ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show how education reproduces migrant youth’s rural hukou disadvantage in new forms of educational and class inequality in post-Mao China. It investigates the extent and ways that the hukou structures educational access, opportunity and outcomes for migrant children in China’s megacities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. While loosened hukou restrictions allowed migrants to enter cities as low-skilled workers and bring their children with them, hukou rules still regulated educational access for compulsory education. Despite the Compulsory Education Law guaranteeing all children nine years of compulsory schooling, migrant children faced poor prospects of education in the cities from the 1990s through to the mid-2000s. Although migrant schools provided migrant children with educational services that local governments were reluctant to supply, they also faced a precarious existence. To a certain degree, municipal reforms in China’s megacities have improved migrant children’s educational situation compared to the 1990s.
