ABSTRACT
Under the household registration (hukou) system, rural children who migrate to the cities or are born there from rural parents lack an urban hukou, thus rendering them ineligible to access public education in the cities. Established by the Chinese Communist Party in 1958, the hukou system categorised an individual according to location and agricultural (rural) or non-agricultural status. In practice, the hukou regime instituted a two-class system between urban and rural residents (Chan and Zhang 1999: 819). Under the hukou system, China’s large population of rural residents were provided few of the benefits that the socialist state gave urban residents (e.g. educational opportunity, pensions, medical insurance). By localising education and other social services to one’s registered hukou locale, the hukou system restricted rural-to-urban migration (Solinger 1999: 37). With the market reforms of the late 1970s and loosened hukou restrictions on mobility, rural residents from inland China migrated to coastal cities (Fan 2005: 307) and, since the 1990s, are raising families in the cities (Chen and Liang 2007a: 118). According to the 2010 national census, an estimated 28 million rural migrant children 1 are growing up in China’s cities (Wu 2012: 5). Consequently, Chinese urban governments face the unprecedented educational challenge of how best to provide for this disadvantaged group of children.
