1The interview with Li reveals the “ordinary” journey of a young migrant in Shanghai. Born in 1992 in the rural region of Luzhou in Sichuan Province, Li was first a “left-behind child” by his migrant parents, then a “floating child” attending a migrant school in Shanghai, before he interrupted his studies and became a migrant worker in his turn. His biography provides us with elements necessary for understanding the mechanism of reproduction of emigration (Sayad 1975) and that of the working classes in Chinese megacities, in which the school system played a key role (Pun and Koo 2019). In this text, following Li’s narrative thread, I will articulate my analysis around three themes: Li’s broken academic trajectory, his confrontation with the Shanghai labor market, and his experiences of professional mobility.

Broken School Trajectory: Personal Failures and External Constraints

2Coming from rural Sichuan, Li is his parents’ second child. He has an elder sister and a younger one. Li saw his parents go to work in Shanghai shortly after his birth. Housed by his uncle, Li spent the first part of his schooling in his hometown. He did not join his parents in Shanghai until he was 12 years old, after his fifth year of primary school. This two-stage mode of migration, which is so characteristic of rural-urban migration in China, is determined by the living conditions of migrant workers in their host city and by the hukou system, which attaches the education rights of migrant children to their place of birth. Through Li’s story, we learn that his parents must work 63 hours per week, 6 days a week, in order to earn enough income to feed their three children. It is impossible for Li’s parents to keep their children close to them before the children reach the age of independence. We know the negative impacts that parents’ prolonged absence can generate for the security and development of left-behind children (Gu and Yeung 2019). Li mentioned, very briefly, how harsh his life in the countryside was (the obligations to carry out agricultural work and his uncle’s severity).

3Coming to Shanghai, Li was happy to escape the peasants’ living conditions and find his parents. Like many of his young classmates who migrated to Shanghai but who did not have a local residence permit, Li could not enroll in a public school, which is reserved for local children.1 Therefore, he could not have gaokao, the university entrance examination in Shanghai. He first entered a primary school for migrant children (Zhuguang) in Heqiao, a suburb of Shanghai, where he remembers his teacher inflicting corporal punishment. After the sixth year of primary school, Li entered a college (Yuhong) for the children of migrants in the same town.

4Migrant schools are often described in research as being of poor quality: most teachers do not have the qualifications to work there, the staff turnover is high, students are undermotivated, and classes can sometimes be chaotic (Goodburn 2009, 2019; Yiu and Yun 2017; Gu and Yeung 2019). None of this appears in Li’s account. Li describes his school experience in Shanghai as “normal.” He ranked between third and fifth in his class and got along well with his classmates and teachers. In fact, his college is next to Xuhang Middle School, a public school that primarily recruits local children. A wall separates the two schools, whose pupils hardly meet each other. It is striking to note that when the child experiences school segregation on a daily basis, he does not view this situation as injustice or discrimination. Li simply found that Xuhang School is “bigger and better” compared to his school, but he never wondered “why migrant children go to this school, and local children go to the other school.”

5Several hypotheses are possible. On the first level we can think that in a school system formally segregated according to administrative status, the difference is part of the naturalized social order. It hardly seems shocking or offensive to migrant children who have deeply internalized their identity as rural people and their “place” in the city. On a second level, we can think that by coming to Shanghai, Li saw his living conditions improve. The satisfaction drawn from the diachronic comparison (with his previous situation) prevails over the negative feeling that a synchronous comparison can generate (with urban pupils).

6For Li, a biographical bifurcation occurred at the end of his second year of college, when the Yuhong school saw its third-year classes closed by public authorities. We know that it is a trivial episode for this type of school, whose survival depends on the goodwill of local power.2 To continue his studies, Li could return to his hometown or enroll in another school. However, he chose to just stop studying. This turning point is to be understood in the conjuncture of several factors: first, it is the logical consequence of migration and the child’s adaptation to an urban lifestyle. In this interview, Li expresses his reluctance to return to the countryside and to undergo school competition in schools in the rural area; second, Li’s dropping out of school reveals the influence of the peer group on the teenager’s aspirations and choices (Raabe and Wölfer 2018). In fact, led by his comrades, Li became very addicted to paid online games and spent a significant portion of his personal budget on them. Dropping out of school responded to his secret desire to gain financial autonomy so that he could play video games at will. Third, the influence of family status on the educational longevity of children cannot be overlooked. Like many Chinese parents, Li’s parents want their children to go to university and escape the fate of manual labor. But Li knows very well that his parents, even if they both worked overtime, would be unable to afford the school fees for their three children. Li’s little sister (4 years younger than Li) could only go to university if Li and his elder sister stopped studying. In this regard, the reaction of Li’s father is significant. Initially very angry, he severely reprimanded Li for his idea of ​​abandonment. But he ended up accepting his son’s choice and began to actively seek work for him. Behind a father’s apparent disillusionment with his son’s school failure, was there an unspoken relief to see a burden finally removed?

