There were 12,947,300 floating children in compulsory education years (Ministry of Education, 2015). By the end of 2014, in urban regions, two out of ten children in compulsory education years were floating children. The population of left-behind children is even larger. According to the sixth national census data, there were 61,025,000 children left behind in rural regions, living in separation from their birth parents (National Bureau of Statistics, 2010). According to the Ministry of Education (2015), 20,754,200 left-behind children were in compulsory education years, accounting for about 30% of the total population of left-behind children. Sichuan, Henan, Anhui, Guangdong, and Hunan are major provinces where there are large numbers of rural children left behind. These five provinces accommodate 43.64% of left-behind children in China (National Women’s Association, 2013). Floating children and left-behind children constitute a population of nearly one hundred million. Due to this massive population, the schooling and wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children craves special attention. About 35% of these children are in the compulsory education years. According to the Ministry of Education (2015), of all the 12,947,300 floating children in compulsory education years, 9,555,900 were in primary school years and 3,391,400 were in junior high school years; of all the 20,754,200 left-behind children in the compulsory education years, 14,095,300 were in primary school years and 6,658,900 were in junior high school years. Migration usually has adverse effects on the schooling and wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children. In theory, children who move to cities with their migrant parents can study in urban public schools, but access to free compulsory education is limited. This is mainly attributed to the decentralised budgeting system for compulsory education – the local governments budget the local education costs and allocate funds across local schools strictly based on the number of schoolaged children registered in the local Household Registration System. The locally registered urban residency is verified by the urban household registration status, or urban hukou, which most migrant workers and their children failed to obtain. In this situation, local schools are not accountable for the schooling of floating children because the schools are not funded for the cost of providing education services for floating children. Consequently, many urban public schools are reluctant to accept floating children unless there are extra funds for doing otherwise.

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One possible way for these children to study in urban public schools, which is distinct from the usual admission procedure, is to pay expensive sponsorship fees (赞助费), which many migrant parents fail to afford and which resultantly impedes the children of migrant workers from enrolling in urban public schools (Mu & Jia, 2016). Since many of these children are drifting beyond the formal urban public education system and are excluded from many other social welfare benefits enjoyed by their urban peers, we use the term ‘floating children’ to connote a sense of rootlessness of these children. To enhance the educational opportunity and respect the educational rights of floating children, many cities have banned sponsorship fees but specific policies vary from city to city. For example, the city of Zhengzhou in Henan province once opened public schools to floating children in 2002, but the education authority soon realised that there were far less educational resources than required to accommodate the large number of floating children (Li, 2008). Take another example, the household registration status is no longer a prerequisite for floating children in Beijing to be enrolled in public schools. Instead, ‘Six Certificates’ are required. These certificates include (Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, 2015): (1) the certificate of migrant parents’ permitted temporary residence in Beijing (暂住证); (2) evidence of migrant parents’ actual residence status in Beijing (e.g., rent contract with the landlord or housing agency; evidence of payment of utility bills of the rented accommodation); (3) evidence that the quota for access to public schooling of school-aged children assigned to the rented accommodation has not been used over the past six years; (4) evidence of migrant parents’ employment status in Beijing (e.g., employment contract, tax payment statement, urban social welfare cover); (5) the household registration status of the family; and (6) evidence that no child care or custody is available in their hometown (e.g., the physical condition of grandparents is not good enough to provide child care). Many migrant parents, however, are unable to obtain these Six Certificates. Consequently, a large portion of floating children in Beijing are still excluded from the urban public education system. This has raised public concerns and there has been consistent calls for the dismantlement of the ‘Six Certificates’ policy in Beijing (Social Science Academy of Beijing, 2015). Even worse, many floating children were not registered in the public education system of their rural hometown when they were brought to the cities by their migrant parents. In this situation, when they were sent back to their hometown, their enrolment in public schools has many problems. As a result, these children would have no access to public schooling. Therein lies our concern that some education policies do not seem to provide a viable weapon to migrant families to battle the problem of unequal access to education. The arbitrariness behind these policies may be inadvertently putting floating children at risk of slipping through the cracks of public education system and sliding toward an undesirable future. The education policy resembles a series of complex requirements that will not help the immediate situation. 34

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In response to the dearth of public educational resources, migrants in some big cities have spontaneously worked to establish their own schools for floating children since the 1990s. These schools are known as migrant-sponsored schools (农民工子弟学校), the fees of which are inexpensive and affordable to migrant parents. However, urban authorities often refuse to grant licenses to these schools and even close down some of them due to their low education quality, inadequate facilities, and unsafe school buildings. Despite such disadvantages, these unlicensed migrant-sponsored schools at least provide floating children with some level of school education (Lu & Zhang, 2001). Due to various problems associated with the schooling of floating children, many migrant parents have to painfully leave their children behind and ask extended family members (usually grandparents) to look after their children while they work in urban areas. Hence these children become left-behind children. Compared with children who grow up with parents, left-behind children are associated with more health, psychological, and behavioural problems. For example, left-behind children are prone to have a less healthy diet and lower rates of physical activity (Yang et al., 2010); lower intake of some nutrients and poorer physical development related to nutrition (Luo et al., 2008); more risk behaviours (e.g., smoking) (Lee, 2011; Yang et al., 2010) and more extreme behaviours (e.g., being withdrawn or aggressive) (Li, 2004); more symptoms of depression and anxiety (Biao, 2007); stronger sense of feeling abandoned, anguished, suffering, and inferior (Liang, 2004; Luo et al., 2008); as well as more selfish, indifferent, and introverted mindset (Lee, 2011; Luo et al., 2008). These problems are mainly due to the fact that migrant parents, caregivers (e.g., grandparents), communities, and schools fail to meet, or are unaware of, the multidimensional needs of left-behind children. In what follows, we first discuss the needs of left-behind children, and then review the problems that undermine the wellbeing of floating children. The Needs of Left-Behind Children As the number of left-behind children continues to grow, the state has realised the necessity of addressing their needs. Although there is an absence of policy at national level that specifies the needs and rights of left-behind children, the state has included these needs and rights issues in the latest legal document for protecting minors, which explicitly stresses minors’ needs for care and protection (Standing Committee of the 10th National People’s Congress, 2007). This legal discourse is based on the assumption that the needs of left-behind children is fundamental for promoting the wellbeing of these children (Xu, 2009). There appears to be an increasing research interest in the needs of children in migrant families, though often in an international migration context. In Southeast Asia, where many residents migrate to other countries for temporary work, children are often cared for by their relatives. Based on their quantitative investigation, 35

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Quisumbing and McNiven (2010) found that remittance from migrant parents not only has a positive impact on children’s education and human capital but also contributes to a household’s transition out of agriculture. In spite of these benefits, a comparative study shows that Indonesian children in transnational families are less likely to be happy than those in non-transnational families. Moreover, insufficient contact with migrant parents generally has deleterious effects on children’s subjective wellbeing (Graham et al., 2012). Interestingly, another quantitative study conducted in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam concludes that longer durations of being separated from parents may contribute to children’s resilience building (Jordan & Graham, 2012) – a capacity that we will discuss in detail in Chapter Seven. Such capacity may buffer the deleterious effects brought about by separation from parents. Transnational migration studies also show that national immigration policies have a substantial impact on the separation of parents and children (Carling, Menjívar, & Schmalzbauer, 2012; Zentgraf & Chinchilla, 2012). Such policies have similar effects on internal migration (Chan, 2009), such as migrant family members in rural China. As we discussed earlier, the Household Registration System has long limited the mobility of Chinese residents. This policy should be at least partly responsible for the separation of migrant parents and left-behind children. Due in part to the separation with birth parents, left-behind children are associated with a variety of characteristics. Some of these characteristics commonly exist among most Chinese children, while others, however, are specific to left-behind children. For example, by examining 63 left-behind children and 64 children who lived with their parents, Fan and Biao (2005) found the family environment of left-behind children scored lower in relationship closeness and entertainment, but higher in conflicts and independence. They also identified specific characteristics among left-behind children following the change of their family environment, including indifference, aloneness, irritability, inhibition, and depression. According to Xu (2009), these characteristics are often aroused from the fact that the emotional, educational, and daily needs of left-behind children are poorly satisfied. For the sake of the wellbeing of left-behind children, we now look more closely at the needs of these children. Mental Health and Emotional Needs of Left-Behind Children The majority of studies about left-behind children are concerned with the impact of parental migration on children’s mental health. Studies show that the length of separation between migrant parents and left-behind children, children’s age and gender, as well as parent-child communication all have an impact on children’s mental health (Luo, Wang, & Gao, 2009). It is noteworthy that compared with children who have one migrant parent, children whose parents both have migrated tend to separate from their parents at a younger age, for longer periods and make less contact with their parents. The latter group also reported lower life satisfaction than other rural children (Su, Li, Lin, Xu, & Zhu, 2013). By reviewing studies that 36

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used cross-sectional design and cluster sampling, Cheng and Sun (2015) found 17 of the 19 studies reported statistically significant higher risks of suffering depression/ anxiety among left-behind children than children who live with their parents. These risks could be caused by these children’s detachment from their parents and child neglect resultant from such detachment. Similarly, in a study by Qiao, Chen, and Yuan (2008), left-behind children had a tendency for higher rates of anxiety than their peers, and this anxiety was found in both the learning and the socialisation of left-behind children. In conformity with international migration research, left-behind children and their caregivers in China may benefit financially from the remittances sent by the children’s parents (see for example, Zhang & Wu, 2003). However, Ye and Pan (2011) contended that such benefit would not remove psychological pressures from left-behind children. This claim is supported by Hu, Li, and Liu (2011), whose study reported reduced level of left-behind children’s social and mental wellbeing after being separated from their parents. Because separation from parents hampers social and psychological wellbeing, left-behind children often have much poorer psychological and behavioural outcomes than their peers, floating children included (Hu, Lu, & Huang, 2014). This finding is interesting since it indicates that left-behind children may have higher psychosocial risks than floating children. Of all the risks, existing literature stresses that loneliness is the most common experience shared by left-behind children (Su et al., 2013). For example, left-behind children are two and a half times more likely to suffer from loneliness than their counterparts. Living with grandparents does not seem to reduce the sense of loneliness. Loneliness is reportedly high among left-behind children who live with their grandparents (Jia & Tian, 2010). Interestingly, this finding seems to be at odds with the study of Fan, Su, Gill, and Birmaher (2010), who found that living with kin caregivers benefited leftbehind children, since living with non-kin caregivers would put children at higher risk to emotional and behaviour problems and result in lower level of wellbeing. In order to recast ‘illbeing’ into wellbeing, the complementary model suggests extra provision of emotional support for left-behind children short of care and love. Ironically, their particular need of spending time with their parents seems hard to satisfy because separation has become a fait accompli whereas ‘living together’ is utopian. Even worse, as a result of deficient parental attention, the emotional needs of left-behind children were normally overlooked or failed to be addressed (Ye & Pan, 2011). Physical Health of Left-Behind Children Generally speaking, left-behind children have poorer physical health-related quality of life than their counterparts who live with parents (Jia, Shi, Cao, Delancey, & Tian, 2010). Based on a quantitative study with 744 left-behind children, Luo et al. (2008) found that these children had less food intake and lower nutrition level than their counterparts. By contrasting parent caregivers and non-parent caregivers of children 37

