Education or Migrant Labor

A New Dilemma in China's Borderlands

Bibliographic Data

ID2133733
AuthorsHarrell (0000-0002-6298-6712), Stevan Harrell, Aga Rehamo
Year2013
Volume11
Issue20
Publication date2013-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJapan focus (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1557-4660 • E-ISSN: 1557-4660
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1557466013033925
OpenAlexW4410136587
LanguageEN
References cited10

Early21st-century China is undergoing several radical transformations that are profoundly affecting its physical, social, and cultural fabric. Not as dramatic, perhaps, as the earlier series of Land Reform, collectivization, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and final decollectivization that framed the era of Mao Zedong's state socialism, the current processes of urbanization, labor migration, universalization of education (Kipnis 2011), transport network modernization, reconstruction of villages (Lora-Wainwright 2012, Abramson and Qi 2011, Looney 2012), and social class formation (Pun and Lu 2010; Lee and Selden 2008; Zhang 2012, May 2010), nevertheless seem destined to have an even more permanent and profound effect on the physical landscape, social structure, and culture of the world's largest nation. Physically, China's cities already contain about half of its citizens (Chan 2009), while freeways, highspeed trains, and ordinary paved highways radically reduce transport distances, and hundreds of millions of rural residents migrate yearly to cities to work in factory, construction, and service jobs (Pun 2004, Chang 2009, Banfill 2012), while increasingly modern urban social services remain unavailable to them because of the caste-like restrictions of the household registration, or hukou 户口 system (Chan 2010, Chan and Buckingham 2008). Almost all urbanites and most rural children in the wealthier coastal provinces receive at least a high-school education, while even in remote rural areas middle-school has become the legal and in most cases the factual minimum

China · Demographic economics · Dilemma · Economic growth · Economics · Migrant workers · Political science · Sociology · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Law · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Philosophy

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