1Qi’s interview proposes a look at the journey of a young Chinese woman from a rural area seeking social and professional upward mobility in the city of Shanghai. If this route is largely conditioned by the rural hukou held by the young woman, it is very interesting to note how a repertory of resources and capital is mobilized to try to escape discriminatory and segregative processes by getting around them. In other words, we observe how a limited and constrained mobility can become a strategic resource.

Education “Here and There”

2Qi was born in 1990 in a rural area of ​​Anhui Province. Her mother moved to Shanghai in 1993 and worked in an electronics factory. Qi’s father joined them in 1995, but he moved back because he was unable to adapt to the city. Qi’s parents would divorce a few years later. Without an urban hukou from the city of Shanghai, Qi could not attend a public school, so she joined a school for migrant workers. Just before entering college, the question arose as to the continuation of her education in Shanghai. The opportunity to join her uncle’s school in Qingpu district meant that she did not have to go back to her hometown. This also benefited her mother, who got a job in the school cafeteria. We can see how the possession of the hukou conditioned the schooling of the girl, acting as a rudder in constrained forms of mobility. If Qi seems to escape it, it is because of her family’s resources, via her uncle’s school. The hukou policy produces social inequalities and seems even to crystallize them in a clear distinction between rural and urban and between migrant children and local children, but also among migrant children who have different levels of resources, capital, and networks.

3Here we could draw a somewhat daring parallel—yet one not devoid of interest and sociological reflection—with the French system of attribution of students to a scholar institute (the so called “carte scolaire”). If, in theory, each pupil must be educated in an institute in his sector, the system thus guarantees equal treatment; but in practice, this school-attribution system seems to reproduce and increase the inequalities between the territories and the districts. Crucially, studies have shown how families manage to make use of rules to circumvent the system. These rely on networks and personal relationships that help them sidestep schools with a bad reputation, and specifically those located in working-class and pauperized neighborhoods (the priority education zones, or ZEP).

4If the debates in France are centered on the efficiency of this system and its perverse effects, one cannot avoid seeing its inscription in the widening of social inequalities between the bourgeois and working-class districts, between the “strong” and the “weak” (Van Zanten 2006; Merle 2011; Oberti and Rivière 2014).

5Faced with Qi’s excellent academic results, Qi’s mother and her uncle plan a path beyond high school towards a university for the young girl, an only child. But they know that it is impossible for her to enroll in a university in Shanghai. The options are clearly distinguishable: whether to abandon this project by integrating in a vocational school, or whether to extend the original path by having Qi keep on with education in her hometown. Thereby, spatial mobility may sustain upward social mobility: by leaving Shanghai, returning to live and study in the province of Anhui to envisage a path of professional and social success.

Spatial Mobility and Upward Social Mobility

6This return to her hometown corresponds to the first biographical bifurcation (Bessin, Bidart, and Grossetti 2010; Roulleau-Berger 2012) in the course of Qi’s life. It is the first turning point in her career. Not only does she have to leave Shanghai, but this is also a matter of family and affinity separation, since her mother and uncle are not able to accompany her in this mobility.

Because there are certain requirements for household registration in Shanghai, and at that time, I did not buy a house or something, so there is a turning point, or you can go the technical schools: technical secondary school or junior college, vocational school or something like that; or you go home to study. Because I have not studied in my hometown, nor have I left my family. In my family may be my grandmother or someone were over there. I did not want to go home to study. I went back to stay for half a month then I did not want to study. My mother listens to my uncle. I said I do not want to study I want to stay in Shanghai, because [I was] with my family from three years old to junior high school. Suddenly I had to separate from my family. And I had to do a new school registration in my hometown. I don’t want to go back. My uncle said I must go back. I must go to college. This is a must, and then I returned to my hometown.

7This rupture is all the more difficult, accompanied as it is by novel difficulties of adaptation within her new school—subjects taught, disparate levels of the pupils—but also within her framework of life—language and accent, food. However, above all, she notices that her level of English is much higher than that of the other students, while considering her poor results in politics and Chinese history.

