ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the extant studies of rural migrant children and challenges the explanatory power of the prevailing rural–urban or migrant–local differentiation discourse in the existing literature. With a closer examination on public school enrolment policies, migrant children’s differentiated schooling experiences, and their self-identity crisis in urban society, this chapter argues that the main conflicts in these studies are conceived as being between rural and urban, migrant and local; little attention has been given to their families’ social position as inferior manual workers in mainstream society. Thus, through evidence present in previous chapters, this chapter suggests looking into the fact that the class-based differentiation, which has been substantially ignored in previous studies, is currently replacing the role of the hukou system in tracking rural migrant children into the social reproduction loop. Thus, it is significant to go beyond the dominant hukou analytic framework and bring a class perspective to mainland China migration studies, especially rural migrant children studies.
