Study and School in the Lives of Children in Migrant Families: A View from Rural Jiangxi, China

Abstract

Millions of children in China have been ‘left behind’ in the countryside while their parents work in distant places to support the social reproduction of their families. This article examines the role of study and schooling in this process. The analysis shows that family strategies to pursue socio‐economic mobility are intricately connected to state frameworks for providing support, and schools are central to this. This is because both family and state interests in the attributes and prospects of the next generation converge in schools. At the same time, on a day‐to‐day basis, the labour of children in schools and the labour of parents in the cities are intertwined. Specifically, by communicating with each other about study, and by focusing on the child's educational future as the key purpose of their daily work, both children and parents carry out their obligations towards each other, while finding ways to cope with the emotional difficulties that protracted physical separation entails.

Women rising as half of the sky? An empirical study on women from the one-child generation and their higher education participation in contemporary China

“…Since 1978 the state's political priority has shifted towards implementing market reforms and developing a modernised society (Liu 2016;Murphy 2014;Goodman 2014). Central to the state's modernisation strategy was demographic reform with the introduction of the One-Child policy 2 (Potts 2006;Greenhalgh 2003).…”

Social work and sustainable rural development: The practice of social economy in China

“…More broadly, poverty and underdevelopment in the countryside have prompted the mass exodus of rural populations to coastal cities in search of jobs. The departure of the able‐bodied workforce gave rise to the proliferation of hollow villages in rural areas, where farmland abandonment and declined productivity have emerged alongside significant socioeconomic problems such as the widespread phenomenon of left‐behind children and the elderly (Jacka, 2012; Murphy, 2014; Ye, Wang, Wu, He, & Liu, 2013).…”

Educating the children of migrants in China and the United States: a common challenge?

“…Until the early 2000s, residence registration 1 3 (hukou) and other policies prevented most migrants from settling in cities, and so their children generally remained in the countryside. Many studies of the children of migrants have focused on the educational attainment and psychological wellbeing of these "left behind children" (liushou ertong) [for example, Duan and Zhou (2005), Lu (2012), Murphy (2014), Ye (2008), Zhou et al (2014Zhou et al ( , 2015]. With the relaxation of controls on movement and policy shift to the active promotion of urbanization in the early 2000s, family migration increased and more migrant workers began to take their children with them to the city (Connelly et al 2011).…”

“…However, as with international migrants, both parents and their children are eager that they should escape the lowwage and often grueling occupations of the first generation. Regardless of whether children migrate with their parents or remain in the countryside, they have high educational aspirations (Han 2012;Murphy 2014;Shen 2017), although there is 1 3 evidence that these decline over time as they become more aware of the low ceiling to their attainment (Han 2012;Xiong 2015).…”