a hukou book’s photo (photo by Chengdu Living)

A Chinese migrant worker couple Jianhong Fang and Zhou Wang have worked in Suzhou, one of wealthiest cities in China with high GDP per capita 145,205 CNY (21,868 USD), for the past 15 years. They work at the same electronic factory, earn money to support their daily lives and send the rest of the earnings to their parents and eight-year-old son Ming Wang.

Ming Wang has studied at his hometown Yancheng with his grandparents for the past eight years. Although in the same province, Yancheng’s economic development is much slower than Suzhou does. The city’s GDP per capita was 58,299 CNY (8,780 USD) in 2015, 0.4 times of Suzhou’s GDP per capita.

What has distinguished Ming Wang and his parents is the hukou system, a household registration system that the government has implemented to allow each citizen to only enjoy their social benefits in the registration place and then control population imbalance within big cities.

According to the China Labour Bulletin, there were more than 287 million rural migrant workers in 2017, making up 36 percent of the entire working population in China. Because of the natural drive of the economy, workers who were born in an urban area tend to search for a job in a metropolitan area. China’s economic rise has relied on these rural migrants.

Although some workers may access the healthcare and social benefits of their working cities by having their employers paid accumulation funds for them, their children usually cannot go to school in their working cities.

Ming Wang’s hukou is in Yancheng. So, without giving up their satisfying jobs in Suzhou, Fang and Wang may never live together with their little son.

Children like Ming Wang have been called “left-behind children,” which means migrant workers have left their children with family members, usually children’s grandparents, in their hometown.

At the end of 2015, Fang and Wang decided to have a second child after the Chinese Communist Party announced the new two-children policy, which allows Chinese couples to have two children without paying extra fees, would replace the old one-child policy.

After one year, their second son Jin Wang was born. Fang and Wang said because of the revision of the hukou policy in 2014, they may be able to let their second son to be educated in Suzhou.

 

The History & Revision of the Education Hukou Policy

 

The vast population of China requires its government to control labor distributions within each region more effectively. Therefore, since 1949, the Chinese government has used the hukou system to assign each citizen a household registration identity. Each citizen has a hukou that demonstrates his or her name, date of birth, citizen identity number and, most importantly, birthplace. This is a pass for everyone to access education, healthcare, housing and other social benefits locally.

In 1949, due to the lack of transportation and slow-development of the economy, most Chinese citizens tended to stay where they were born.

The hukou system had its first revision in 1958 that set a rural and urban divide. Specifically, children were required to stay at their hukou registration places to achieve an education. However, more migrant workers wanted their children to go to school in the city they worked. For example, although Ming Wang was born in Suzhou, he was still defined by the policy as a migrant child and should go back to his parents’ household registration place to achieve an education. In 2001, 20 percent of the youth population in China were migrant children.

Therefore, hukou policy had its second revision in 2014, which allows migrant children to go to school in cities. This is why Jianhong Fang and Zhou Wang couple immediately had their second child after the new hukou policy and the two-child policy was published.

The Chinese central government and the education department have designed to allow migrant children to receive education in cities. Based on the Chinese Ministry of Education policy, all migrant children are encouraged to complete nine-year compulsory education (six-year elementary school and three-year middle school) in the city that their parents work. According to China’s mandatory education policy, public school usually charge a small fee, which is about 700 CNY (100 USD) per semester.

Zhou Wang said they would keep their second son with them this time.

 

Where Can Migrant Worker’s Children Get Educated In The Cities Now?

 

Public School

Based on the education policy, the education cost of a public school should have no significant difference with a migrant school. Therefore, if given a fair chance, most migrant parents would choose a public school for their children due to the experienced teachers and good-quality equipment there.

However, discrimination among migrant students is still alive at most public schools in the cities, according to the new analysis in the Global Education Monitoring Report.

Reputable public schools in the cities have the right to fill up local students first and usually leave no space for migrant students. Even when some public schools open some seats, local governments and schools request burdensome paperwork to each migrant applicant. For example, in Suzhou, migrant parents need to present at least five supporting documents, which can be proof of residence, temporary resident permit, work permit, income report, place of origin certificate, etc. Human Rights Watch reported that over 90 percent of migrant families could not obtain these documents.

