Image credit: Pathway to Home, by Xiaohan
KUNTIAN CHEN
Read the Faculty Introduction.
Around 5 years ago, Chinese scholar Qian Liu examined the “social integration status” of migrant workers’ children in urban public schools, attempting to understand whether migrant workers’ children were accepted as part of the urban communities they were living in (395). According to an entry in his field diary, a teacher from an urban primary school told him: “… since the parents (migrant workers) aren’t well mannered, it is hard for us to manage them, and the parents don’t understand what we are saying” (398). The quote displays a negative view of migrant workers and their children, where they are viewed as illiterate and bad-mannered in the urban spaces that they live and study in.
In this essay, I define migrant workers (‘农民工’ in Mandarin) as people who grew up in rural areas, and moved to urban areas for work in China. Migrant workers are commonly considered as a group ‘in-between’ urban and rural residents in China, in that they grew up in rural areas but are now working and living in cities. By the term ‘urban residents’, I refer to Chinese nationals who are born and have lived continuously in cities in China, as contrasted against rural residents, who are born and live in rural areas.
With urban residents and migrant workers now living together in closer proximity, migrant workers are often blamed for their children’s lack of literacy skills, and perceived as lacking in their own sense of personal responsibility for their children. This is evident in surveys conducted in four major cities by the Chinese sociologist Li Zhu, who noted the presence of strong negative reactions against migrant laborers in urban populations (48). Such negative reactions include instances where migrant workers, their children, and larger rural populations are considered as illiterate and lacking any ability or potential to become literate (48). Read together with Qian’s field research, Li’s surveys illustrate how negative attitudes about the literacy of migrant workers and their children are common among urban residents. However, I argue that such negative attitudes against migrant workers are unreasonable. Lower literacy skills in migrant workers’ children are due to long working hours imposed upon their parents, where their parents are unable to provide adequate informal literacy activities to support their children’s education. Rather than seeing migrant workers’ children as incapable of becoming literate, and their parents as irresponsible, we should see migrant workers and their children as victims of a cycle of low income and inadequate education, and inherently capable of achieving stronger literacy skills, instead of placing the blame of lower literacy skills on them.
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