ABSTRACT
Given the rapidly increasing presence of poor and low-income migrant children in Chinese metropolises, some non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have shifted their intervention strategies from material assistance (‘spreading kindness’) to value and capacity building (‘building new citizens’). Drawing on ethnographic data from an ongoing, longitudinal study (2007–2016) of migrant children in Shanghai, this paper critically examines the citizenship education initiated by a domestic NGO, Changban Volunteer Center (a pseudonym), which seeks to instil such children a set of civic virtues to foster their educational advancement and upward social mobility. The theoretical framework of multidimensional citizenship is employed to tackle the identity challenges faced by migrant children in dealing with multifaceted identities attached to urban, rural and global settings. This paper contributes to the theoretical debate on interventions by educational NGOs, in particular how they perceive and implement citizenship education for disadvantaged internal migrants. It further considers the potential of this type of informal education to help cultivate citizenship-related attitudes and capacities and to address the educational exclusion of migrant children.