Although public schools are not allowed to charge extra fees to migrant students, some public schools may still request different kinds of renamed fees such as school selection fees, miscellaneous fees or out-of-district fees.

Additionally, transportation is another extra cost for migrant parents who live on the border of the urban and rural area. In Shanghai and Beijing, migrant workers need to reach certain social credits to purchase a car. However, even the point system application process is overwhelming for most migrant workers. Also, the Chinese government has imposed heavy taxes on automotive goods. Therefore, it usually costs a migrant student more than two hours to reach his or her school by public transportation.

These obstacles have forced migrant students to either choose migrant schools or return to their hukou registration places.

Migrant School

Migrant schools, which usually run privately, are a type of schools designed for migrant students who are not accepted by public schools.

For most migrant parents, migrant schools are always their second option. Unlike well-equipped public schools, migrant schools lack teachers, nutritious food supply, facilities and sometimes even licenses.

Some teachers in migrant schools are retired teachers or volunteers or young graduates. According to the 2013 China Labour Bulletin report, the turnover rate among migrant school teachers was about 51 percent in Beijing because most young teachers treated migrant school positions as their stepping stone to public schools.

The overcrowded public facilities and unqualified lunch is another serious issue. Because migrant parents often busier and pay no attention to children’s dinner food, the limited access to drinking water and poor nutrition food at school make children’s health problems worse.

More importantly, the old migrant education policy didn’t allow any private migrant schools; therefore, most current migrant schools are still illegal or have no teaching licenses. In 2011, the Beijing government closed more than 20 local migrant schools.

According to a recent NPR report, a Beijing migrant school’s volunteer said that her students and their parents feel like being kicked out by the city if the government closes their school.

Although the new migrant education policy was published in 2014, it hasn’t spurred some local governments to build more legal migrant schools. So, the plan has not reached out the majority of the migrant population.

 

What Has Caused Returned Students?

 

Migrant workers’ children have made up one of the third student population in China. The new hukou policy has planned to solve their education difficulties. Nine-year compulsory education is one of the most important strategies.

However, discrimination in migrant education cannot be eradicated overnight. ‘Returned children’ refer to the students who have to return to their province of origin after finishing the nine-year compulsory education in the cities.

Furthermore, they have to achieve higher education and take the college entrance examinations, also called gaokao, where their hukou is registered.

The gaokao policy is another invisible disadvantage coming from these children’s hukou. For students who have a hukou of big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, their college entrance examination is usually designed relatively easy.

In China, most parents have a higher expectation on their children to go to an ideal college because they believe that gaokao is a fair game for every student. If a student wins this game, he or she may have a better chance to enter the middle class. However, the Chinese government still wants to control the population imbalance within a large country. When migrant students pass the scoreline of universities in big cities, they can temporarily hold a city hukou based on their school certificates. The local governments and universities have set score barriers preventing a large number of other provinces’ students from entering their ideal universities.

For example, in 2016, Tsinghua University and Peking University, the top 2 universities in China that located in Beijing, accepted 84 students out of every 10,000 Beijing students and less than three students out of every 10,000 students from other provinces.

Without achieving good-quality education, Ming Wang may never be able to compete with students who have a city hukou. When asked Jianhong Fang and Zhou Wang what kind of future they want for their second son, they said they don’t want Jin Wang to follow Ming Wang’s road.

 

Ashley Rivenbark, an American student who has studied in Hangzhou through the U.S. State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship, said living in China has changed her view of it.

China has its unique culture and increasing global power. The trade between China and U.S. has spurred the need of graduates who are fluent in both China and America – not only the two languages but also cultures and business development.

However, among 330,000 American students who chose to study in different countries, only 12,000 of them went to China last year. For most American students who choose to study abroad, France, UK, Germany, and some other European countries are ideal.

Reversely, in 2017, Chinese students accounted for more than one-third of total 1.1 million international students who studied abroad in the United States.

