1In this comment, I reflect on the story of “Chen,” a girl born in rural Sichuan to parents who migrated to cities in China’s developed East. As a young girl, Chen was left behind in the village with her mother, then with other relatives, while her father and then both her parents migrated for work. Chen then spent three years in Shanghai with her parents and later returned to the village to continue school, but she soon changed her plans and rejoined her parents in Shanghai, where she has since worked and attempted to pursue further education. This case provides opportunities to consider the spatial and social (im)mobility of young people of rural origin in China, and the role of family members in decisions about where a child of migrants will live, when she will move, and how long she will continue her education. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly common for internal migrants in China to migrate together with members of their nuclear or extended families, including their spouse, children, and parents. An entire family may make the move at one time, or some family members may migrate first and others may join them later. The growth of whole and partial family participation in migration has been termed “familization of migration” (Fan and Li 2019). I begin by situating the migration of Chen’s parents (and eventually her own migration) in the context of the uneven development and the familization of migration in China. To understand Chen’s migratory decisions, I then turn to her experiences with family members and educational institutions during the years she spent in the origin and the destination. Like many rural children in China, Chen ultimately decides to leave school before completing high school. One of the valuable aspects of this record is the insight it offers into how village infrastructure, family relations, and subjective experience interact to lead an adolescent girl to this decision. Chen’s case suggests how both state institutions and the geography of uneven development frame the field of action in which young rural-urban migrants make decisions, and it points to the key role of family members, including substitute caregivers, in the success or failure of an individual’s attempts to achieve mobility and security.

Rural-Urban Migration in China: Increasing Feminization and Familization

2Chen is from a typical household of rural-urban migrants in China. Her home village is in Sichuan, one of the major migrant-sending provinces. Due to its relatively large population and the scarcity of farmland, surplus rural labor in Sichuan has long been struggling to find means of support other than agricultural production. In the early 1980s, when the Reform and Opening-up started to create urban job opportunities in coastal China, rural labor began to flow from villages in Sichuan and other relatively poor areas in western and central China to the cities of the East. Migration scholars have constructed various macro analyses based on the Gravity Model to interpret changing spatial patterns of interprovincial migration in China. They have found that “pull” factors, such as the GDP annual growth rate and the population density of a destination, play significant roles in determining the direction of migration flows (Shen 2012).

3How the spatial arrangement of Chen’s family members has changed over time mirrors the larger process of the familization of internal migration in China. Fan et al.’s study (Fan, Sun, and Zheng 2011) of rural-urban migrants in China categorizes married migrants in terms of whom they live with in the destination: “sole” (married but living alone), “couple” (with spouse, but leaving children in the origin), and “family” (migrating with spouse and all children). In Chen’s household, the father migrated first, leaving behind his wife and children (sole migration); then, the mother joined the father in the same destination city, leaving the children behind with relatives (couple migration); finally, children joined parents (family migration). In the 1990s, most rural-urban migrants in China were single and sole male migrants. In the 2000s, increasing numbers of women, especially those who were married, began to participate in migration (Chen and Fan 2018). Recent decades have seen a progressively greater share of rural children join their migrant parents in destination cities, and family migration has therefore become more common (Duan, Lü and Zou 2013). However, family reunions of migrant workers in the destination usually do not last long, in part due to the constraints of China’s hukou system. Students can only take the high school entrance exam and attend public high school where they are registered residents. In order to pursue further education, many children return to their places of hukou registration, some accompanied by one or both of their parents. This return migration pattern has been observed both among children of migrant workers who were born in rural areas and among those who were born in cities (Li and Liang 2019).

Split Households and Left-Behind Children

4Chen’s experience is an example of how social immobility is reproduced among generations of migrants, and how it is largely attributable to systemic structural constraints. There are great gaps in economic development and the availability of public goods, particularly a high-quality basic education, between rural and urban areas, and between the eastern coastal region and the rest of China (Xiang 2007). Due to unequal regional development, and consequently unequal distribution of work opportunities, Chen’s parents had to migrate for work, and they left her behind, in the care of relatives. Flexibility in work demands flexibility in household organization, in the form of division of labor and collaboration between genders, generations, and households, and sometimes it requires a split-household arrangement (Fan 2009). Some research has found that educational performance of children is adversely affected by parental migration when both parents migrate or when a non-parent guardian is the principal care provider. Additionally, longer durations of parental absence are associated with poorer educational performance (Zhou, Murphy and Tao 2014).

