http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ffafd8fa-0a9a-11e5-a8e8-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3dE4mtANt
June 16, 2015 3:35 am
Beijing’s migrant children forced out of the city
Lucy Hornby in Beijing
Second-class citizens: children of migrant workers at nap time at an illegal migrant school in Beijing
Yang Yinli, like millions of migrant workers in China, sent her first son to live with his grandparents in the countryside. It was a choice she would bitterly regret.
No one was watching the lively six-year-old when he was struck and killed by a truck roaring through the steep village roads. Heartbroken, Ms Yang bore a second son and vowed to raise him in Beijing, stuffing a crib into her tiny shop and keeping a close eye as the toddler played on the pavements.
But new regulations announced this year may force her to send her son, now five, away to be educated. The regulations, which in effect prevent migrant children from entering the first year at Beijing schools, triggered weeks of protests this spring by crowds of anguished parents.
The battle faced by migrants for a basic education in Beijing and other major urban centres shows how China is struggling to accommodate the millions flowing to its cities despite a national policy of stimulating urbanisation. “His father could move with him but then what about me? I would still be far from the child,” Ms Yang says, her voice cracking.
About 40 per cent of the primary schoolchildren in Beijing lack a city hukou , the official household residency permit that grants access to social services, including education, healthcare and the right to buy homes. Nonetheless, in recent years they have been permitted to attend primary school in the city, a concession that has allowed many migrant couples to keep young children by their side. This school year alone, 470,800 non-Beijing hukou — or migrant — students attended primary and middle school in Beijing.
A relic of the famines during early Communist rule, the hukou system was introduced in the 1950s to keep the peasantry out of cities where food was more plentiful. It has gradually been relaxed as a flood of workers moved out of rural villages to the factories in cities along the prosperous coast but migrants still remain second-class citizens in many of the cities where they have settled.
Official statistics show that 55 per cent of Chinese, or 749m people, now live in cities, up from 19 per cent in 1980 at the dawn of market reforms, although the real number is probably higher — and still rising. A government think-tank has estimated it would cost about $100bn per year to integrate another 400m people into the cities over the coming decade.
The end of surplus labour has profound implications for the Chinese economy
Data blog: Three things we learnt on China migration
How the flow of labour from countryside to city in China has powered three decades of growth
China’s great migration
When China’s 170m rural migrant workers head home it is the biggest movement of people on earth
Reforms that allow migrants to establish residency in provincial cities have been accompanied by tighter restrictions for some, mostly hitting those who have moved to the biggest cities, or those who often change jobs and residences.
“If we were a market economy, the problem of population would sort itself out and resources would flow more evenly. But China is not a fully market economy and a lot of resources are still concentrated in the hands of certain cities,” says Hu Xingdou, an economist who studies migrant issues at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “Under these circumstances we can never have the free movement of people.”
Recent policies — such as the rules on education — seek to push migrants out of the most attractive and high-wage places into provincial cities where there is a glut of new housing. Those policies, a reversal of several decades of population flow into the biggest cities, force migrant parents once again to face the choice of confiding young children to the care of elderly and uneducated grandparents or to enrol them in distant boarding schools.
In May hundreds of migrant parents staged daily protests at education offices in Chaoyang district in Beijing. Videos of one protest show burly policemen dragging off weeping mothers while the crowd chants: “It’s not right!”
Anger is particularly strong because many migrant parents paid into Beijing’s social security system following tightened regulations issued last year, only to be stymied by additional requirements announced in late April. Those include rental documentation that migrants crowded into temporary housing cannot provide.
The Beijing Municipal Education Bureau referred questions on specific policies to the district. The district bureau said it was too busy preparing for college entrance exams to answer the FT’s faxed questions.
At pick-up time at one Chaoyang district pre-school, parents exchanged notes. “I think it is unfair,” said Ms Zheng from Fujian Province, the mother of seven-year old twins who were born in Beijing. “Why should migrant children be separated out?” She declined to give her full name for fear of damaging the boys’ chances of somehow entering school.
Audio
China's shrinking labour force
A shrinking labour force is driving huge economic change in China. James Kynge talks to Jamil Anderlini about the human cost of China's mass migration from rural areas to the cities and why it is now beginning to slow.
Launch in Pop-up
Ms Zheng had hoped regulations would evolve to allow her twins to someday attend high school in the city. Currently, children can only take the university entrance exam where their hukou is registered, exiling city kids to provincial towns hundreds of miles away just as they hit their teenage years. Grades plummet and it is common for children who were decent students in the cities to drop out once they are far from their parents. Sexual abuse and delinquency are growing concerns.
Some desperate teens have made national headlines. In May a 12-year-old girl who had attended at least two years of school in Beijing before being sent back to a desolate village in Sichuan province killed herself and poisoned her grandmother with pesticide.
“It has a great impact on the children but our nation doesn’t think about this much,” says Prof Hu. “We say if the nation is unwilling to build an extra school in the cities today someday it will end up building an extra jail.”