Since 2007, the number of Chinese students who have chosen to come to the U.S. has increased dramatically. On the other hand, the number of American students in China has remained virtually flat. According to the Financial Times, the number was 11,064 in 2007 and 11,910 in 2017.

There are now 30 times as many Chinese students in the U.S. as U.S. students in China. This phenomenon has caused an information asymmetry, which means that there is not enough information exchanging between two countries.

The U.S. Foreign Policy recently surveyed 343 Americans who have studied in China through higher education programs. Most of them reported that they satisfied with their choice and explained why they think this is an ideal option for American students who want to study abroad in the future. Here are some statistics:

Are you the first person in your family to study abroad?

69.4 percent of students responded yes.

This shows that students who preferred to study in Beijing or Shanghai were not just the children of those who studied in Paris or London 30 years ago.

Most students didn’t have any previous relationship with local residents. 56 percent responded that they were positively searching for local friends on and off campus.

Do you think that living in China was worth the time, effort and expense required?

97.1 percent of students responded yes.

Students said that they didn’t realize the convenience and adaptability of China until they came here. Convenient transportations including G-series high-speed train and new subway system shocked them at the very beginning. Also, the cheap labor created the booming of food delivery service.

78.4 percent of students even responded that they felt “more positive” towards the country after studying in China.

Do you, or do you plan to, use the Chinese language in your future work?

82.9 percent of students responded yes.

The increasing communications and trades between U.S. and China have created plenty of job opportunities for graduates.

Although most American students didn’t think they can operate their own businesses in China, most believed that the language skill and, more importantly, a better understanding of Chinese culture definitely would help them to find a good job.

Conclusion

According to a 2017 Quartz report, eight in 10 of Chinese students who studied in the U.S. went back to China after graduation. They have become teachers, operated their own startups and even built advanced AI technologies in China.

This year, the Trump administration worried about Chinese student spies and considered to put restrictions on the majors that Chinese students can choose and even cancel the student Visa for Chinese students.

But for young Americans who have studied or want to explore in China, it is still a transformative period.

 

Sources:

http://www.studyinchina.com.my/web/page/study-in-china-for-american-students-in-china/

https://www.ft.com/content/6665e98c-ece6-11e8-8180-9cf212677a57

Xinyan Zhang’s high school was in Beijing, and she got a score of 550 out of 710 in her gaokao, which is China’s National Higher Education Entrance Examination. She chose the Communication University of China, one of the top universities in China.

Because Zhang wanted to major in Broadcast Journalism, she took the arts exams with other applicants and ranked 71. When entering her college, Zhang felt very confident about her scores until she met three classmates from Jiangsu, ranking from 1-3 on the art exams.

Zhang would never forget the conversation between her and her Jiangsu classmates. Zhang’s classmates said it was impossible for them to come to the Communication University of China if their Arts exam rankings were not high.

This conclusion may all come from the different education policies made by the Chinese government based on the hukou system.

In China, the hukou system is a system of household registration, which identifies a person’s information including residence, name, parents, spouse and date of birth.

The government has dominated the gaokao examination, which is considered a fair game for each student. Especially in Beijing, the government don’t need many migrants and wants to make the scores of policymakers’ children look nicer.

Students usually go to their schools near their hukou, and they are required to take gaokao in their hukou location.

According to the local education bureau offices data, Beijing students like Zhang have a 25 percent chance to get into one of the government-identified top universities. However, Jiangsu students have a less than 10 percent chance to get into such universities.

China’s prestigious Peking University and Tsinghua University, which are both located in Beijing, take 84 students out of every 10,000 Beijingers, 14 out of every 10,000 Tianjiners (a city near Beijing), and only 2 out of every 10,000 Jiangsuers.

This condition has happened not only on Jiangsu students, but also students from Hunan, Hefei, Anhui, etc.

Zhang reminded her high school president talking about how the high school alumni met each other in Peking University and Tsinghua University. Each year, at least 100 students at her school have the chance to go to the two universities. In the entire Jiangsu province, less than 15 students may have the same opportunity, although the population of Jiangsu is 3.5 times larger than Beijing’s.