5Being left behind by both parents may have helped Chen to develop relationships with some family members, but it mainly gave rise to a sense of exclusion, both from the relatives she lived with and from her parents. After her mother migrated to Shanghai to join her father in 2003, Chen moved to the house of her mother’s parents and lived with them and the family of her mother’s brother for three years. It took her some time to accept her mother’s absence. “At the beginning I missed (them) a lot. … After sending me to my grandma’s house my mother walked to a bus station (and left me from there). I often went there (to see if she came back). … The road in front of my grandma’s house has many curves. I often looked at the farthest curve and wondered if my mother was walking towards me from there ….” Chen “developed connections” with her grandparents over the three years of living with them, and she developed a sense of distance from her parents. “Kids are like this,” she explains, “they feel closer with the ones who they spend the longer time with.”

6Chen’s aunt, who was a teacher, helped to supervise her school performance during the years Chen lived with her mother’s relatives, but Chen observed that the aunt was stricter with her own children than she was with her. “She (my aunt) has this thought, that is it is not good to regulate other people’s children too strictly. I’m not the child of her own blood, so why regulate me so closely?” While Chen did receive love and care from adult family members, her comments suggest that these adults treated her as “someone else’s child.” In other words, they offered her less care and attention than she expected to receive from her actual parents. Studies have found that, compared to children who live with at least one parent, children who are left behind by both parents are much more likely to experience loneliness (Jia and Tian 2010; Su et al. 2013). This experience may affect a child’s sense of security, hinder social development, or interfere with learning.

7Not only is being left behind usually a difficult experience for the children of migrants, an eventual reunion with parents in a destination is often not the end of the family’s difficulties. Among international migrants, research has shown that when reunification follows a lengthy separation, parents often find that that time apart has undermined their authority and credibility with the children (Suárez-Orozco and Hernández 2012). After three years apart from their parents, Chen and her younger sister joined their parents in Shanghai. Chen says the reunion occurred because “my mother hoped that my sister and I could stay by my parents’ side.” However, the years of separation had created distance between Chen and her parents. Additionally, sometimes Chen and her sister fought, and Chen believes that this bothered her parents a great deal. “Maybe at that time my father and mother were used to a two-person world. Suddenly two children showed up … sometimes we saw our mother was angry and we thought, ‘Maybe we should not have come (to Shanghai)’… For example, my mom said, ‘[Having] these two come [here has been] so bothersome!’ so we thought we should not have come.” This aspect of Chen’s story raises the question of whether children are necessarily better off living in the destination when their working parents have limited time and energy for them, as is often the case among migrant workers in cities. However, research suggests that children usually do benefit from living with parents in cities, and that this is even more advantageous than living with their parents in the countryside. One study compared children who migrate with their parents to cities to children who live with their parents in the countryside. The migrant children achieved higher academic outcomes, possessed better language skills, and enjoyed greater physical growth; additionally, they were not seriously psychologically disturbed in the face of adapting to an unfamiliar and sometimes intimidating urban environment (Xu and Xie 2015). Whether joining migrant parents at the destination after a period of separation can also improve children’s well-being is a related but distinct question, and one that is still under-studied.

Education of Children of Migrants and the Decision to Leave School

8The unequal distribution of educational resources between China’s East and West, and between rural and urban areas, together with other constraints posed by the hukou system, may facilitate the social reproduction of low-skilled labor across generations of migrant worker families. Even though Chen’s parents were eventually established enough to bring her and her sister to Shanghai, the two sisters could not be enrolled in a nearby public school due to their lack of Shanghai hukou. Instead, they had to get up at six in the morning each day to go to a migrant-only private school that was far away. A study comparing the performance (in Chinese and mathematics) of migrant children enrolled in regular public schools to those in migrant-only schools, both in Shanghai, found that the children perform much better when they are enrolled in public schools, and the study concluded that access to public schools is the key factor determining the quality of education migrant children receive (Chen and Feng 2013). According to Chen, the quality of teaching in the migrant school she attended was not remarkably different from that of the school she attended in her hometown. Given the general reputation of migrant schools, this could be understood as an indication of the relatively low quality of teaching in her school in Sichuan. However, this did not mean the migrant school was easy, and in fact Chen struggled in class a great deal. A crippling disadvantage was the fact that before she came to Shanghai, Chen had never learned to speak Mandarin, China’s standard national language. In Sichuan, she had received all of her class instruction in the local dialect. English was also a major challenge. In Sichuan, students usually start learning English in middle school, but in Shanghai English is taught from the second year of primary school. Chen started attending school in Shanghai at the beginning of her sixth year of primary school; by that time, she was already four years behind in English.