Chapter 2

under seven years old, Tan et al. (2010) found that non-parent caregivers had relatively poor nutrition knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. Another comparative study by Gao et al. (2010) found that school-aged left-behind children were more likely to have a less healthy diet and physical activities than children who lived with parents. Therefore, it is unsurprising to find that left-behind children have higher rates of stunted growth and being underweight (All-China Women’s Federation, 2007). In addition, the safety of left-behind children has been a big concern. Notably, left-behind children were more likely to suffer non-fatal injury than children who were cared for by both of their parents (Shen et al., 2009). Time and time again, empirical evidence in the literature has reminded us that leftbehind children are not only faced with the risk of unsound psychological wellbeing but also troubled by various health problems that have negative effects on their physical wellbeing. In this respect, left-behind children are suffering doubly. Even worse, the educational needs of left-behind children have been poorly addressed so far, which further plagues left-behind children who have already been placed at a disadvantaged situation. Education of Left-Behind Children The educational needs of left-behind children are another area that attracts research attention. As mentioned above, the situation of these rural children being left behind is attributed to the macro level context of rapid urbanisation and massive internal migration. Behind this context we have seen the unbalanced development between the rural and the urban – a phenomenon of rurality discussed earlier. Of all the crucial resources for human growth, educational resources are not equally distributed in rural and urban regions. It is not surprising that rural and urban families have unequal access to educational provision, particularly the provision through the public sectors. The slow development of the rural economy has discouraged some rural families from investing in their children’s education, for example, parents of left-behind children who foresee a dire future for themselves and their children (Zhang, 2014). The governmental input into rural education is far less than that of urban education. For example, compared with urban children who enjoy various educational facilities in their community, such as public library and children’s activity centre, rural children have been provided with very few such services. That said, rural community has advantageous social capital and natural resources that have not been well utilised (Zheng & Li, 2014). The academic standing of left-behind children was found to be lower than that of children living with their parents due to lower levels of confidence and interest in learning (Liang, Hou, & Chen, 2008). Compared with their counterparts who live with parents, left-behind children have a higher risk of school dropout (Gao et al., 2010). Once again, we see multilayered disadvantages associated with left-behind children – first in the means (e.g., lack of confidence and motivation in learning), then in the ends (e.g., school dropout). 38

THE WELLBEING OF FLOATING CHILDREN AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN

Apart from the between-group comparison, differences were also found from within. Left-behind children with parents who both migrate were found to have worse academic self-concepts and teacher-student relationships than those with one parent in migration (Yao & Mao, 2008). Based on quantitative data collected in five provinces in 2006 and 2008, Zheng and Wu (2014) revealed that mothers’ migration had negative effects on the academic performance of left-behind children, while no such impact was found for father-only migration. It should be noted that children’s performance did not bounce back even after their parents returned home. This indicates that migration may generate enduring negative effect on the educational outcome of left-behind children. However, these children’s academic satisfaction and engagement can be improved by better parent-child communication (Su et al., 2013). Some researchers argue that the educational problems found among left-behind children are caused by their unstable family structures. The consistent absence of their parents has deteriorated these rural families’ educational functions in significant ways. For example, kin caregivers have to assume the responsibility of tutoring children while the parents are away; however, these caregivers are usually the older generation (e.g., grandparents) with less education compared to the younger generation and hence not capable of offering necessary educational instruction at home (Qin, 2011). The educational problems among left-behind children, in this regard, cannot be addressed when solely replying on these rural families. Due to its potential of enabling and utilising diverse social networks, community education was regarded as one of the most promising approaches to meeting these children’s educational needs (Duan, 2006; Li, 2002). The concept of community education not only involves establishing educational facilities in rural communities, but also involves multiple significant adults who are approachable to these children, such as retired local cadres or young volunteers (Zhang, 2014). To sum up, the aforementioned risk-based approaches uncovered a variety of problems with regard to the wellbeing of left-behind children. However, the overwhelming emphasis placed on the functional disorders of migrant families has overlooked some protective factors of kinship care (Luo et al., 2009). Similar to Western studies on children in care, most existing Chinese studies on left-behind children largely use subjective and/or objective indicators of wellbeing to identify negative outcomes of migration. In Chapters Five and Six of this book, we shift our focus of investigation from the negative outcomes to the protective factors. In the rest part of this chapter, we zoom in on the adversities that have long troubled floating children. Floating Children in Adversity1 Floating children, similar to Pentecostal Christians in Malawi (Englund, 2004), left their original home in rural China and migrated with their parents to urban 39

Chapter 2

China – their imagined home. As we narrated in the Preface of the book, many floating children are nostalgists because they constantly miss and recall the rural life that they have left behind. At the same time, they willingly engage with their cosmopolitan life project, imagining to dwell in urban China where they now find themselves, to gain legitimate cultural citizens of urban China, and to call this place a home away from home. In this respect, many floating children retain a fluid sense of home and belongingness. They do not find dichotomous identity labels useful. Instead, they construct a dynamic and malleable identity of villager and cosmopolitan, rural and urban, near and far, here and there, and us and them, even though they are keenly aware of value differences. Many floating children are living on ‘moving sand’. Their life is often rife with a sense of ‘feet off the ground’ and rootlessness. As forcibly argued in the extant literature, floating children are deprived of full citizen rights in urban China because of the Household Registration System. In this respect, the household registration status, or hukou, of each family member is a form of institutionalised cultural capital – an institutionally recognised object form, the household registration book in this case, that symbolises distinction and confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to various resources in particular social fields (Bourdieu, 1986). As Bourdieu (1986) reminded us, the same form of cultural goods may not have the same value in different fields. When migrants move from their rural hometown to the city, their rural hukou does not accrue any symbolic value in urban China. Resultantly, the rural hukou at best fails to help floating children capture a favourable position in the social field of urban China and at worst fails to help these children enter this field, for example free entry to urban public schools. Therefore, it is not surprising to see many floating children come to urban China with a sense of inferiority wrought by their secondclass status (Irwin, 2000). The Household Registration System has long been criticised for generating social problems for floating children (Chen, Wang, & Wang, 2009; Guo, 2002; Liang & Chen, 2007; Lu & Zhou, 2013; Nielsen, Nyland, Nyland, Smyth, & Zhang, 2006; Sun et al., 2010; Woronov, 2004). Under this system, floating children remain official residents of their rural origin. Although they are currently residing in the cities, they are deprived of full citizen rights to many social welfare and public services enjoyed by their urban peers. Consequently, floating children are suffering from various educational, health, and psychological problems. We now briefly revisit these problems. Educational Problems of Floating Children The funding system of compulsory education in China is decentralised. That is to say, local governments decide the distribution of, and allocate resources to, public schools in their administered region according to the distribution of school-aged children of permanent or officially registered residents in that region. Without an 40

THE WELLBEING OF FLOATING CHILDREN AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN

urban hukou, floating children are often deprived of free compulsory education in urban public schools (Goodburn, 2009; Hu & Szente, 2010). To send their children to public schools, migrant parents have to pay expensive sponsorship fees, which is beyond the means of the majority of them who are at the bottom of the social strata (Kwong, 2004; Lu & Zhang, 2004). Although some municipal governments have relaxed the school-entry policies and urban hukou is no longer required for school enrolment in some cities, migrant parents have to obtain piles of documents, such as the ‘Six Certificates’ required in Beijing, in order to send their children to urban public schools. Ironically, some migrant parents are reluctant to send their children to public schools even if places are available or affordable. Some migrant parents cited discrimination from urban children as the reason behind this reluctance (Goodburn, 2009). Some parents worried that their children may be looked down upon or even bullied by their urban peers (Chen & Liang, 2007). This parental concern was echoed by teachers who observed the unfriendly school environment for at least some floating children (Li et al., 2010). In response to their “unfriendly”, “bullying”, “detesting”, and “isolating” environment, floating children reportedly gave voice to their social exclusion in the cities and felt “very uncomfortable”, “angry”, “lacking a sense of security”, and “annoyed” (L. Wang, 2008, p. 697). Recognising the school-attendance problems associated with floating children in public schools, migrant parents and communities have long been committed to establishing schools specifically for floating children. These schools are called ‘migrant-sponsored schools’. In contrast to the high cost and the risk of discrimination in public schools, migrant-sponsored schools charge a reasonable and affordable price (Li et al., 2010) and demonstrate a more friendly and inclusive environment (Han, 2004). Many floating children prefer migrant-sponsored schools where students are of similar (rural) backgrounds (L. Wang, 2008). Some migrant parents often choose to send their children to these schools. Due to the large population of floating children in the city and their need for affordable education, migrantsponsored schools are proliferating in many cities (Chen & Liang, 2007; Han, 2004; Lu & Zhang, 2004; L. Wang, 2008). Despite the recent, increasing support from the local government (Kwong, 2004), migrant-sponsored schools are not the imagined sanctuary for many floating children. Most migrant-sponsored schools suffer from the scarcity of educational resources – lack of professional management, qualified and motivated teachers, sound concrete buildings, adequate classroom facilities, sports grounds, and sometimes a safe and hygienic environment (Chen & Liang, 2007; Han, 2004; Li et al., 2010; Lu & Zhang, 2004; L. Wang, 2008; Woronov, 2004; Yan, 2005; Zhu, 2001). Even worse, these schools have to relocate frequently because of their usually unlicensed nature and temporary school-sites (Li et al., 2010). In addition, floating children in these schools are from complex demographic backgrounds, which makes it hard to divide them into different grades and classes by age and academic standings as the regular schools do (Han, 2004). Since the quality of migrant-sponsored schools is of concern, 41

Chapter 2

many of them are often at risk of being closed down by the local government (Mu et al., 2013). The education of floating children has to negotiate these dilemmas: the largely inaccessible public schooling and the general low quality of migrant-sponsored schooling. Consequently, school enrolment of floating children has drawn extensive attention from empirical research. Using data from the 2002 China Nine-City Survey of Floating Children, Liang, Guo, and Duan (2007) revealed that the enrolment rate of floating children aged between seven and 16 was above 90% in eight out of nine surveyed cities, contending that enrolment of school-aged floating children in these cities “seems to be not particularly problematic” (p. 37). This was echoed in a study conducted in Beijing where the majority of floating children (88%) was found to attend schools (Guo, 2002). In contrast, other scholars tend to have less positive views towards the school attendance of floating children. Liang and Chen (2007) estimated that the enrolment rate of floating children in Guangdong was 80%, much lower than that of the local school-aged children who were almost fully enrolled; and floating children with less than one year of urban residence suffered the most, with an enrolment rate of only 60%. In brief, though estimates vary from city to city and from survey to survey, the enrolment rate of floating children is generally lower than that of urban children. Considerable studies have unearthed various impact factors associated with the schooling of floating children. Children at a younger age (Liang et al., 2007), with better educated parents (Guo, 2002) – either better educated fathers (Liang et al., 2007) or better educated mothers (Nielsen et al., 2006), from intact (Liang et al., 2007) or higher-income families (Nielsen et al., 2006), or living longer in urban cities (Guo, 2002; Liang & Chen, 2007; Lu, 2007; Nielsen et al., 2006) were found to be more likely to attend school. Lu (2007) complemented the previous studies by looking at the ever-delayed schooling of floating children. The study indicated that children at an older age, from lower socioeconomic background, larger family size, with a shorter stay in cities, or residing in high-cost coastal regions tended to be more likely to be at risk of school delay. Many other colleagues further enriched the literature by discussing the academic achievement of floating children. Better parent-child and teacher-student relationships as well as school climate were found to contribute to the academic achievement of floating children (Wu, Palinkas, & He, 2010). Teachers in migrant-sponsored schools noted that floating children, who lived in a poor physical family environment, or whose parents had limited involvement in their schooling due to parents’ stressful urban life, poor parenting skills, or low educational levels, often suffered from poor school performance (Li et al., 2010). In addition, some scholars link the educational problems of floating children to their high mobility. These children suffered from the inconsistency of different curricula used in different schools (Chen & Liang, 2007; Kwong, 2004). Many of these children reportedly struggled to adjust to the new curriculum and sometimes had to repeat their previous school year each time their family relocated (Han, 2004). 42