More importantly, the education quality and even the pressure on students are higher in Jiangsu. Because students have to take their province’s gaokao examinations during the same three-day gaokao period, the difficulty levels are different.

Students joked on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, that Beijing’s gaokao is the easy mode, Tianjin’s is the medium mode, and Jiangsu’s is the hell mode.

Zhang said one of her classmates from Jiangsu always felt not confident even though she always had the best scores in class and got accepted by one of the top newsrooms in China.

Zhang also called herself a confident girl because she believed that students in Beijing had experienced the ‘encouraged education system.’

As the province that has the highest per capita GDP in China, Jiangsu’s total GDP was 7.06 trillion yuan in 2017. Therefore, some wealthy parents come with two ways to help their children overcome the education disadvantage.

Middle- or high-class parents ask their children to study English and send them to study abroad after graduation. Therefore, these students don’t have to tolerate the unfair competition with Beijing’s students.

On the other hand, more parents are coming up with new methods. In 2017, The China Daily reported on how did some Chinese parents purchase the Republic of Guinea’s citizenship for their children. Therefore, these local students became foreigners, took the easiest gaokao examinations designed for international students, and finally got into Peking University.

 

Sources:

https://www.businessinsider.com/maotanchang-gaokao-factory-town-2013-10

https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unfair-college-admissions-system/276995/

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/1945104/thousands-chinese-parents-take-streets-protest

Recently, the Trump administration decided to pay subsidies to farmers to offset the impact of the trade war between the United States and other countries. A similar government intervention policy called “government cheese” had been used during the 1970s by President Jimmy Carter.

All these cheesy stories started in 1949. When the Agricultural Act of 1949 got passed, the U.S. government established the Commodity Credit Corporation to take charge of stabilizing farmers’ incomes. It was the first time for the government to purchase dairy products like milk and cheese from farmers.

In the later 1970s, The U.S. federal government distributed 300 million pounds of government cheese, an almost neon orange mixed cheese, to do food charities. This kind of cheese was five pounds per block, had a rectangular shape, and attached lots of USDA stamps. The primary purpose was to maintain the price of daily supplies. President Jimmy Carter, along with Congress, raised the price of milk 6 cents per gallon and kept increasing the price with inflation in 1977. Also, the government put $2 billion subsidies to save the dairy food industry. Although this strategy saved the dairy food industry from its shortage, the government itself became the primary customer. It bought all the milk that couldn’t be sold by farmers and processed the milk into cheese. Without the market, the government had to store all the cheese in thousands of warehouses and even some caves in 35 states.

“Probably the cheapest and most practical thing to would be to dump it in the ocean,” a USDA official said in 1981. Although the government cheese was useless for the USDA, most Americans at that time still suffered from the after-effects of the recession. Therefore, American citizens harshly criticized President Ronald Reagan and the federal government for the waste of these daily food products, which include cheese, butter, and milk powder.

Surprisingly, Agriculture Secretary John R. Block showed up at a White House event with some pieces of government cheese on his hand and said, “we can’t find a market for it, we can’t sell it, and we’re looking to trying to give some of it away.”

To distinguish the government cheese from regular cheese products, the Commodity Credit Corporation established some new supporting programs to deliver the cheese to lower-class families. One joke related to this was that if you give cheese to people who cannot afford regular cheese, it is not a behavior to hurt the current market. Obviously, it is not true. This government cheese story has shown the butterfly effect of one government intervention. Ultimately, the Temporary Emergency Food Assistance Program released more than 30 million pounds of cheese around the nation.

When the dairy prices came down in the 1990s, the government finally took itself out of this “cheese charity” business.

However, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue announced the plan to provide $11 billion subsidies to assist the farmers who had struggled during the Trade War, the same organization Commodity Credit Corporation comes back and start to do its job again.

Sources:

https://www.history.com/news/government-cheese-dairy-farmers-reagan

https://www.npr.org/2018/09/07/645459818/government-cheese-well-intentioned-program-goes-off-the-rails

The Tyranny and the Comfort of Government Cheese