8Often rejected by her peers, the situation Qi experienced is similar to that of many young descendants of immigrants in France. For some, vacations spent returning to their hometown (the so-called “bled” vacations in French) are often indicative of an internal conflict: in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Senegal, or Congo, these individuals are recognized and identified as “French,” while in France they are considered “Arabs,” “Maghrebians,” “Africans,” “immigrants” (Schiff 2015). On one side of the Mediterranean, they are accused of a lack of respect for cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions and a praise of modernity; on the other side, they are victims of the stigmatized and stigmatizing image of “unintegrable” to French society, especially when they live in segregated working-class neighborhoods. It is this tension that reinforces, by mirror effect, the feeling of not being a French citizen, or at least not being recognized and treated as such (Castel 2007).

9Through hard work Qi managed to integrate in high school and then the General University of Chuzhou in 2009, with a specialization in computer network engineering. The four years of study there seem to take shape as a project of upward social mobility via professional success. As Laurence Roulleau-Berger and Yan Jun pointed out, “the majority of young people of peasant origin aim for a higher socioeconomic level than their parents. The chances of upward professional mobility are still strong in Chinese society today” (Roulleau-Berger and Yan 2017, 134). Qi “builds” her project via different professional competitions and by obtaining scholarships. In the third year, she gets an internship at an IT company in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province. After three months, Qi chooses to resign: she considers herself unable to acquire new skills in this position and finds herself facing her superior’s refusal to give her a raise. She starts her fourth year at university while looking for a job, which was more difficult to get than she had expected, given her great CV—rife as it is with training, awards, certificates, and scholarships. Facing difficulties, Qi develops a new strategy and reviews her criteria on the job market. She decides to no longer limit herself to her university training and her computer skills, in order to exclude rural areas and focus on jobs offering high wages.

Career in the Chinese Labor Markets

10In 2012, Qi joined a computer software sales company in Nanjing, performing a job that was not really related to her university training and skills. However, she quickly obtained good results and received a good salary. In 2013, she was noticed by the management of the company, who offered that she could join the human resources department. Thus, the following year, Qi was transferred to the company’s headquarters in Shanghai: the pace of work was sustained and overtime accumulated, but her salary had doubled in three years. Like many young Chinese migrants, Qi’s biographical path is made up of spatial and professional discontinuities (Roulleau-Berger 2010, 2015): from her arrival in Shanghai at the age of three, her return to her native city at adolescence, her university registration in Chuzhou, her first internship and her job in Nanjing, to her current position (on the day of the interview) in Shanghai, when Qi had left an internship in her field of training to occupy a position in sales, then moved to the human resources sector. However, this succession of bifurcations results in an upward social and professional mobility, where Qi capitalizes on economic, social, and symbolic resources as she progresses. Social capital and spatial capital seem to combine throughout Qi’s career in the Chinese labor market. If the hukou policy limits job performance, breaks down opportunities, and builds up obstacles, the strength of networks and guanxi combined with a provided repertory of resources may help to sidestep such difficulties.

11In this way, studies show the importance of family and personal networks in the search for an internship or employment, especially for certain young descendants of immigrants who are on the front line facing discriminatory processes in the labor and employment markets (Brinbaum and Rieucau 2012; Brinbaum 2018). There are distinctions between migratory origins, with a clearer mobilization of relational networks by descendants of people of Turkish or Southeastern Asian origin, but there are differences according to social origins as well. For instance, the children of unskilled workers turn more frequently to the national service for employment (Pôle Emploi), while the daughters and sons of managers and intermediary professionals mobilize their personal networks. At the same time, the place of residence highlights the weakness of personal networks for residents of pauperized neighborhoods (the so-called quartiers prioritaires des politiques de la ville), who largely make use of employment intermediaries (Couppié 2013). For some young people, the integration process then turns out to be much more chaotic, slowed down by mechanisms of racist discrimination and urban segregation which keep these young people away from employment, all the more so regarding their weak or even nonexistent relational networks (Roulleau-Berger and Giraudo-Baujeu 2019). These young people, in relation to the ambivalent neighborhood (Kokoreff 2003), experience urban captivity: mobility is not only impossible, it is also useless. Mobility is not seen as a resource, but rather as a danger.