THE WELLBEING OF FLOATING CHILDREN AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN

Health Problems of Floating Children In addition to educational problems, floating children often have health issues. Similar to fiscal planning for education, health care planning in China is also projected on the basis of the potential health care needs of the officially registered population (Liang et al., 2007). Without an urban hukou, floating children are largely excluded from many public health services enjoyed by their urban peers. This is evidently indicated by the health literature. Drawing upon the national database, Liang et al. (2007) found that the vaccination rate for Tuberculosis, Measles, Pertussis-Diphtheria-Tetanus, Poliomyelitis, and Hepatitis B among the surveyed floating children was about 10% lower than the national average. This is largely consistent with the data associated with floating children in Beijing, which indicated the considerably low age-appropriate immunisation rates for Diphtheria, oral Poliomyelitis, Hepatitis B, and Tetanus-Pertussis combined vaccine (Sun et al., 2010), as well as the remarkably lower Measles vaccination rate (83.4%) than the officially reported rate (96%) (Hu, Xiao, Chen, & Sa, 2012). The low coverage of these vaccines were partly attributed to the high mobility of floating children, the low educational level of their primary caregivers, and the insufficient immunisation notification services and supplementary immunisation activities provided to these children (Hu et al., 2012; Sun et al., 2010). Similarly, an epidemiological study conducted in Guangzhou revealed that the oral health of floating children was poorer when compared to the national statistics of urban children (Gao, McGrath, & Lin, 2011). This study indicated that the poorer and deteriorating oral health of floating children partly resulted from children’s dietary changes made during rural-urban relocations, coupled with unaffordable healthier food choices and expensive dental care services in Guangzhou. The low immunisation rate would greatly increase the susceptibility of floating children to vaccine-preventable diseases and therefore would have a negative impact on the condition of their health. Previous studies have indicated that floating children are more likely to suffer from both health and education problems. A large-scale study seems to indicate the health-education link among floating children in Southwest China. The study found that poorer health was associated with lower academic achievement, negative learning attitudes, learning disabilities, antisocial and risk behaviour, and social maladjustment (Zhang, Li, & Liu, 2010). In this respect, floating children, as many left-behind children, are dually disadvantaged – they are suffering from both educational and health problems. Psychological Problem of Floating Children Alongside the education and health literature, the psychological school also engages with the investigation of floating children. Large scale surveys in Shanghai suggested that floating children with better parent-child and peer relationships, as well as a stronger sense of self-esteem and perceived social support from family, friends, 43

Chapter 2

and people around were more likely to have a stronger sense of life satisfaction (Wong, Chang, He, & Wu, 2010); while those who experienced parent-child conflicts, discipline from teachers, and discrimination in schools were more likely to suffer from symptoms of separation anxiety, depression, and generalised anxiety disorder (Wong, Chang, & He, 2009). Like left-behind children, floating children are sometimes associated with a sense of loneliness. A large-scale comparative study conducted in Beijing found the sense of loneliness among floating children isolated in migrant-sponsored schools was greater than that among those enrolled in regular public schools; while there was little difference in the sense of loneliness between urban children and floating children who attended public schools (Lu & Zhou, 2013). As such, migrant-sponsored schools were considered unlikely to contribute to social inclusion of floating children (L. Wang, 2008). These studies seem at odds with the findings from an interview study (Li et al., 2010) in which public school teachers observed the loneliness and low self-esteem of floating children in their classes. These inconsistent findings indicate that the psychological problems of floating children are not fixed or static; instead, they are socially contingent on time and space. In brief, educational, health, and psychological literature is concerned with various problems associated with floating children. However, there is a paucity of sociological research that helps to theorise how these problems and risks come to challenge, disadvantage, and marginalise floating children in urban China. Although L. Wang (2008) has made an attempt to conceptualise this marginalisation through the sociological notions of institutional, financial, and cultural exclusion, the author largely overlooked the underlying theoretical entanglement among the three notions. Another study (Mu et al., 2013) briefly discussed the rural dispositions of floating children from a sociological perspective but largely missed the nuances of this phenomenon. To complement the extant literature, we draw on a sociological framework in Chapters Three and Four to debate the schooling, wellbeing, and ‘wellbecoming’ of floating children in relation to culture- and classbased inequality. CHAPTER SUMMARY: TIME TO SHIFT FROM THE MEDICAL DEFICIT MODEL

Floating children, left-behind children, and their migrant parents start their journey of migration from a state of rurality. This rural history and culture is a disposition and a position that cannot be removed or redressed, and hence stays with them all through their lives. The enduring effect of rurality on floating children and leftbehind children becomes visible in the migration context when urbanisation uproots their parents from their rural origin. For floating children and left-behind children, outcomes emerging from urbanisation and internal migration are usually negative. The negative outcomes have been well documented in the literature. The physical, psychological, educational, and social wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children remains an ongoing concern for family, school, community, government, 44

THE WELLBEING OF FLOATING CHILDREN AND LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN

and academia. Since there is no commonly agreed universal model of child and youth wellbeing, it is not surprising that the wellbeing of floating children and leftbehind children has received cross-disciplinary attention, including the clinical perspectives on health,2 psychological perspectives on mood and affect, educational perspectives on learning and its outcomes, as well as sociological perspectives on the relationships between the internal and the external. Extant work has made great contributions so far to portray the wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children. Such work is welcomed because it debunks the increasingly visible vulnerability of floating children and left-behind children in the migration context. Although floating children and left-behind children have qualitatively different life trajectories, negative outcomes brought to them by urbanisation and internal migration are somewhat similar. Interestingly, extant work often uses an ‘either-or’ approach and treats floating children and leftbehind children as a dichotomy. This schism has led to a somewhat fragmented body of literature that has yet to be integrated. Little, if any, research has studied floating children and left-behind children together. The exception is found in Hu’s study (2014), which identified parents’ stable marital status, harmonious family relationships, and mother’s higher level of education as protective factors to buffer negative effects and promote wellbeing for both floating children and leftbehind children. Research work like Hu’s study, however, is only sporadic in the literature. Urbanisation and migration do not generate floating children and leftbehind children independently. Rather, the two groups co-exist and symbiose in the migration context. It is for this very reason that we frame floating children and left-behind children together in this book. Most, if not all, existing studies use a problem-based approach, looking particularly at the negative outcomes brought to floating children and left-behind children. In this vein, these studies adopt the medical deficit model that pathologises individuals. For example, floating children and left-behind children are depicted as disadvantaged groups with their physical, psychological, educational, and social wellbeing in a poor state; migrant parents are sometimes portrayed as being irresponsible for, and disengaged from their children’s growth, while sometimes considered to be helpless adults who are hopelessly submissive to the power of urbanisation and internal migration; schools and communities are often described as exclusive institutions; and governments are blamed for their irresponsiveness to fundamental social changes and emergent social problems. The view that is sympathetic for the vulnerable and critical towards the stakeholders is more helpful in identifying problems, locating potholes, and drawing public attention; whereas it is perhaps less helpful in excavating the underlying social orders buried in the pathologies. It is even less helpful in making a systematic change because such change often requires fundamental reshuffling of existing social structures. Questions remain, therefore, in terms of how we can make a difference to floating children and left-behind children, if the seemingly orderly social structures are well-established, conservative, and hard to change. 45

Chapter 2

In response to the voids in the literature, the point of departure of our work is the everydayness and mundaneness of the learning and socialisation of floating children and left-behind children in routine settings. To this end, we grapple with the nuances and minutiae of the being and living of these children, and intend to make a difference to their lives, no matter how little it is. We also differ from the bulk of the extant research that largely adopts a deficit discourse and defines floating children and left-behind children as vulnerable victims of the era of urbanisation and migration. We do not disagree with this perspective. Having said that, we make an attempt to complement this perspective by wading into the ways in which floating children and left-behind children redefine themselves as competent social learners and proactive agents, and transform challenges of the urbanisation and migration era into enabling opportunities through resilience building. Again, it is apparent that floating children and left-behind children are often treated as two discrete categories. Our book deviates from this discrete model and intends to consider these two populations of children within the same context and consider the ‘floating’ and ‘left-behind’ phenomena to be symbiotic. When the subsequent chapters unfold, our micro-level, resilient, and coherent approach to the schooling and wellbeing of floating children and left-behind children will become clearer. NOTES This review was previously published in the article cited below: Mu, G. M., & Jia, N. (2016). Rural dispositions of floating children within the field of Beijing schools: Can disadvantaged rural habitus turn into recognised cultural capital? British Journal of Sociology of Education, 37(3), 408–426. doi:10.1080/01425692.2014.939264 The website of the journal is www.tandfonline.com. 2 Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (WHO, 1946). 1



46

CHAPTER 3

COMING INTO AN INHERITANCE Intergenerational Social Reproduction through Class-Based Pedagogies

“虎父无犬子”——罗贯中，《三国演义》(Tigers do not breed puppies / Eagles do not hatch doves. LUO Guanzhong, Romance of Three Kingdoms) “龙生龙，凤生凤，老鼠养儿沿屋栋”—— 翟灏，《通俗编》(Dragons breed dragons, phoenixes hatch phoenixes, and mice teach their children to climb the roof. ZHAI Hao, Vernacular Classics) In every survey of Chinese history, there is no inadequacy of class-based discourses. Eagles are supposed to fly high up in the sky, and mice are supposed to learn to climb the roof. Such heredity is a biological fact and remains universally true. When hereditarianism is used as a metaphor, it has a class-based connotation. The two Chinese idioms cited at the beginning of this chapter seem to suggest an implicit practical logic – a logic that goes without saying because it comes without saying. The social order composed of these logics helps reproduce the class structure. When the social order is considered to be legitimate, it is taken for granted and socially sanctioned. The class structure, and particularly its relationship with education and upbringing, has long been the topic of scholastic debate in the western literature. For example, The success of all school education, and more generally of all secondary pedagogic work, depends fundamentally on the education previously accomplished in the earliest years of life, even and especially when the educational system denies this primacy in its ideology and practice by making the school career a history with no pre-history: We know that through all the skill-learning processes of everyday life, and particularly through the acquisition of the mother tongue or the manipulation of kinship terms and relationships, logical dispositions are mastered in their practical state. These dispositions, more or less complex, more or less elaborated symbolically, depending on the group or class, predispose children unequally towards a symbolic mastery of the operations implied as much in a mathematical demonstration as in decoding a work of art. (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 43) Of course Bourdieu is defnitely not the first and the only sociologist interested in class-based education. Indeed, the conspiracy between school education and class stratification has been the subject of debate within the epistemic community for at least a century. For example, Marx and Engels (1932) convincingly elucidated the 47

