Home divided, home reconstructed: children in rural–urban migration in contemporary China

^†The connotation of the Chinese word for home as ‘jia’ is quite broad. This term can refer to family, the material dwelling (house), and an affective space. This broad definition is adopted in the article unless specified otherwise.

Abstract

This article is centred on the geographies of Chinese children in contemporary China – an area which has been problematically overlooked in geographical literature on childhood. In employing unique mobile research methods by tracking migrant children through the migration cycle, the author conducted an extensive ethnographic study of rural migrant children aged 8–17 in China. The article explores rural children's everyday lived experience of migration and how migrant children negotiate and articulate home and belonging while on the move. The study demonstrates the dynamic environment that migrant children inhabit, the fluid, contextual and mobile nature of their life in rural migrant households, their migrancy and their active involvement in homemaking.

Keywords:

• children
• China
• migration
• rural–urban
• home

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the journal editors for their encouragement, two anonymous referees for their very useful comments and suggestions, and Dr Sharpling for editing the article. This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust.

Notes

^† The connotation of the Chinese word for home as ‘jia’ is quite broad. This term can refer to family, the material dwelling (house), and an affective space. This broad definition is adopted in the article unless specified otherwise.

1. The origin of the household registration system (hukou system) can be traced back to the baojia system in the eighteenth century in imperial China. It was aimed to register the population and to maintain surveillance of the people (Cheng and Selden 1994). The Soviet propiska (registration) system also exercised a great influence on the hukou system in China (Dutton 1992). Whereas the system in China was designed not only ‘to control mobility and to prevent rural leakage into urban society’ (Wong 1994), it also served as ‘the foundation for distributing goods in the urban public goods regime’ (Solinger 1995, 135), to accelerate industrialisation and as a decisive mechanism in shaping China's ‘collectivist socialism’ (Cheng and Selden 1994, 645). For more information on the history of hukou and related reforms, see Chan and Zhang (1999).

2. State policies and regulations favour the urban hukou holders in many ways, providing them with stable jobs, housing, free medical care and all the possible welfare. The conversion of an ‘agricultural’ hukou to ‘non-agricultural’ hukou is possible, but it is subject to different local policies and regulations. As most of the thresholds for conversion are very high, especially in big cities, few rural migrants can meet the requirements.

3. In 1992, the Blue Cover Residential Card (‘blue stamp’ or ‘blue chop’ hukou) was introduced in big cities by the government to give people from out of town a chance to gain permanent-resident status if they had bought property. In 1998, for example, newborn babies could be registered under either the father or mother's hukou. However, these reforms have not fundamentally changed the hukou system.

4. The percentage of children who are enrolled in state schools is much lower in reality as the study only sampled migrant children from schools, leaving those who have no access to schools out.

5. See Zhang (2006), Zhang (2011) and Zhang (2013) for further information.

6. Situated in a village in peripheral Beijing, this primary school is well known in the local migrant community as a migrant school that is run by rural migrants for rural migrants. It was set up in 2005 by its current director, Mrs Yang, a rural migrant who came from Henan Province. The school has classes from reception to Year 6 and has around 250 pupils, among whom, 30 were boarding students. The school employs 10 paid staff, all of whom are rural migrants except for the school warden, who is a local from the neighbouring village.

7. Pseudonym is used here. Most of the names used were picked up by the pupils.

8. Xiao Hu's first elder sister was only mentioned to the researcher during her in-depth interview with Xiao Hu's parents.