9Chen’s spatial mobility and her prospects for social mobility through education have been impeded by institutional barriers. Under the hukou system, students without a local hukou cannot take the high school entrance exam or attend high school in destination cities. This constraint made it necessary for Chen to go back to her home village three years after she came to Shanghai. Returning to one’s place of registration to prepare for and take this exam is very common among migrant children. Even when a child is born in a city, if the parents have a rural hukou, so does the child, and children in this situation typically also return to their parents’ rural residence (Li and Liang 2019). Chen returned to the home village by herself and was expected to finish the last year of junior high there, but she quit school a few months later. During these months, Chen appears to have spent most of her time at the school. On weekends, she could have returned to her parents’ home in the mountains, where only her father’s father was living, or she could have tried to go to her mother’s relatives in town, where her mother’s mother and her mother’s siblings were living. Chen wanted to stay in the town with her mother’s relatives, but her mother did not encourage her to do this, and she seems to have gotten the impression that her aunts- and uncles-in-law, namely her mother’s brother’s wife and the husband of her mother’s sister, would not have welcomed her. Thus, she concluded that going “home” to her grandfather was her only choice. Chen describes taking a bus from the school in town, arriving in her village at dusk, and walking along a dark rural road, out of the town, into the “gloomy and scary” mountains, to the house where her grandfather lived. According to Chen, her feelings of loneliness and insecurity in the village contributed to her decision to quit school and rejoin her parents in Shanghai.

10The reasons children of migrants quit school have been explored in the contexts of international migration and rural-urban migration in China. Financial constraints usually play a role, and girls face a higher risk of quitting than boys (De Brauw and Giles 2008; Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo 2010; Hu 2012). Receiving remittance tends to have a positive effect on children’s school attendance, both in China and other countries, but school attendance is often negatively affected by the absence of a family member due to migration. If children with a migrant parent expect to move to the destination eventually, and if they expect that their education in the origin will be poorly rewarded there, then they may decide that quitting school is a reasonable course of action (Amuedo-Dorantes and Pozo 2010). Studies have yet to answer whether migrant children who return to their hometown unaccompanied are more likely to drop out of school than the ones who return accompanied by their parents, or as compared to the children who remain left behind in the hometown continuously. In Chen’s case, feelings of fear, sadness, and isolation related to her environment and some of her family members seem to have created emotional difficulties and mental pressure that led to her decision to drop out. Her case suggests the child’s physical environment, transportation options, absence of parents, strained relations with some family members in the origin, and the mental and emotional dimensions of these experiences may all be relevant to such a decision.

Navigating the Metropolis

11After moving back to Shanghai, Chen made two attempts to invest in her own education, and both failed. The first time was in 2010, half a year after she had returned to Shanghai and begun working in different factories. That year, she planned to attend a vocational school in Sichuan to learn to be a kindergarten teacher. The plan was effectively vetoed by her mother, who believed Chen would not complete the vocational school. The second time was in 2011, when Chen paid for a training course for an accountant qualification exam but did not actually attend any classes because she was offered a new job, selling real estate, that was far from the training course, and she thought that this new job could be her ticket to greater career mobility. Migrant work is characterized by a high level of instability and uncertainty, and the failure of Chen’s second attempt reflects the difficulties she had in evaluating and choosing among potential opportunities in a largely unfamiliar urban environment. Chen’s case illustrates some of the structural disadvantages faced by people of rural origin in China, how they attempt to negotiate challenges in order to achieve social mobility, and the central roles of family members in some of their key decisions.