June 16, 2015 3:35 am
Beijing’s migrant children forced out of the city
Lucy Hornby in Beijing
Second-class citizens: children of migrant workers at nap time at an illegal migrant school in Beijing
Yang Yinli, like millions of migrant workers in China, sent her first son to live with his grandparents in the countryside. It was a choice she would bitterly regret.
No one was watching the lively six-year-old when he was struck and killed by a truck roaring through the steep village roads. Heartbroken, Ms Yang bore a second son and vowed to raise him in Beijing, stuffing a crib into her tiny shop and keeping a close eye as the toddler played on the pavements.
But new regulations announced this year may force her to send her son, now five, away to be educated. The regulations, which in effect prevent migrant children from entering the first year at Beijing schools, triggered weeks of protests this spring by crowds of anguished parents.
The battle faced by migrants for a basic education in Beijing and other major urban centres shows how China is struggling to accommodate the millions flowing to its cities despite a national policy of stimulating urbanisation. “His father could move with him but then what about me? I would still be far from the child,” Ms Yang says, her voice cracking.
About 40 per cent of the primary schoolchildren in Beijing lack a city hukou , the official household residency permit that grants access to social services, including education, healthcare and the right to buy homes. Nonetheless, in recent years they have been permitted to attend primary school in the city, a concession that has allowed many migrant couples to keep young children by their side. This school year alone, 470,800 non-Beijing hukou — or migrant — students attended primary and middle school in Beijing.
A relic of the famines during early Communist rule, the hukou system was introduced in the 1950s to keep the peasantry out of cities where food was more plentiful. It has gradually been relaxed as a flood of workers moved out of rural villages to the factories in cities along the prosperous coast but migrants still remain second-class citizens in many of the cities where they have settled.
Official statistics show that 55 per cent of Chinese, or 749m people, now live in cities, up from 19 per cent in 1980 at the dawn of market reforms, although the real number is probably higher — and still rising. A government think-tank has estimated it would cost about $100bn per year to integrate another 400m people into the cities over the coming decade.
The end of surplus labour has profound implications for the Chinese economy
Data blog: Three things we learnt on China migration
How the flow of labour from countryside to city in China has powered three decades of growth
China’s great migration
When China’s 170m rural migrant workers head home it is the biggest movement of people on earth
Reforms that allow migrants to establish residency in provincial cities have been accompanied by tighter restrictions for some, mostly hitting those who have moved to the biggest cities, or those who often change jobs and residences.
“If we were a market economy, the problem of population would sort itself out and resources would flow more evenly. But China is not a fully market economy and a lot of resources are still concentrated in the hands of certain cities,” says Hu Xingdou, an economist who studies migrant issues at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “Under these circumstances we can never have the free movement of people.”
Recent policies — such as the rules on education — seek to push migrants out of the most attractive and high-wage places into provincial cities where there is a glut of new housing. Those policies, a reversal of several decades of population flow into the biggest cities, force migrant parents once again to face the choice of confiding young children to the care of elderly and uneducated grandparents or to enrol them in distant boarding schools.
In May hundreds of migrant parents staged daily protests at education offices in Chaoyang district in Beijing. Videos of one protest show burly policemen dragging off weeping mothers while the crowd chants: “It’s not right!”
Anger is particularly strong because many migrant parents paid into Beijing’s social security system following tightened regulations issued last year, only to be stymied by additional requirements announced in late April. Those include rental documentation that migrants crowded into temporary housing cannot provide.
The Beijing Municipal Education Bureau referred questions on specific policies to the district. The district bureau said it was too busy preparing for college entrance exams to answer the FT’s faxed questions.
At pick-up time at one Chaoyang district pre-school, parents exchanged notes. “I think it is unfair,” said Ms Zheng from Fujian Province, the mother of seven-year old twins who were born in Beijing. “Why should migrant children be separated out?” She declined to give her full name for fear of damaging the boys’ chances of somehow entering school.
Audio
China's shrinking labour force
A shrinking labour force is driving huge economic change in China. James Kynge talks to Jamil Anderlini about the human cost of China's mass migration from rural areas to the cities and why it is now beginning to slow.
Launch in Pop-up
Ms Zheng had hoped regulations would evolve to allow her twins to someday attend high school in the city. Currently, children can only take the university entrance exam where their hukou is registered, exiling city kids to provincial towns hundreds of miles away just as they hit their teenage years. Grades plummet and it is common for children who were decent students in the cities to drop out once they are far from their parents. Sexual abuse and delinquency are growing concerns.
Some desperate teens have made national headlines. In May a 12-year-old girl who had attended at least two years of school in Beijing before being sent back to a desolate village in Sichuan province killed herself and poisoned her grandmother with pesticide.
“It has a great impact on the children but our nation doesn’t think about this much,” says Prof Hu. “We say if the nation is unwilling to build an extra school in the cities today someday it will end up building an extra jail.”
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