Chapter 3

relationship between base and superstructure. They considered education system, as part of the superstructure, to be a reflection of the economic base and a contributor to the reproduction of the economic structure of society. Accordingly, the Marxist school contends that the ruling class, in ruling the material force of society, is at the same time ruling intellectural force of society by manipulating the production and distribution of its own ideas, and more importnatly, making these ideas universal. Following Marx and Engels, many Marxist scholars seem to suggest the identifiable differences in the educational knowledge made accessible to different social groups – between intelligentsia and labourer, between aristocrats and grassroots, between noblemen and vagabonds, and between the elite and the pleb. The view towards the complicity between class and education still rings true in more recent times. Such view aligns with Bernstein’s (1990, 2003) argument that class inequalities are likely to be reproduced through pedagogic practice. Specifically, middle- and upper-class children are often placed in a favouring position while working-class children are often disadvantaged through the course of pedagogic practice, irrespective of the forms of pedagogic practice – whether it is conservative or progressive, or whether it is market-oriented or knowledge-oriented. This view is also supported by the empricial research of Anyon (1981), who elaborately illustrated the qualitatively different types of school knowledge made avaiable to students from different socio-economic status in the US. Specifically, “fragmented facts” and “rule-governed behaviours” were provided to working-class students (Anyon, 1981, p. 12); “understanding and information from socially approved sources” to middleclass students (Anyon, 1981, p. 17); “discovery, construction, and meaning making” coupled with “personal creativity and independent thinking” to affluent class students (Anyon, 1981, p. 23); and “academic, intellectual, and rigorous” knowledge as well as “good thought, rationality, and reasoning” to elite class students (Anyon, 1981, p. 31). In line with Anyon’s observations, many scholars consider class-based school knowledge to be an important aspect of the reproduction of unequal class structures in modern societies (Apple, 1979; Ball, 2003; Teachman, 1987; Young & Whitty, 1977). If classed school knowledge is apparent in democratic capitalist societies, where the class structure is relatively fluid, we are curious to know whether educational engagement and aspiration for future have classed elements in contemporary China. How Chinese people, particularly those in the migration context, perceive and engage with education within a market-driven economy and a neoliberalism society? The wellbeing (e.g, educational engagement) and wellbecoming (e.g, aspiration for future) of migrant children offer us an opportunity to grapple with these questions. Here it is noticeable that we use the term ‘migrant children’ instead of ‘floating children’. However, our use of the term ‘migrant children’ is conceptually different from the term ‘migrant children’ widely used in the literature. The extant literature uses the term to refer to children of rural migrants who are arbitrarily given the underclass social status. Such use of the term oversimplifies and underestimates the diversity and heterogeneity of migrant children. In contrast to 48

COMING INTO AN INHERITANCE

the current literature, we use the term ‘migrant children’ to refer to children not only of rural migrants but also of skilled migrants who have various forms of capital – economic, cultural, social, and symbolic (Bourdieu, 1986) – to place themselves and their children in a favrouable position in the social space. Accordingly, we use the term ‘migrant children’ in a broad sense in order to cover the full spectrum of the notion and take account of the complexities and variances within this group of children. We use the term ‘floating children’, however, to specifically refer to those from a disadvantaged rural background who struggle for equal access to social and educational resources in urban areas and who therefore have a sense of rootlessness in the migration context. When this chapter unfolds, it will become clear that not all migrant children are disadvnataged. Some are fairly comfortable and some are ‘floating’. In this chapter, we draw on our longitudinal qualitative data and nascent quantitative data to excavate different ways in which parenting and schooling come to shape migrant children’s education and life status, and unravel the ways in which different pedagogies at home and in school are taken for granted and hence conducive to the reinforcement of class structure. DIFFERENT ROOTS AND ROUTES

Time and time again, scholarly work has justified the critical role of family in chilren’s educational and professional success (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990; Lareau, 1989; Papapolydorou, 2015; Reay, 2005). Following this line of scholarship, this chapter narrates and analyses the life stories of two migrant families in Beijing that we have studied for many years. Given the limited space and the purpose of this chapter, we have only selected two families from our longitudinal study. We will not detail the life trajectory of the two families over the years but have a sharp focus on their engagement with their children’s present and future. To this end, we discuss and analyse the interview accounts of children and their parents. To complement these accounts, we report on data generated through talks with teachers and classroom observations. Before we proceed, we profile the two families. Each family has only one child. Xiaobao was born into a rural family in Anhui province. His maternal and paternal grandparents and great grandparents were all sharecroppers, engaging with various labourious agricultural work, such as field ploughing, livestock farming, and crop planting. Xiaobao’s parents inherited the peasant life. When they were young, they worked on farms in their hometown just like the earlier generations of their family. Nothing changed until 2002 when Xiaobao’s parents came to Beijing with folks from their village. The couple also brought Xiaobao to Beijing with them. At that time, Xiaobao was only three years old. “His grandparents are not in a good health. Otherwise, we could have left Xiaobao with them”, Xiaobao’s mother told us. When the family first came to Beijing, life was very difficult. The couple worked and lived on a construction site. The husband was deployed to a unit responsible for 49

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concrete and sand supply for the construction site. He had to work long hours every day, shuttling with a wheelbarrow numerous times between two fixed points within the construction site, transporting concrete and sand from one point to another. This was apparently a tedious and arduous job. Every day he finished his work at dawn. With his body worn out, stomach hungry, hands dirty, and eyes sleepy, he returned to the shabby temporary cottage at the edge of the construction site – a small place that they could call ‘home’ at that time. The wife’s job was a hard one too. She was a cook on the construction site. Each time she cooked for the construction workers, little Xiaobao played at her side. Food materials needed to be wahsed. In winter, the cold water from the tap chilled her to the bone. Her wrinkled hands and frostbitten fingers told everything. The couple worked hard and led a frugal life. The wage was low so the couple only had nominal savings. Even so, they supported their family in the village by remittance. To save money, they decided not to return to their hometown every Spring Festival because the train tickets during the Spring Festival would cost the couple over one thousand Chinese Yuan (Six Chinese Yuan equals one US Dollar). During their time in Beijing, they sporadically talked to their aging parents by longdistance call. This was the only way to keep the family connected during those years because a mobile phone was way too luxurious for the couple. Several years of hard work saw some payoffs for the family. Their living condition improved and the family had more savings than before, though life was not affluent. The couple decided to establish their own business. To do this, they used up their savings and they also had to borrow some money from their relatives and friends. They rented a house in a populated community and opened a small vegetable and fruit shop there. The house was built of bricks, with polished marble floors. There were two rooms in the house. The front room was quite spacious so it was used as the shop. Behind the shop room was a small and sparsely furnished room, where the family lived. We first met the family at the shop in 2006. At that time, Xiaobao was seven years old – a conventional age in China to start primary school. There was a public school in the community. This was the school where Xiaobao studied. Soon after Xiaobao started school, we had an opportunity to talk to the family. Xiaobao’s dad told us, It took us a while to get all the documents they (the school) needed, so we just submitted the application and they approved that. How lucky! It’s not a good school but it’s good enough for us. At least he has a school to go to. At least he doesn’t linger around or mingle with bullies, right? Every day he goes to school by himself and comes back home by himself after school. We are busy in the shop so we don’t have time to escort him to school, and we don’t have time to pick him up after school either. It’s fine as long as he’s not led astray by bad boys. The shop was the only one of its kind in the community so the couple had pretty good business. The living condition of the family continued to improve in subsequent 50

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years. In 2013, the couple opened their second business in the community – a small expressage company delivering post for the community residents. The division of labour between the couple was clear. The wife looked after the vegetable and fruit shop and the husband looked after the expressage company. Figure 7 demonstrates the home and work of the family.

Entry to the vegetable and fruit shop.

Inside the shop – the family’s Xiaobao’s dad was bedroom was set behind the door. sorting the delivery items.

Figure 7. Home and work of Xiaobao’s family

The company ran well and the business grew fast. The husband could hardly manage the delivery services by himself. In 2015, Xiaobao failed his senior high school entrance examination. He gave up school and began to help his dad with post delivery. This seemed to work well for the family. Xiaobao worked alongside his dad as a delivery man. With Xiaobao’s help, his dad did not have to work exhaustively like before. At the time when we wrote this book, Xiaobao just turned 17 years old and has ‘successfully’ reproduced his parents’ social status. The life story of Xiaowang’s family is qualitatively different from that of Xiaobao’s. Xiaowang’s great grandparents were both well educated. They were communist party members and worked for the central government in Beijing when the People’s Republic of China was founded. During the Cultural Revolution years, however, Xiaowang’s great grandparents were sent to the countryside and never gained the opportunity to return to Beijing. They worked and lived in the countryside for their lifetime. They were parents of four, and Xiaowang’s grandmother was one of them. Xiaowang’s grandfather had a similar family history as his grandmother. Xiaowang’s grandparents met and married in the countryside. Like his great grandparents, Xiaowang’s grandparents also suffered from the Cultural Revolution. The social upheaval back then deprived them of the opportunity for higher education. Lack of higher education limited their mobility, both socially and geographically. Resultantly, they were stuck in the countryside and unable to return to their hometown Beijing. Because of this history, they always hoped Xiaowang’s dad could fulfil their ‘lost dream’. They supported the education of Xiaowang’s dad. 51

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Xiaowang’s dad did not fail the expectation of Xiaowang’s grandparents. His dad expectedly completed higher education and afterwards obtained a decent job in a city one hunderd kilometres away from the rural county where the family has lived since the Cultural Revolution. Xiaowang’s parents were university mates. They married after their graduation. Xiaowang was born in 2002. The family of three led a happy life in the city but deep down Xiaowang’s dad never thought of ending up in this small city. Each time he thought of returning to Beijing – his ‘going back to his root’ project, layers of ripples flew at the bottom of his heart. Such thought constantly struck him and the family. The year of 2004 was a watershed for the family. In that year, Xiaowang’s parents made a hard but brave decision – they resigned from their jobs in the city. Soon after their resignment, they decided to open a fitness centre in the CBD of Beijing. As soon as they were about to celebrate this new chapter of their life, they realised that they had to make an even harder decision – they had to move to Beijing by themselves, leaving Xiaowang behind with his grandparents in their rural hometown. It was in 2004 that two-year-old Xiaowang became a left-behind child. Xiaowang’s parents were very familiar with the fitness industry because this was their field of study at university and was also closely related to their previous professional experience in the small city. Their astute insight into the market and the clients’ needs hugely benefited their business. Since their fitness centre was located in the CBD, their members were mostly middle-class and upper-class professionals and executives. They offered Yoga, Pilates, and Aerobics in their fitness centre. Their business developed quickly, like a rolling snowball. Their chain workshops sprung up in Beijing. In 2009, the couple bought a supreme apartment and decided to bring Xiaowang to Beijing. After four years of hard life as a left-behind child, Xiaowang finally reunited with his parents. This year, Xiaowang turned seven. It was also in this year that we first met the family. As soon as Xiaowang came to Beijing, his parents started to look for schools for him. “Since we didn’t have Beijing hukou (户口, residence status documented in the Household Registration System), he (Xiaowang) was not accepted by the public schools unless we could get all the necessary documents”, Xiaowang’s dad told us. This, however, did not trouble the family too much. Xiaowang’s parents soon lost their interest in playing games with the public school system and decided to sent Xiaowang to an international school instead. In September 2009, seven-year-old Xiaowang started his first ever primary school lesson in a prestigious international school in Beijing. It seemed that Xiaowang’s parents were happy with the school, as his dad said, The fees are bloody expensive. It costs us 250,000 (approximately US$ 40,000) a year. But it’s worth it. They teach everything, like golf, performing arts, Oxford English, and physique lessons. The school focuses on kids’ all-round development, so they also teach traditional Chinese things, like painting and 52

