Making restrictive schooling policies for rural migrants: discourse, power, and policy cycle in the Chinese context

ABSTRACT

In China, the government had created a policy-friendly educational setting for rural migrant children for a long period after 2001. Yet in 2013, in some metropolitan areas such as Beijing and Shanghai, the schooling policy retuned to more demanding criteria, bringing hardships to many migrant families. This paper examines the power relations underlying the formation of the post-2013 restrictive policy. Utilizing Foucauldian theoretical resources, it develops the work of Bowe, Ball and Gold on policy cycle and produces an updated analytical framework. The findings show that the discursive formation permeating the four coexisting and permeable contexts of the policy trajectory legitimizes the following statements: recruiting migrant children leads to declining educational quality; state school education is a restricted type of social welfare open only to the “contributors to the city”; and standardization is necessary for school enrolment practice. The power relations lie beneath the discursive practices are the exam-orientated education discourse and the disciplinary power of the privileged over the dominated, which objectivize migrants as “outsiders” and a risk to educational quality. This paper demonstrates the analytical capacity of Foucauldian theoretical resources for policy analysis in the Chinese context.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant children
• China
• Foucault
• discourse
• policy cycle
• educational policy

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Carol Vincent, Professor Stephen Ball and five anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Data source: unpublished Ministry of Education statistics (obtained from an interview).

2. Data source: retrieved from National Bureau of Statistics website: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/

3. Data source: unpublished Beijing Municipality of Education statistics (obtained from an interview).

4. The exact number is still unknown due to the lack of official statistics. Yet a comparison of statistics in 2012/13 and 2017 indicates that a number of migrant children, who could otherwise enrol in local state schools under the old criteria system, had to left Beijing and Shanghai to study in elsewhere: as noted earlier, in 2012/13, the number of migrant children accounted for around half of the total student number of compulsory education age in Beijing and Shanghai; yet in 2017 the percentages dropped down to 20–20.9% in primary schools and 9.9–19.9% in junior secondary schools in Beijing, and 30–39.9% in primary schools and 20–20.9% in junior secondary schools in Shanghai (Ministry of Education, 2018).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported Guangzhou Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science [grant number 2019GZGJ41 and 2019GZYB33], and by Guangdong Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science [grant number GD18YJY02].

Notes on contributors

Hui Yu

Hui Yu (PhD, IOE) is a senior research fellow at School of Education, South China Normal University. As a sociologist, Dr Yu’s particular research interests include educational policy enactment and cultural reproduction of rural migrant family in urban China. His research focuses on: 1) how the cross-field effects shape the logic of the educational policy field and generate policy changes; 2) how the intersection of rural origin, migration status and working-class identities shapes the migrant families’ habitus. His works have been published in peer review journals, such as Journal of Education Policy, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Australian Educational Researcher.