Rural migrant children in the Chinese public sphere

This podcast is part of the European project called “China Horizons: Dealing with a resurgent China” and more precisely of the Work Package 2 (hosted at Sciences Po) devoted to the analysis of the “dynamics of Chinese society”. In this WorkPackage, we question the mainstream image of a Chinese society that is seen as a blown apart, backward and motionless society. We focus on the “opinions” expressed by the Chinese society on social media networks, during social conflicts, and during interviews.

In this episode of our series, we deal with a very specific topic: namely, the perception, by the Chinese society, of children of migrants coming from the countryside. As opposed to what was happening during Mao’s time, rural dwellers are allowed to move to urban areas to work today.
But because the Chinese government has maintained the household registration system, the “non local” citizens have limited access to public services (schools, vocational training, hospitals, and home owning for example) in their new place of residence. In particular, access to education is very difficult for migrants’ children because they are considered very different from the local children and the school doors are not always open to them.
Today, we are going to discuss this issue with Camille Salgues, a sociologist and anthropologist specializing in childhood studies, and Jean Louis Rocca, professor at Sciences Po, in charge of the WP2 of China Horizon DWARC project.

Listen to the interview (audio)

• A general perspective on the issue of Chinese migrant children:
  Ling, Minhua. 2019. The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai’s Edge. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

• On Chinese migrant children’s everyday life: Salgues, Camille. 2021. “In the Midst of Rubble, Bordering the Wasteland: Landscapes of Ruins and Childhood Experiences in China”. China Perspectives 4: 31 40. Available online.

• On French “helplines”: Fassin, Didier. 2011. “Suffering Unveiled: Listening to the Excluded and the Marginalized”. In Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, Didier Fassin (ed.). University of California Press.

• On France in the 1950s and “modernization”: Ross, Kristin. 1996. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. MIT Press.

• On the Chinese middle class: Rocca, Jean-Louis. 2017. The Making of the Chinese Middle-Class. Small Comfort and Great Expectations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• On Chinese public opinion (audio recording): "From common to public: What tools for understanding opinion in contemporary China?", with Isabelle Thireau, EHESS-CNRS, Laurent Thévenot, EHESS, Camille Salgues, Sciences Po-CERI. Chair: Jean-Louis Rocca, Sciences Po CERI.

Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.
Illustration: Rural migrant children, Shanghai, China, 2008. Photo by Camille Salgues

The project “Dealing with a Resurgent China” (DWARC) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101061700.

Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.