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calligraphy. They organise overseas study tours during school holidays. Their pedagogies are new and interesting, very different from the conventional Chinese ones. If you look at the public schools here, all they teach is examination. Six years of study in the international school seemed to be rewarding. Xiaowang has developed into a disciplined, confident, and ambitious juvenile. He has obtained a sharp mind and know-how capacity, propriety and good manner, sense of independence and collaboration, as well as high-level literacy and numeracy, among many other attributes celebrated by the modern neoliberalism society. At the time when we wrote this book, Xiaowang studied in Year Seven of the international school. He told us, “in the future I will go to university overseas. I want to be an entrepreneur when I grow up.” The profiles of the two migrant families are substantially different. While Xiaobao is from a working class family, Xiaowang is from a (upper-)middle class family. Here it is by no means our intention to proffer the binary typology of migrant children. We are not suggesting that these children can be categorised into either Xiaobao type or Xiaowang type. Instead, we infer the heterogeneity of migrant children from the two life stories reported above. Although most, if not all, migrant children are associated with a rural life history and connected to the migration context, their life trajectories could be substantially different. Interestingly, the life story of Xiaobao’s family and that of Xiaowang’s seem to suggest that life is a circle, and at least for some migrant children, they may end up back where they started. In our case, Xiaobao inherited his family business and worked as a delivery man like his dad, while Xiaowang hypothetically would like to become an entrepreneur in future. Because Xiaobao and Xiaowang came from different roots, they walked and will continue to walk along different routes. Whether this claim is tenable or not requires much more time to justify, but with their life stories unfolding in the following sections, it is apparent that both Xiaobao and Xiaowang have a strong potential to reproduce the cultural history and social status of their early generations. SOCIAL REPRODUCTION THROUGH THE CLASSED PEDAGOGY AT HOME AND IN SCHOOL

In this section, we draw on Bourdieu’s notion of ‘pedagogic work’ (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and Bernstein’s notion of ‘pedagogic practice’ (Bernstein, 1990, 2003) to frame our longitudinal qualitative investigation. We focus on the potential ways of social reproduction in these two migrant families. A distinction has been made between primary and secondary pedagogic work by Bourdieu and Passeron (1990). Primary pedagogic work can complete “without any antecedent” (p. 42) because it is “accomplished in the earliest years of life” (p. 43). Such work includes, inter alia, parental engagement, cultural inculcation, and family upbringing within the domestic milieu. In contrast, secondary pedagogic work is any pedagogic work 53

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that comes after, such as schooling. While both forms of pedagogic work are integral to children’s education, Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) seem to believe that “the success of all school education, and more generally of all secondary pedagogic work, depends fundamentally on the education previously accomplished in the earliest years of life” (p. 43). Bourdieu’s ‘sequential delineation’ considers primary pedagogic work to be a prerequisite to secondary pedagogic work. This perspective is plausible, but education within the family domain and that within the school boundary do not necessarily occur in sequence. Instead, they are often inter-nested and concurrent. It is often the coaction of the two that contributes to social reproduction. Different from Bourdieu, Bernstein (2001) proposes the notion of ‘totally pedagogised society’ within which perpetual trainability and self-improvement are normalised. This notion speaks to the ongoing and multiple forms of pedagogic practices and modalities. In general, there are two, often not mutually exclusive, types of pedagogic practices, namely visible pedagogic practices and invisible pedagogic practices. Visible pedagogic practices are based on explicit rules of regulative and discursive order, while invisible pedagogic practices work on the basis of implicit rules of social order (Bernstein, 2003). Specifically, visible pedagogic practices are always emphatic about the performance and external product of the child, and at the same time are concerned with the text that the child is creating and the extent to which that text is meeting the criteria. In the case of invisible pedagogic practices, the rules are invisible to the acquirer, but visible to the transmitter. Consequently, the focus here is not upon the gradable performance of the acquirer but upon the procedures and competences meaningful to the acquirer. From the above discussion, it is clear that there are different modalities embedded in pedagogic practice. These modalities include hierarchy between the acquirer and the transmitter, sequence of learning and development, as well as criteria for learning and performance. Migrant children are constantly shaped by pedagogies at home and in school. It will soon become clear in the exposition with regards to how these pedagogies often worked in tandem with social class and cultural capital that Xiaobao and Xiaowang brought to their life, and how these pedagogies potentially and actually contributed to their social reproduction. To unearth the modes and fabrics of social reproduction, we had considerable contact with Xiaobao and Xiaowang. Over the years, we had numerous conversations with them. We visited their home and talked to their parents. We went to their schools, observed their classes, and chatted with their teachers. We watched them struggle along and move on. We wish to give the families our heartfelt gratitude for giving us the opportunity to work with them. We appreciate the time that they spent with us, and we are grateful for the precious and unique opportunity that they gave us to step into their lives and listen to their stories. They seemed to enjoy sharing their experiences with us. They seemed to consider each sharing as an exceptional opportunity to “make themselves heard” and to “carry their experience over from the private to the public sphere” (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 615). Their speech seemed to convey “a joy of expression” (Bourdieu, 1999, p. 615) each time they talked to us. All these, of 54

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course, are built on rapport and mutual trust. In what follows, we replay some of the selected episodes of their life. Classed Pedagogy and Parental Engagement in Children’s Education Xiaobao’s parents and Xiaowang’s parents have reportedly different levels and forms of engagement in, and expectations for, their child’s education. These different patterns did emerge from our first meeting with the two families many years ago at a time when Xiaobao and Xiaowang just started their primary school, though in different years – 2006 for Xiaobao and 2009 for Xiaowang. Topics during the first meeting had a clear focus on parents’ engagement in their child’s pre-school education and school selection. When we asked parents, “How did you get your son ready for school?” Xiaobao’s parents and Xiaowang’s parents had substantially different pedagogies. Consider the excerpts below. Xiaobao’s mum: What do you mean? Like kindy? We didn’t send him to kindy. He was brought up on the construction site. He just played with sand, bricks, and muddy water on the construction site, so we always asked him to stay away from the construction trucks and watch out for falling bricks from the buildings. Other than that, we didn’t teach him anything when he was small because we didn’t have much education ourselves. But before the school interview, we had to teach him to count from one to ten and count down from ten to one because we heard the school might test him during the interview. Eventually, the school asked him to do some simple arithmetic and read a few simple words, and he wasn’t able to do that stuff. We were so stressed, but somehow the school didn’t say anything and accepted him. Xiaowang’s mum: In terms of this, we owe him too much. We weren’t able to provide decent parenting when he was small. We were not around when he needed us. My heart was broken when he asked me times and times again, “Mum, why not you just work in Macdonald’s around the corner? Don’t work in Beijing. It’s too far. I want to see you every day.” I nearly burst into tears at that moment, but we had no choice because we had to go to Beijing and we had to earn money. (She wiped off her tears and continued) I need to thank my parents-in-law. They taught Xiaowang so many things, like reciting the Chinese Tang Poetry1 and the Three-Character Classic,2 painting, singing nursery rhymes, playing Chinese chess, reading and writing simple words, and doing some simple maths. So Xiaowang walked into school with many things. It is apparent that the primary pedagogic work provided by the two families is qualitatively different. Xiaobao’s parents barely taught Xiaobao anything. The counting and counting-down taught to Xiaobao right before the school interview were far less than what the school asked for. In contrast, Xiaowang’s grandparents equipped Xiaowang with many things when Xiaowang started school. Although 55

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his parents were unable to teach him, Xiaowang was lucky to have knowledgeable grandparents and to be born into a family with abundant cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) – a valuable asset historically possessed by the family and socially passed down through generations. While Xiaobao started school from scratch, Xiaowang was culturally well prepared for school. The difference between the two is striking – Xiaobao was almost illiterate when he started school while Xiaowang was able to read and write. On an important note, early investment in reading makes children later less dependent upon teachers, gives them access to alternative perspectives and resources, and provides them with a position of superiority over those who are unable to read (Bernstein, 2003). As Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) remind us, some parents and families differ from others in that they fail to provide high-status cultural capital that their children’s academic development in school requires, for example reading. Such unequal distribution of cultural capital in the domestic milieu leads up to different quality and quantity of primary pedagogic work provided by these families, and resultantly contributes to different levels of school-preparedness of children from these families. This primary pedagogic work, carried out without any antecedent and performed during the earliest phase of upbringing in the time required for inculcation, “is an irreversible process” that produces “an irreversible disposition”, or “a primary habitus, characteristic of a group or class, which is the basis for the subsequent formation of any other habitus” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, p. 42). It is arguable that inequalities have already disadvantaged some children even before they started school. When essential capital is not acquired through primary pedagogic work, possibly the only other source of its acquisition is through secondary pedagogic work provided by schooling. But the question remains in terms of whether school education can narrow the gap of inequality and hence help the disadvantaged children catch up. Bearing this question in mind, we go on with an analysis of the school selection strategies adopted by Xiaobao’s parents and Xiaowang’s parents. When asked about school selection for their children, Xiaobao’s parents and Xiaowang’s parents gave dramatically different responses. Xiaobao’s dad: School selection? We never thought about that. Too expensive because we can’t afford the school selection fees. We don’t have networks so we don’t have anybody to help us. We don’t have a Beijing hukou (户口, residence status documented in the Household Registration System) so we were lucky the school accepted Xiaobao. It took us a while to get all the documents they (the school) needed, so we just submitted the application and they approved that. How lucky! It’s not a good school but it’s good enough for us. At least he has a school to go to. At least he doesn’t linger around or mingle with bullies, right? Xiaowang’s dad: Oh yes. That was a hard decision. We planned to send Xiaowang to a key school because we got all the money ready to pay the 56

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school selection fees. But the paperwork pained us to death. Actually we could have asked friends to give a hand, like to call up the school principal, but we really didn’t want to bother them because we could sort it out by ourselves. So I talked to Xiaowang’s mum, “We have the money anyway so why not send him to an international school?” I discussed a lot with his mum and we also asked around and went to inspect many international schools on their open days. We found international schools fairly cool and they teach many things public schools don’t teach. His current school indeed is a prestigious one, high quality! Xiaobao’s family reportedly did not have the essential economic, social, and symbolic resources (e.g., money, networks, and Beijing hukou) that could guarantee access to high-quality schooling. In contrast, Xiaowang’s parents had all the economic resource available, cultural knowledge at their disposal, and social networks to draw on, by virtue of which they could search, evaluate, and choose the best available schooling for Xiaowang. As suggested by previous research (Ball & Vincent, 1998), parents made school choice by virtue of the ‘grapevine’ knowledge socially embedded in networks and localities, which were unequally distributed across and differently used by different social-class groups. Upper-middle and upper class parents, like Xiaowang’s parents, have plenty of cultural and social capital that often enables them to confidently navigate the system and excavate all the useful information to help with their decision making; while working-class parents, like Xiaobao’s parents, do not employ similar strategies when choosing schools for their children but abide by school authorities’ decisions simply because these parents do not have high-status resources (Papapolydorou, 2015). In this vein, it is plausible to claim that Xiaobao and Xiaowang were doomed to take different routes of life because they were born from different roots. As a matter of fact, Xiaobao went to “not a good” public school in the community while Xiaowang went to a “prestigious, high quality” international school. What a difference! Soon after Xiaobao and Xiaowang started school, we visited their parents again, in 2007 for Xiaobao’s parents and 2010 for Xiaowang’s parents. We asked about parental expectations for their child’s educational performance. Xiaobao’s mum spoke about her low expectation. Not that much. He has a school to go to every day. What else can we ask for? I always said to him, “Just do your best!” If he can learn to add, subtract, multiply, or divide, that’s good enough. At least, he can help the cashier in the shop after school. If not, I won’t worry too much as long as he knows how to manage the shop when he grows up. I really don’t have any other expectation if he can read and write and do some simple maths. Xiaobao’s dad echoed, Actually people need to look at themselves first. Like I even didn’t finish my primary school, how possible my son can become, say, a scientist? That would 57

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be a joke! I am fooling myself if I say he (Xiaobao) can go to university. He just needs to do what he is supposed to do. Xiaowang’s mum had a completely different discourse, As he’s growing up, I hope he can gradually learn from past experiences. It’s not just academics but everything. I often said to him, “Don’t be complacent about small success and don’t give up when you fail.” I want him to think for himself and his future. I wish him to expose himself to ideas, creative ones. Of course, to do all these, he will have to go to the best schools, and we will have to prepare him. While Xiaobao’s mum and dad were apathetic about their son’s academic development, Xiaowang’s mum was empathetic. Although different, their expectations were both clearly defined. While Xiaobao’s mum simply expected her son to be able to read and write, Xiaowang’s mum was keen to develop her son into a thinking human being. Because of these different expectations, it did not surprise us later when we found out Xiaobao’s parents and Xiaowang’s parents had remarkably different levels of engagement in their son’s education. In the years that followed, we talked to Xiaobao’s parents and Xiaowang’s parents, asking them questions like “How do you engage in school activities?” and “How do you support your son’s study?” Their pedagogies were unsurprisingly disparate. See the excerpts below. Xiaobao’s dad: Engage? We don’t know how to engage… Xiaobao’s mum: You went to parent meetings, didn’t you? Xiaobao’s dad: I didn’t want to attend the meeting, but the teacher said we had to. You didn’t attend anyway, so I had to. I even didn’t have face to go to school. After all, his marks were low. Investigator:

So did the teachers say anything about Xiaobao?

