Educational Inequality in Migrant Children in China: From Visible Exclusion to Invisible Discrimination

Abstract

Since mid-1980s, China has witnessed a burgeoning migration society accompanied by industrialization and urbanization. To a large extent, it can be argued that the ongoing process of migration in China, at the same time, is a process of children of migrant workers suffering from unequal childhoods compared to their urban peers. In such divided childhoods, the educational inequality of migrant children who join their parents in the migration has emerged as a crucial issue in political and academic fields. In this chapter, based on a brief introduction of the migration background and China’s household system which functions as a decisive mechanism of social stratification, the educational inequality of migrant children is systematically explored. The analyses indicate a rough transformation of the educational inequality of migrant children from visible exclusion to invisible discrimination, or more precisely, to a mixed situation of both. The two mechanisms together continuously intensify the reproduction of social inequalities that migrant children have been suffering due to the dual Hukou system.