March 5, 2010
Wall Street Journal

In his annual work report speech before the National People’s Congress Friday, Premier Wen Jiabao devoted considerable attention to the need for improvement of living conditions for China’s 150 million urban migrant workers.

China’s migrants are still subject to a hereditary household registration system, known as hukou, that divides citizens into urban and rural residents. While urban residents continue to enjoy preferential access to subsidized education, health care and housing in the cities in which they are registered, outsiders face restrictions and often have to pay much more for benefits available to urban hukou holders. Amid increasingly vigorous calls for reform of the system, Chinese leaders have promised changes.

On Friday, Wen vowed that China “will solve employment and living problems rural migrant workers face in cities and towns in a planned and step-by-step manner, and gradually ensure that they receive the same treatment as urban residents in areas such as pay, children’s education, healthcare, housing and social security.” (PDFs of Wen’s work report in English and Chinese)

But it looks like there is still a very long way to go, as the recent experiences of some migrant schools in Beijing illustrates.

Migrant workers have built modern Beijing, but their communities are still subject to the whims of development. Cuigezhuang village, outside the Fifth Ring Road in northeast Beijing, was until very recently home to an estimated 30,000 people at any one time, the vast majority migrant workers and their families. Now, the place is approaching ghost town status. Most of its brick, cement and cinderblock shacks have been evacuated on orders from the local government, which is clearing Cuigezhuang and several other villages in the surrounding area to urbanize this underdeveloped corner of the city. Seven schools established for the children of migrant workers in five nearby villages have already been closed and will be demolished soon. Across the capital, a total of around 30 migrant schools serving 10,000 students are threatened by development plans, representing 10% of Bejiing’s estimated 300 migrant schools. Of the total, only 64 are licensed.

Education for children of migrant workers often presents a dilemma: Urban public schools tend to charge steep non-resident fees that low-paid migrant parents cannot afford, so they must often choose between unregistered, quasi-legal classrooms– set up by individuals without the aid of the state—or sending children back to their hometowns to be educated in the local school system where they have their hukou. Parents who choose the latter usually can only see their children once a year, during the Lunar New Year holiday.

Luo Chao was until recently the principal of one of the affected schools, the Cuigezhuang Experimental School. Luo, a former village government cadre in Henan province, is himself a migrant, having moved to Beijing with his family in 2000 in search of a better life.

“The income back home was too little, only 200 to 300 yuan per month, which was hardly enough to sustain an entire family,” he said. “We had very little land and there’s not much business there, so we sold our house and decided to settle down in Beijing.”

After seeing the limited educational opportunities available to migrant children in Beijing, Luo opened his first school in 2002, with an initial investment of 130,000 yuan. Two years later, he borrowed money from relatives and moved the school to a larger site, formerly home to a dance school and wooden door factory. The school offered classes from kindergarten to the second year of middle school, and its student body sometimes exceeded 1,000, says Luo (last semester, it was 760). Luo reckons he and his relatives have invested more than 1.6 million yuan to date, including an outstanding debt of 200,000 yuan.

Luo says he repeatedly tried but failed to obtain a license for his school, which would have made it eligible for government funding or subsidies, and might have provided some protection from demolition. Given his school’s unofficial status, Luo says his chances of recouping much of the investments are small. Still, he appears determined to continue educating migrant children, recently taking over another school in Daxing district in the south of Beijing. “After the school was closed down by the government, many migrant parents came to me and begged me to help their kids, and I just couldn’t bear for them to drop out of school at such a young age,” Luo said.

Some of Luo’s students have followed him to the new school or found places at other migrant schools; others have left Beijing with their parents, while a smaller number (about 100, according to Luo) are staying at home.

The only school left open in the area is the Wenyuhe Bilingual Experimental School, a fairly modern public school opened by the Chaoyang district government in 2004. Although the school is open to migrant students, there is currently no room for new students, according to a teacher who answered the phone in the guidance office.

Meanwhile, Luo and other principals of the shuttered schools in the area are holding out hope that local authorities will offer them at least some compensation, which could be used to set up new migrant schools further out on the outskirts of Beijing.

Wang Jie, principal of the now-closed Good Kids Kindergarten, also in Cuigezhuang village, said she has borrowed 100,000 yuan from friends and family to rent another space in Shunyi district, where many migrants are heading, and is preparing to open another school for young children there on March 20. But she worries that local authorities in Shunyi, which is known for its luxurious villas, won’t welcome unlicensed migrant schools.

“There is a great need in our society for privately-owned migrant schools, so why doesn’t the government ever offer us any help or understanding?” Wang asks.

– Sky Canaves and Sue Feng