Xiaobao’s dad: They said Xiaobao was rather chatty with the kid next to him in class. Investigator:

So what did you do?

Xiaobao’s dad: I asked the teacher to be strict with him. When I came back home from the meeting, I gave him a good bollocking. Investigator:

Do you often talk to the teachers afterwards?

Xiaobao’s dad: No. We don’t know what to say to his teachers. We had little education so we don’t understand his school stuff, and so there’s nothing to say to his teachers. Just do what the teachers said. But sometimes it’s hard because the teachers

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don’t know our actual situation. They said parents should try to give children a quiet place at home and care about their study. Look at our shop! We just don’t have that room. People come and buy things at all times. Where to find a quiet place? How can we watch him all the time? Investigator:

Then how do you support your son’s study?

Xiaobao’s dad: Support? What help can we give him? We have very little education… Xiaobao’s mum:  I just yell at him when I found him dawdling over his homework. We have little education and we couldn’t do too much. Just to threaten him when he didn’t behave. And this works well. Investigator:

What about extracurricular books? Did you buy him any?

Xiaobao’s mum: He even can’t do school books. There’s no point buying him extra ones. Xiaowang’s parents, however, reported high-level engagement and support. See the narrative of Xiaowang’s dad below. Yes, we will support him by all means, no matter how much time or money it’s going to cost. No matter how busy we are, we always work with him on his study, for example, his social studies project. We often asked him to reflect on his strengths and weaknesses, like where did he do well and where is the problem? Anyway we give him the best we can give. He has his own room at home. Look, we hope to create a comfortable and quiet place at home so that his study is not distracted. Xiaowang’s mum continued, He usually behaves but when he was in…probably Year Four or Year Five, he became a bit…hmm…How to describe that? Hmm…a bit agitated, kind of vehement and sometimes aggressive and not as obedient as before. Teachers said he needed to stay more focused, and they said sometimes during the group discussion, he got kind of sidetracked, joking with other kids. So I asked the teacher to change his group and place him in a group of high-performing kids. Also at that time, as far as I remembered, his scores in math were slightly going down. I thought this needed to be sorted out, so I decided to intervene. I called up the math head teacher because we are friends. I said, “Why my son’s grades are going down? He should perform much better. Can you ask his teacher to help him and do something?”

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The above excerpts are information rich. First, inferiority and superiority tend to be predisposed, internalised, and hence taken for granted. Having little education was repeatedly used by Xiaobao’s parents as an ‘excuse’ to extenuate their scant support and inadequate engagement in Xiaobao’s education. The logic behind the extenuation here is that Xiaobao’s underachievement in school was forgivable and acceptable. However, this would never happen to Xiaowang because his parents were attentive to even a slight drop in his marks. That “he should perform much better” became an assumed fact, indicating that he was supposed to be the high-achievers. In this respect, both inferior and superior positions are commonly accepted and socially sanctioned. Such class habitus even does not need to be reasoned and vindicated, because it is embodied, as if it were naturally born, culturally normalised, and historically legitimate. Second, the significance of time emerged from the above excerpts. Pedagogic practice cannot be performed wholly through the time spent at school and it must be supplemented by official pedagogic time at home (Bernstein, 2003). There was a large discrepancy between Xiaobao and Xiaowang in terms of the official pedagogic time ensured at home. While Xiaobao’s parents said “how can we watch him all the time”, Xiaowang’s parents supported Xiaowang’s study no matter how busy they were. Even worse, Xiaobao might have to spend some time to “help the cashier in the shop after school”. The unavailability of official pedagogic time at home is common for poor children because “often time is used to work for money” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 206). The official pedagogic time at home as children grow is becoming more and more important because children are expected to complete more schoolwork at home when they become older. In this respect, the disparity between the limited official pedagogic time at Xiaobao’s home and the guaranteed pedagogic time at Xiaowang’s home has created an increasingly powerful wedge between Xiaobao and Xiaowang. Third, the concept of space warrants some discussion here. The performance of pedagogic practice at home not only requires time but also demands a context, that is, an official pedagogic space at home – “a silent space” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 206). Such space is usually unavailable in the homes of the poor because the cost of it is high. An invisible pedagogic practice presupposes considerable freedom of movement of children (Bernstein, 2003). When the spatial requirement is translated into the family space of the poor, it is apparent that the poor families cannot afford the cost of an invisible pedagogy because there are many members confined to a small space. This is evident in the above excerpts. Xiaobao’s ‘home’ was right behind the family shop, a bustling marketplace jammed with noisy crowds of buyers. The family of three lived in the small room behind the shop. Apparently there was no quiet and spacious official pedagogic space in Xiaobao’s home. In contrast, Xiaowang had his own study room in a luxurious apartment unit, “a comfortable and quiet” official pedagogic space. In this case, the school could reproduce itself in Xiaowang’s home but not Xiaobao’s. Under these conditions, there did not exist an effective second site of acquisition with an effective official pedagogic space for 60

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Xiaobao. Without a second site of acquisition, “failure becomes the expectation and the reality” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 206). Fourth, there is a different pattern of parental intervention in children’s education. Xiaobao’s parents “don’t know what to say to the teachers” and they “just do what the teachers said”. When there was a problem with Xiaobao, they often felt helpless. They asked for the teachers’ help as a last resort. This phenomenon is documented elsewhere (Crozier, 1997) – working-class parents entrusted their children to schools as institutions and they were reluctant to occupy teachers with their concerns. Xiaowang’s parents, however, drew on their social capital to guide the teachers and request special arrangements for Xiaobao (e.g., change group) whenever they saw a problem. The difference here is apparent. Xiaobao’s parents were peripheral to Xiaobao’s education, but Xiaowang’s parents were integral to Xiaowang’s education. In identifying and analysing the differences between the two families, we highlight the role of social class in shaping children’s life trajectories. While upper- and middle-class parents engage in the project of ‘concerted cultivation’ strategically designed to create opportunities and realise potential for their child(ren), working-class parents rely on ‘the accomplishment of natural growth’, leaving their children’s development unfolding spontaneously (Lareau, 2003). This difference can be attributed to the unequal distribution of resources in different social class groups. Upper-middle- and upper-class parents have high quality and adequate quantity of capital at their disposal, which gives them confidence and capacity to watch and intervene in their children’s education. Working-class parents, on the contrary, do not have too much to draw on to negotiate with schools and teachers. This does not necessarily mean that they do not wish better educational provision for their children but merely that they do not feel as confident as the superior class to deal with children’s education. This is a disposition rooted in their inferior socioeconomic and cultural background (Papapolydorou, 2015). The habitus of inferiority is epitomised in the socially constituted ‘agoraphobia’ that persuades working-class parents to exclude themselves from engagement in children’s school education. Last, the “modalities of pedagogic practice” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 199) at home are somewhat different. Xiaobao’s family tended to use more explicit hierarchical rules of a visible pedagogic practice. Such pedagogic practice provides “a grammar of proscriptions and prescriptions” and “deviance is very visible” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 199). When Xiaobao did not behave, his dad would give him a good bollocking and his mum would yell at him, hoping to correct any behaviours that were deviant from the rules. In extreme cases of explicit hierarchical rules of the visible pedagogic work, strategies of corporeal punishment may be used (Bernstein, 2003), although this is not the case here. Xiaowang’s parents seemed to use more invisible pedagogic practice to encourage personalised representations within a relaxed familial context. Through inter-personal communications, Xiaowang’s parents could read Xiaowang’s motivation and intentionality. Although such pedagogic practice was more implicit and indirect, it does not necessarily mean that Xiaowang’s parents would lose control. As a matter of fact, the control might not evaporate and we could 61

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even expect greater potential of control. Xiaowang’s parents often asked Xiaowang to do self-reflections, through which Xiaowang’s internal world were made more public. Here, parental control and surveillance of Xiaowang was realised because he had nowhere to hide. Such seemingly invisible pedagogic practice, according to Bernstein (2003, p. 210), “works to make the invisible visible”. Classed Pedagogy and Children’s Academic Engagement and Aspiration for Future In addition to the conversations that we had with parents, we had considerable contact with Xiaobao and Xiaowang. Sometimes we called their home and sometimes we visited their home after a typical school day. During one of our visits, we intended to understand their learning experiences (wellbeing) and future aspirations (wellbecoming), asking them questions like “What did you do in school today?”, “What do you do after school?”, “Do you want to go to university?”, and “What do you want to do in the future?” These questions were asked when both Xiaobao and Xiaowang were in Year Three, in 2009 and 2012 respectively. We recount some of the conversations below. Investigator: So what did you do in school today? Xiaobao: Nothing. Boring! In the Chinese class, we tossed chalk to each other. That was fun. (Fleeting smiles flickered across his face.) Investigator: Why did you do that? Xiaobao: To get the teacher mad! His class was boring. Just chanting and repeating. Investigator: What about other classes? Interesting at all? Xiaobao: Nothing different. The math teacher always asked us to skip the thinking pages. Investigator: Thinking pages? Xiaobao: Just the several pages after each lesson, something like more difficult math word problems. Teachers said we don’t have to worry about that stuff because they are too hard. I only do the basics. Pass (in the exam) is ok. Investigator: Have you ever failed in the exams? Xiaobao:

Once, only once in maths.

Investigator: So what did you do with it? I mean how did you manage to catch up? Like doing more maths after school?

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Xiaobao: Nothing. Who knows what happened that time. I got everything wrong. Bad luck! But I am usually ok (in exams). Investigator: So what do you usually do after school? Xiaobao:

Play games and mum was mad. She yelled at me all the time.

Investigator: Do you want to go to university when you grow up? Xiaobao:

Like a very big school? Like school for older students?

Investigator: That’s right. So do you want to go to university? Xiaobao:  Hmm…I don’t know. Maybe…if I have money…hmm… probably not because of my poor grades. Also I am not smart. Investigator: So what do you want to do when you grow up? Xiaobao:

Anything, any job. But if it’s too hard, I wouldn’t do it.