The First Professional Experiences

7When he left school in 2008, Li was 16 years old. His parents stopped supporting him financially. Too young to find a job in factories that generally prefer adults considered more enduring, Li used the identity card of a relative to find a job in a steel sheet processing plant. But his aspiration to earn a decent living would turn into disappointment. Young migrants who have left school without a diploma or who have a less prestigious diploma suffer the full force of China’s adoption of the capitalist work regime: exploitation, humiliation, and alienation. In his first job as a steel roll processing machine operator, he was paid 1,500 yuan per month and had to work very late at night and carry heavy loads. In his second job as a security guard at a Fortune 500 company, his job was to stand guard and greet leaders when they arrived. Li found the job “mind-numbing, depressing,” and he felt he was “worthless.” Ironically, at the end of a working day, Li felt empty, and he lost all desire to play video games.

8We can wonder here about the role of school in the school-to-work transition of young migrants. In a longitudinal survey carried out in Beijing, Song Yingquan and his colleagues (2017) followed for 5 years 1866 pupils enrolled in the second year of college in schools for the children of migrants. Their study shows that most of these young people stopped their studies after college. Only 40 % of students attended upper secondary education (general or vocational), less than half the national rate of admission to high school (85 %, 2013); only 6 % of them entered the higher education system (half of them in university technology institutes or in establishments not under the authority of higher education), the national university admission rate being 40 % in 2015. Therefore, for migrant children, being enrolled in a migrant school considerably reduces their chances of accessing the general curriculum of high school as well as university. But school segregation is not the only factor in the inequality of opportunity. In her ethnography conducted with migrant children in Shenzhen, Charlotte Goodburn (2019) identified four distinct pathways of education after junior high school—public vocational school, private migrant secondary school, general public high school, or a return to the countryside for further schooling. The author suggests that these educational routes all lead to the same end point: regardless of their pathway, aptitude, financial investment in education, or previous professional aspiration, young migrants are oriented towards low-skilled urban service jobs. From this perspective, what ultimately shapes the social destinies of migrant children are state and municipal hukou policies that perpetuate the disadvantages of migrants across generations.

9In France, since the 1970s, critical analyses have questioned the function of the school in capitalism and have shown how a seemingly unified school participates in shaping the destinies of social classes through two highly compartmentalized networks: a short and technical education for children of the working class, and a long and general education for children of the elite (Baudelot and Roger 1972). In the Chinese context, the production of class destinies relies above all on an open school segregation. The educational order reflects the socio-political order and constitutes its instrument of reproduction. In the face of relentless structural inequalities, migrants’ individual efforts to invest in education seem insignificant, even though they are not entirely in vain. Li’s educational path is no exception to the picture drawn above. His journey seems doubly determined by his rural origin (hukou) and by his school experience in Shanghai (migrant school). However, early work experiences led Li to wonder about his future. To escape the subaltern conditions, he wanted to continue his studies. But due to a year-long hiatus, if he returned to his home region, he would not be able to keep pace with the learning of his peers. On the other hand, he also missed the opportunity to enter vocational schools in Shanghai. With these thoughts, Li abandoned the idea of going back to school and decided to continue working in Shanghai.

Work While Learning—Mobility Strategies and Solidarity

10From 2009, Li had a succession of work experiences: as a worker in a welding factory (a year and a half), as an operator in a pallet processing factory (4 months), and as a maintenance worker in a large factory of vehicle batteries (4 years). His monthly salary ranged from 1,500 yuan to 4,500 yuan (the average monthly salary in Shanghai was 5,939 yuan in 2015). We can say that Li was fortunate to enter the manufacturing sector, where he could learn a lot on the job and accumulate useful technical skills. Meanwhile, he realized that he lacked theoretical knowledge, and in order to move up the ladder a minimum-level diploma is essential (in this case, zhongzhuan3). So, in 2011, after entering the battery manufacturing factory, Li immediately enrolled in evening classes at Shanghai Television University. While working, he worked on a technical secondary school diploma in administrative management, and then a professional license in mechatronics. However, Li was interested above all in accumulating the most marketable skills rather than gaining abstract knowledge and high-level degrees.