Investigator: So you think you could be anything you want when you grow up? Xiaobao: No. Only rich people can. Once my friend brought me to his house. It’s in a Hutong (a type of narrow streets or alleys, commonly associated with northern Chinese cities, most prominently Beijing). It’s big, like a huge one, and I asked, “How much is it?” He said it was from his grandparents. I asked, “What did they do?” He said, “Nothing. My grandfather’s grandfather had kinship to the royal family.” So I was like why they don’t work hard but have everything so good? Xiaobao’s disengagement in school is evidently manifested in the above conversation. By tossing chalk and getting teacher mad, Xiaobao engaged in antidisciplinary practices. These practices, according to theories of resistance (e.g., Giroux, 1983a, 1983b), are typical everyday forms of counter-cultural expressions among dominated groups. The resistance, however, is only an ineffective sort of “spontaneist populism”, through which “the dominated seldom escape the antinomy of domination” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 82). This antinomy of domination encompasses two opposite choices. On the one hand, to engage in oppositional school activities “through horseplay, truancy, and delinquency, is to exclude oneself from the school, and, increasingly, to lock oneself into one’s condition of dominated” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 82). In this case, resistance only furthers the marginalisation of the already marginalised. On the other hand, “to accept assimilation by adopting school culture amounts to being coopted by the institution” (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 82). In either way – to oppose or to accept, the dominated groups are condemned to a dilemma of choices between two equally bad solutions (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 82).

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Either assimilation-cum-institutional cooptation or resistance-cum-further marginalisation entraps children from working class families into inequalities. Here Xiaobao was very aware of the inequalities. He questioned the fact that some people were born with wealth and they lived well by doing nothing. That said, it is not useful to simplistically view ‘rich people’ as not working hard. Although privileged, many children of elite background are working very hard to keep what they have. Xiaowang is one of them. See the excerpts below. Investigator: How was your school today? Xiaowang: Not too bad. We had our group discussion, like the brainstorming we did last week… Investigator: You did it last week as well? Xiaowang: Yes, we do it at least once a week. The science teacher asked us to talk about anything we know about science, anything really deep and interesting. Today we talked about the universe. For example, we talked about the black hole and where it came from, etc. etc. On my way back home, I talked to my classmates on the school bus. We talked about our homework, like maths word problem solving, like how I figured it out. Investigator: What do you usually do after school? Xiaowang:  Homework first, then play the piano. At dinnertime we watch TV and I talk with my parents, like what I did in school or what’s fun in school. Then I have to write my diary, write in English! I sometimes read science fictions before bed. On weekends I am busy, and don’t have much time to do my own things. I have to go to piano class and taekwondo class, and sometimes mum and dad took me to museums. I like museums. I like the dinosaurs there. There are huge and beautiful animals. Investigator: Very interesting! So do you want to go to university and learn more when you grow up? Xiaowang: Of course. My uncle went to university and got a great job. Mum and dad said I need to become a person like my uncle and they said I can go overseas for my university. I think in future I will have very important jobs like my uncle. There are several issues that merit discussion here. First, it is clear that the disparity between Xiaobao and Xiaowang continued to grow. Xiaobao was born into a working-class family. This family background disadvantaged Xiaobao because the

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family provided little, if any, primary pedagogic work due to its lack of material and symbolic resources. This further marginalised Xiaobao because the family was not able to choose educational provision for Xiaobao but to helplessly accept what was available at hand. Xiaobao’s vulnerability became exacerbated after he went to school because the habitus produced by his inferior family origin and early upbringing predisposed him to subconsciously or even unconsciously accept his underclass status. When the underclass status is considered to be normal, change is hardly possible because any change would be considered to be abnormal. Resultantly the underclass status becomes a durable, supposed-to-be, and takenfor-granted state of disadvantage. Such taken-for-grantedness is evident in the above excerpts. As Xiaobao confessed, he only did the basics just for the sake of exams; he was not interested in university because he already knew that what it took to get there was being rich and smart, and he was not; and he would do any job but not the hard ones. In stark contrast, Xiaowang took it for granted that he would go to university and have important jobs in future. The confidence can be attributed to the habitus endowed by his family culture history – from his welleducated great grandparents, through his intelligent grandparents and parents, to himself. This confident disposition is a habitus that came to Xiaowang without either explicit reason or signifying intent, but none the less became sensible and reasonable, immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and hence taken for granted (Bourdieu, 1977). Second, Xiaobao’s responses and Xiaowang’s responses are structurally and linguistically different. Xiaobao’s responses are often composed of single words. His language pattern is simpler, shorter, and more condensed, but requires more background information and prior knowledge for the listener to consume. Xiaowang’s responses, however, usually are composed of complete sentences, full of details, and rife with descriptions. The different language patterns used by Xiaobao and Xiaowang are what Bernstein (1971, 1973) means by language codes. Specifically, Bernstein differentiates between the restricted language code and the elaborated language code. While the former is more implicit and requires shared assumptions and understanding on the topic, the latter is more explicit and thorough, and does not require reading between the lines. Therefore, the latter can stand on its own and can be understood even by overhearing. The classed implication behind the notion of language code is important here. Bernstein (1971) reveals the correlation between social class and the choice of language codes. Restricted language code is more commonly found in the working class, as in Xiaobao’s case. Working class people tend to use less formal language with shorter phrases interjected into their speaking. They are more likely to communicate in restricted language code as a result of their upbringing and socialisation. Middle class and upper class people have access to both the restricted and the elaborated language codes because they are more geographically and socially mobile. When they do use the elaborated language code, their speech is composed of longer sentences and more complicated 65

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structures that are replete with commonly used words and well laid out thoughts, as in Xiaowang’s case. Third, the modalities of pedagogic practice are different in terms of the awareness of sequencing rules. To clarify, sequencing rules can be both explicit and implicit. Explicit rules regulate the age-appropriate development of the child, articulate particular competences that the child needs to acquire at a particular age, and construct the temporal project of the child (Bernstein, 2003). Children pedagogised through these rules are always aware of what their expected state of consciousness is supposed to be. In contrast, children pedagogised through implicit sequencing rules are not aware of their temporal project. When asked about the hypothetical project of going to university, Xiaobao seemed to be guessing what the investigator meant. He was unsure about his understanding of the question so he asked the question back by “like a very big school? Like school for older students?” His hesitation later on indicated his unawareness of the temporal project. At least, he was not very clear about it. When asked about the same question, Xiaowang immediately articulated his temporal project – he wanted to go to university and have important jobs afterwards. In this respect, Xiaobao’s diffidence about the future stood in contrast to Xiaowang’s confidence. As a result, Xiaobao lived only in the present and cared about his ‘being’ whereas Xiaowang saw his future and invested in his ‘becoming’. The opposite grammatical tenses of the two pedagogic practices are termed as “ideology of tense” by Bernstein (2003, p. 199). Because sequencing rules are often inscribed in syllabi, behavioural rules, and family inculcation (Bernstein, 2003), we could reasonably expect Xiaowang’s adequate access to decent primary and secondary pedagogic work and Xiaobao’s lack thereof. Therefore, it is arguable that the (in)equality of pedagogic work can socialise the least advantaged children into the most impoverished ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 2006), whereas children from affluent background are embodied with a ‘cosmopolitan worldview’ (Hansen, 2014) enabling them, consciously or unconsciously, to construct their imagined communities. Classed Pedagogy in School It seems that Xiaobao and Xiaowang had significantly different learning experiences and expectations. To further make sense of these differences, we managed to visit their schools and had the opportunity to observe their classes and talk to their teachers. In most of Xiaobao’s classes that we observed, teachers dominated the class. Rote learning and didactic teaching were commonly used pedagogies in many classes. Teachers played the conventional role of ‘sage on the stage’. Many children twisted and seemed to be perfunctory, apathetic, or disinterested when teachers were lecturing. Some children blushed, lowered their heads, and seemed to become stressed when teachers asked questions. Most of their answers were short or in broken sentences. Most of them did not elaborate without teachers’ probing, and often not even then. Children’s use of the restricted language code in 66

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these classes was obvious. Teachers often used the conventional ‘right-or-wrong’ criterion to evaluate students’ responses. In most of Xiaowang’s classes that we observed, teachers were not ‘sage on the stage’ but ‘guide on the side’. Inquirybased learning seemed to be the widely adopted pedagogy in the school. In many classes, students played the leadership role in learning and teachers provided advice and comments in a proposed, rather than imposed way. Students very much enjoyed their learning, highly engaged in group discussions, and exuberantly contributed their ideas. They were not evaluated against the ‘yes-or-no’ binary rubric. Highorder thinking was the most valued capacity in learning and all-round development was the ultimate goal. We also talked to the teachers at the times that were convenient to them. Topics of conversions focused on their experiences in routine teaching. The major information that we obtained from these conversations was that teachers in Xiaobao’s school and those in Xiaowang’s school tended to use different pedagogies in their teaching. For example, the math teacher in Xiaobao’s school noted, I usually don’t do exercises and items provided by the manual. I also skip the thinking pages. They’re way too hard for them. They never get it, and they’ll never use it because they’re lazy. I hate to label them, but they are lazy. In addition, students here are wild little monsters and have no interest in learning. They don’t listen to you in class. You have to repeat things many times. You have to do behaviour management all the time. So I only have time to do the basics in class. I would celebrate if they understand all the basic stuff in the textbook. I am blessed if they all pass the exams. The social science teacher in Xiaobao’s school had a similar discourse, Children in this school don’t know anything, so you can’t teach them too much. But actually you can teach them anything, easy things, things they can understand. Their parents don’t care. They are not like parents in key schools. I would never teach in key schools. The parents there think their kids are a genius. You have to work too hard there. My friend there told me she goes in early every day and finishes rather late. She always has to do something special and extra for the kids. What a life! I am just not into that. Teachers’ discourses in Xiaowang’s school are qualitatively different from those in Xiaobao’s school. One of Xiaowang’s teachers confided to us, Here we don’t use yes or no evaluations. It doesn’t matter whether it is right or wrong and sometimes there is no right or wrong answer. The value is the discussion of ideas, so we organise a lot of teamwork and group discussions, from which they can come up with possible solutions to a certain problem. They need to learn to reason and they need to be able to think things through. The purpose is to teach children to think and reason and to come up with valid conclusions and problem solving. 67

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Another one disclosed, In my class, I have a millionaire’s son, official’s son, professor’s son, etc. I really have to be careful about what I say in class. If I say something wrong, they will pick it up and they’d jump in and say, “my mum said what, what” or “my dad said what, what”. Their parents are successful professionals. If there is a class structure in society, these parents are at the top. They know what they want for their kids. They want their kids to do as well as they do or even exceed them. They pass the best genes on to their kids. You should look at the parents. They all look like executives, for example, their way of talking and their dress. Apparently there were different “modalities of pedagogic practice” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 199) in the two schools. Specifically, hierarchical and criterial rules were more explicit in Xiaobao’s school, while those in Xiaowang’s schools were more implicit. In Xiaobao’s classes, the dominant role of teachers was clearly defined. This created an explicit hierarchy between teachers and students in the classroom. In Xiaowang’s classes, subordination and superordination became less clear. This created an implicit hierarchy and the power relations between teachers and students were masked or hidden behind mutual communications. The teachers acted directly on the learning context but indirectly on the students. In other words, teachers were facilitative of group discussions instead of telling the students what to do. Teachers in Xiaobao’s classes, however, chose to do the opposite. While teachers in Xiaobao’s school chose explicit criterial rules to grade students’ performance by exams or to evaluate students by the conventional ‘right-or-wrong’ criterion, teachers in Xiaowang’s school constructed a context where students performed their learning with minimum external constraints, and hence social relationships appeared highly supportive. When the rules are explicit, learners are usually aware of the rules; where there are implicit rules, learners are often unconscious of the rules. It will be recalled that Xiaobao clearly knew he had to pass exams to meet the rule, but Xiaowang was encouraged to discuss anything that interested him, because the rules were less clearly articulated. Another modality of pedagogic practice – the sequencing rules – was also found to be different in Xiaobao’s school and Xiaowang’s school. To restate, the sequencing rules in the case of a visible pedagogic practice explicitly articulate children’s development in very clear steps or stages (Bernstein, 2003). As discussed earlier, Xiaobao came to school with a disadvantaged position. Such disadvantage resulted in his failure in meeting the initial requirements of the sequencing rules. According to Bernstein (2003), there are three pedagogic strategies that can counteract the initial disadvantage so that the inequality will not continue to grow. The three strategies are: (1) the introduction of a repair system to cope with children who are unable to meet the sequencing requirements, (2) the relaxation of the rhythm of knowledge transmission to provide these children with more time to consume the knowledge and catch up, and (3) the reduction of the quantity and/or the quality of learning contents to be acquired while maintaining the system and the rhythm. 68

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The third strategy was observed in Xiaobao’s school. The teachers stuck to the basics and skipped the learning components that would go beyond students’ capacities. This pedagogic practice constrains lower working class children, Xiaobao in this case, by “the local, context-dependent, context-tied operations” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 205). The teachers in Xiaowang’s school, however, chose to do exactly the opposite. They added many captivating and challenging components to students’ learning. This pedagogic practice enables middle and upper class children, Xiaowang in this case, to understand the principles, the application of principles, and the principles of the principles. These children are more likely to come to understand that the heart of learning “is not order but disorder, not coherence but incoherence, not clarity but ambiguity, and that the heart of discourse is the possibility of new realities” (Bernstein, 2003, p. 205). Here the classed pedagogic practice in school justifiably contributes to the social reproduction of class. It is arguable that Xiaobao would fall further and further behind while Xiaowang would move on with an accelerating rate. The disparity between the two would become an insuperable chasm. The classed pedagogic practice in school, according to Bernstein (2003, p. 204), produces “a more delicate system of stratification within an already stratifying pedagogic practice”. Potential Durability of Inequalities So far we have made the argument that floating children, for example Xiaobao, who came from a disadvantaged family background, can be further marginalised by school education; while some migrant children, such as Xiaowang, who have been associated with a privileged family background, can be favoured by school education. Drawing insights from the cases of Xiaobao and Xiaowang, we argue that education both at home and in school can contribute to social stratification and inequalities. This makes us worry about the wellbecoming of Xiaobao and Xiaowang. The question here is “can these inequalities endure into the future?” It is this question to which we now turn. On the occasions of our visits to the two families, we always took the opportunity to talk to the parents. Sometimes the topic of conversation was directed to parental aspiration for their child’s future. Below is what Xiaobao’s dad confided to us during one of the conversations, What aspirations can we rural people have? His school marks are low. What else can we expect? If being a delivery man is good enough for me, it’s good enough for my son. He could just do our family business. It’s small but good enough for him. So if he couldn’t pass the exams for senior high school, it’s not a big deal. If he went on with senior high, he should think about going to university afterwards. But he won’t make it. Here the habitus of inferiority is clear. The normalised and accepted disadvantage is evident in the question “what aspirations can we rural people have”. ‘Rural’ 69

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here indicates a disadvantaged family origin and ‘low school mark’ denotes the disadvantage in educational performance. The double disadvantage mirrors the low quality primary and secondary pedagogic work for Xiaobao. As Bourdieu and Passeron (1990) remind us, working-class parents and families typically do not have the high-status economic, cultural, and social capital that academic and economic success requires. When such capital is not provided by the education system, there is little if any other source of its acquisition. Therefore, it did not surprise us when Xiaobao’s dad had very little expectation. Interestingly, Xiaobao’s dad did not feel hopeless or helpless because Xiaobao could simply inherit the family business. In fact, Xiaobao did become a delivery man as his dad ‘expected’. Because of the underclass habitus, the intergenerational reproduction of the social status did not trouble Xiaobao’s parents. Therefore, coming into an inheritance did not happen to Xiaobao by chance. Rather, it was more like an inescapable social destiny and spell. Coming into an inheritance, at least in the case of our study, contributes to the social reproduction of an underclass of people who have experienced disadvantage, first in school and later in life. This form of reproduction may be best exemplified in the book “Learning to labour: How working-class kids get working-class jobs” by Willis (1977), in which the lads thoroughly rejected school in favour of their own working-class subculture. Xiaobao is very much similar to the lads described by Willis (1977). In our recent conversation with Xiaobao’s family, we found out that Xiaobao insisted on dropping out of a business diploma program in which his parents deliberately enrolled him. Xiaobao reported that he hated school with a passion. This was followed by his mum’s complaint, You know how much money we paid? I can think of so many things we could have bought using that money. Isn’t it good if you learn something and help with our family business?…(You’re) helpless. What else can we do? You’re not cut out to be a student. Reverting to the topic of parental aspiration, we found that the discourse of Xiaowang’s parents stood in stark contrast to that of Xiaobao’s parents. During one of the conversations, Xiaowang’s dad was outspoken about his high expectations for Xiaowang. See below. We always try to set high standards for him and we often tell him there’s nothing wrong with aiming high. But we don’t quite believe in bribes for his motivation but internal pride, so we tend not to overuse material incentives… I wish him to have important jobs so I always push him hard. Once maybe he thought I was pushing him too hard and he said something like “Why do I have to do all these? I just want to be a bus driver when I get big.” So I said loudly and angrily to him, like a threat, “Listen, boy, I will beat you up if you ever say that again. I spent all my money on your schooling for you to be just a bus driver? Our family doesn’t breed bus driver!” 70

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Apparently, the hierarchical rules of pedagogic practice within Xiaowang’s family were not always implicit. The family politics were not always democratic. Once Xiaowang disobeyed or deviated, democracy was withdrawn and rules were articulated. The explicit control of the hierarchical rules, according to Bernstein (2003), functions to repair the boundaries, clarify the rules, and ultimately maintain the social privilege. Because of the privileged social status, Xiaowang’s dad assumed that his son would have important jobs in the future. Such taken-for-granted disposition came without any question or reason because it is a habitus embodied in the mindset, and hence enduring into the future. Will Xiaowang have important jobs when he grows up? We will have to wait and see. EMPIRICAL CODA: SOME QUANTITATIVE EVIDENCE ON SOCIAL REPRODUCTION

In previous sections of this chapter, we have analysed the pedagogic work and pedagogic practice at home and in school associated with two migrant children. We purposefully focus on the stories of Xiaobao and Xiaowang because their cases are at the two ends of the spectrum of the migrant children phenomenon. These two ‘extreme cases’ (Patton, 1990) help us capture the heterogeneity of migrant children and make sense of the nature, patterns, and dynamics of their social reproduction. It is evident that migrant children constitute a heterogeneous group with diverse sociocultural qualities, rather than a monolithic group always at a disadvantage as discussed in the bulk of the current literature. As a subgroup of migrant children, floating children are also associated with heterogeneities and diversities. We now draw on our quantitative data to look at the variances within the sample of floating children and delve into the implications of these variances for social reproduction. At the time we wrote this book, our pilot survey of the social wellbeing of floating children was also completed. Participants of the survey included 356 floating children and 243 migrant parents in four districts of Beijing. After we matched the parent data and the children data, we generated a dataset of 178 cases because some parent data and children data were unmatchable. Information captured by the survey included parental and children’s demographics; parental and children’s aspiration for future; family socio-economic status; and children’s resilience, social and academic engagement, and social connectedness. Given the topic of this chapter, we only report on a small part of the pilot data here. Despite the small scale of the pilot sample and the use of non-random sampling, preliminary findings from the pilot survey strongly align with our longitudinal qualitative data discussed in preceding sections. Before we report the findings, we briefly look at the profile of our sample. Fathers constituted approximately one-third (35.4%) of the parent participants while mothers constituted the remaining two-thirds (64.6%). Only 28.6% of these parents had a university degree. As a reflection, only 17.5% were reportedly skilled workers, for example, IT staff, engineers, and company seniors. Many parents engaged with service work (38.9%, e.g., sales, cashiers, and community security) 71

Chapter 3

and labour work (23.1%, e.g., construction workers, cooks, and bus drivers). Some were self-employed or freelanced (12.3%). A small percentage of the parents (6.7%) were unemployed at the time of the survey. The children participants (40.4% boys and 59.6% girls) ranged in age between nine and 15 with a mean age of 11. An overwhelming proportion of the children participants (98.3%) were born outside Beijing. Two-thirds of the children participants (66.3%) reportedly had siblings. There were no ethnic minority children in the sample. All of them were Han Chinese. As discussed in previous sections, sociological factors influence children’s aspiration for the future. Accordingly, in this section we analyse how family annual income, parental highest educational qualification and their aspiration for their child(ren)’s future, as well as children’s academic engagement come to inform children’s aspiration for the future. While family annual income and parental highest educational qualification each were measured by a single-item indicator, children’s academic engagement and their aspiration for the future as well as parental aspiration for their child(ren)’s future were all measured by a scale, composed of five, six, and six indicators respectively. Children’s academic engagement scale was first developed by the CORE (Creating Opportunities for Resilience and Engagement) project (http://www.coreconnects.ca/) that is concerned with the wellbeing of Grades Five to Nine students in Alberta, Canada. The sample of the current study is of similar age group to the CORE sample. The internal consistency reliability of children’s academic engagement is .83 when the scale was used to the current sample. The scales of children’s aspiration for future and parental aspiration for children’s future were developed by Casas, Figuer, González, and Malo (2007) who examined the wellbeing of Spanish adolescents ranging in age between 12 and 16. Although the mean age of their sample is higher than that of the sample here, the two scales have high international consistency reliability (.79 and .82 respectively) when applied to the current sample. Our hypothesis here is the wellbeing of floating children contributes to the wellbecoming of these children. To test this hypothesis, we conduct hierarchical linear regression, with children’s aspiration for the future treated as a dependent variable while family income, parental educational qualification and their aspiration for their child(ren)’s future, as well as children’s academic engagement as independent variables. Results from the regression analysis are summarised in Table 1. To predict children’s aspiration for the future, family annual income, parental highest educational qualification, children’s academic engagement, and parental aspiration for their child(ren)’s future were added into the model step by step. As shown in Table 1, the four predictors explained 22.0% of the variance of children’s aspiration for the future. The remaining variance may be attributed to other factors, which is beyond the scope of this chapter. What is at odds with our expectation is the non-significant contribution of family income to children’s aspiration for future. A closer look at the variable ‘family income’ identified the problem. The distribution of the variable was heavily skewed and significantly deviant from normal distribution (Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistics = .293, p < .001). Since we overestimated the family 72

COMING INTO AN INHERITANCE

annual income of our participating families, most responses to this item fell into the lower categories. The measurement error may be responsible for the anomaly here. This needs to be addressed when we scale up our quantitative investigation in future. Table 1. Predictors of children’s aspiration for the future: Model summary Model

R

R2

Adjusted R2

Change statistics

Durbin-Watson

R2 change F change Sig. F change 1

.074a 0.006

–0.000

0.006

 0.977

 .324

2

.159b 0.025

 0.014

0.020

 3.541

 .062

3

.271c 0.073

 0.057

0.048

 9.046

 .003

4

.469d 0.220

 0.202

0.146

32.434