11It is in this imbrication of professional and educational trajectories that we can understand Li’s mobility experience. On the one hand, Li became more selective in his job search. He targeted jobs with well-defined schedules (8 hours a day, 5 days a week) in order to have free time to study. On the other hand, through his training he wanted to gain a better position on the job market. Li therefore embodies these underprivileged Chinese youth who are trying to make it on their own. In China today, the ethos of self-enterprise is widespread among young Chinese, including young low-skilled migrants. This self-enterprise involves continuous investment in one’s human capital, but also all-around professional and spatial mobility. As Laurence Roulleau-Berger and Yan Jun (2017) have shown, young migrants in China are not tethered to one place or social space but are developing increasingly cosmopolitan migratory careers and mobility skills. In a Chinese market characterized by the absence of collective bargaining, migrants use individual strategies to respond to market developments. And their strategies are made possible by the strong need for labor from local companies. Therefore, Li frequently changed companies and sectors to escape a work situation that lacked perspective, or he did so to get a raise.

12However, we cannot overlook the importance of all the different types of solidarity that have made the lives of millions of young migrants in Chinese megacities more bearable, and their mobility strategies possible. Solidarity is first tied between peers. Throughout his migration and mobility trajectory Li maintained ties with his classmates, his compatriots from the same region, his colleagues at work, etc. Within these networks it is not only information that is exchanged, but also gifts, emotions, and moral support. Li describes how looking for work with others and sharing information and best practices with friends made this exercise less difficult. One of the peculiarities of guanxi in China is that the boundaries between “we” and “others” are permeable and shifting. Thus, in Li’s sociability, the migrant/native border, the border of the professional hierarchy, and the class border intersect. At work, Li also rubbed shoulders with more highly educated graduates and sympathized with certain Shanghainese colleagues and managers. These relationships have allowed him to broaden his horizons and better define his professional project. But solidarity is above all among family members, who play a crucial role in the context of migration. If each Chinese family can be conceived of as a microenterprise of “anthroponomic” production (Bertaux 2010)—that is to say, centered on the activity of the production and reproduction of energies and capacities of its members—family resources strongly influence the trajectories of their members. If Li and his sisters were able to come to Shanghai, it was thanks to their parents’ years of tireless work. Parental support enabled Li’s little sister to continue her university studies (dazhuan), and Li to plan a married life (Li mentioned the work of decorating a married couple’s apartment in his region of origin). In a society where the support of social institutions is almost absent, it is thanks to intergenerational solidarity that many young people like Li can hope to start their own families. For his part, Li remains very attached to his parents, despite the angry nature of his father. In 2009, he refused a transfer to Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, so that he could stay close to his parents.

13However, the reproduction of social position does not necessarily imply the reproduction of a habitus and a lifestyle in a rapidly changing society. Compared to his father, who has worked in the same Taiwanese company as a welder for his entire career, Li is part of a more mobile and hedonistic generation of migrant workers. He did not hesitate to take advantage of the leisure activities, such as computer games, offered by a consumer society. A year after starting his mechatronics training, when he realized that he could graduate without making too much effort, Li went to class less often and started playing computer games again.

Conclusion

14In today’s China, young migrants are building their educational and professional trajectories between opportunities and constraints. On the one hand, the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country favor the horizontal (geographic) mobility of rural migrants; on the other, the inhospitable policies of the Chinese megalopolis and school segregation according to the hukou halt their vertical mobility. We can see, through Li’s biography, the effects of these contrasting developments. Thus, the intergenerational reproduction of social positions (semi-skilled worker in the industrial sector) coexists with significant spatial mobility (between the region of origin and Shanghai), sectoral mobility (from the agricultural sector to the industrial sector), and professional mobility (from one company to another). According to Song Yingquan and his colleagues’ survey (Song, Zeng and Zhang 2017), despite their difficult experiences in school, 80 % of the students surveyed ended up settling in Beijing. The authors conclude that “analysis has revealed that this group’s ‘educational dream’ has been shattered, leaving cheap ‘professional dreams’ and ‘the stubborn dream of staying in Beijing.’” It is true that in a country with rapid economic growth, school segregation seems less problematic for migrant children. It does not prevent them from developing segmented professional and social integration in the city where they had studied. The Chinese school system, failing to support migrant children in their social advancement, still has the merit of transforming “country people” into city dwellers (in the cultural sense of the term). Perhaps this is a message of hope that Li’s biography sends to us.