Abstract: The rise of meritocratic rhetoric insists to Chinese youth that they are responsible for their own economic outcomes by putting effort in achieving high educational attainment. However, policy restrictions limit migrants’ access to social services that deny rural migrant youth opportunities for upward mobility. While these explicit mechanisms in the Chinese education system arguably play the most direct role in keeping migrant youth in desperate economic circumstances, implicit practices within the classrooms play a crucial role in preventing them from recognizing and resisting the exploitative nature of the structural inequalities they face. Exploring case studies from Beijing public primary schools, this paper argues that the daily practices and routines embedded within public primary schools serve as ideological mechanisms that teach migrant children to subscribe firmly to the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy, place blame on individual factors rather than structural inequalities for their low socioeconomic position, and recognize their marginalized identity as natural and justified.
Keywords: Class inequality, migrant youth, education, social reproduction
Introduction
Since 1979, China has embraced market-driven economic reforms that transformed the economy from socialist to capitalist and ushered in an era of unprecedented economic development. In doing so, China’s leaders not only discarded state control of production and distribution, but rejected Mao’s vision of an egalitarian classless society.[1] Overturning Mao’s regime of values, the state introduced new guiding ideologies of individualism and meritocracy, and encouraged the population to strive to accumulate material wealth through personal effort, self-reliance, and entrepreneurial hustle.[2] This rhetoric reduces the cause of class inequality to the individual; one’s outcome is determined by one’s character and quality. Thus, under this ideological framework, class inequality in China is ‘apolitical’; an individual succeeds in society because they possess the work ethic and merit to succeed in school and the labour market, and correspondingly, an individual ends up in a disadvantaged class position because of their personal failures at school and inadequate aptitudes. This ideological strategy is crucially relevant and important for the state to manage the emergence of the present socio-economic configuration, which was set in motion by the post-1979 economic reforms. China’s rapid economic growth has been achieved at the cost of a widening income and developmental gap between China’s urban coastal cities and rural inland, and the uneven development of the nation has led to extreme class inequality between urban and rural citizens.[3]
As rural migrants move to cities to find better employment opportunities, many of these workers have little choice but to bring their children, and or raise their city-born children in urban areas. Despite the rhetoric of meritocracy and equal opportunity, structural inequalities continue to perpetuate the rural-urban divide, and state policies arguably reflect the government’s focus on achieving industrial goals at the expense of rural migrants and their children.[4] The national household registration system [hukou] is perhaps the most successful state-sponsored instrument that limits the opportunities, mobility, and welfare of rural migrants.[5] Amongst many restrictions that limit migrants’ access to social services, the hukou makes rural migrant children ineligible to attend urban public high schools.[6] In doing so, the state locks generations of rural migrant children out of white-collar occupations, which reproduces a social hierarchy in which rural migrant youth provide cheap labour at the bottom of the labour market.[7] Although these explicit structural mechanisms in the Chinese education system arguably play the most direct role in denying rural migrant youth opportunities and resources while keeping them in desperate economic circumstances, implicit ideological mechanisms at school play a crucial role in preventing migrant youth from resistance, and from believing and participating in collective action against the exploitative nature of the structural inequalities they face.
This paper explores the implicit practices, rules, relationships, and structures present within the daily interactions and practices experienced by migrant children attending public primary schools in Beijing. Upon critical examination, these implicit mechanisms at the urban primary schools function not only reflect the power and hierarchies in the larger Chinese society, but also teach rural migrant youth to recognize their disadvantaged class positions as justified. The practices, interactions, and relationships embedded within public primary schools in Beijing do not simply supply rural migrant children with instructional knowledge and skills; it teaches them to become aware of their marginality and the rural-urban divide in Chinese society, to subscribe firmly to the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy, and to place blame on individual factors for one’s low socioeconomic position.
Theoretical Framework
Education extends beyond the dispersal of academic knowledge. Structural Marxist theorist Louis Althusser describes educational institutions as the dominant ‘ideological state apparatus’ — institutions that convince individuals that the ruling ideology is politically fair so as to continuously reproduce state power and social structure.[8] Saying that “ [the school] takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years…it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology, or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state”[9], Althusser argues that education functions to integrate the younger generation into the logic of the present regime of value. Under this Althusserian approach, schools are direct agents of ideological control that function to reproduce and maintain the dominant norms and hierarchical class relations.
Foucault builds upon this approach, contending that schools are “institutions for surveillance and correction”.[10] Authority figures – such as teachers – observe, evaluate, and constantly hold students to the dominant norms, values, and beliefs so they behave and think by the ruling ideology, and discipline them if they do not. Interactions inside the school space are, therefore, political expressions. Zhang and Luo apply this notion to the experiences of Chinese rural migrant students in Beijing public primary schools, noting that the everyday practices in the school space “are unspoken academic, social and cultural messages” communicated towards the migrant children: when teachers discipline them, migrant children are instructed them on how they should behave, and when they interact with their urban classmates, they are informed on how they should view different classes and groups, and how they should view themselves.[11]
Teachers and Authority
Teachers play an essential role in transmitting the dominant values, norms, and beliefs needed to support the larger social structure. Teachers’ attitudes and treatment towards rural migrant students translate into how their rural migrant students perceive what behaviours or ideas are acceptable or unacceptable, who is ‘good’ and who is ‘problematic’. This is evidenced in Zhang and Luo’s 2016 study of the schooling experiences of Chinese rural migrant students in Beijing public primary schools. Teachers at Beijing public primary schools said that they “don’t care who is a rural migrant child ” and “don’t look at their parents’ background”.[12] Despite their intentions, they nevertheless regarded migrant children as problematic students and attributed low academic performances to their family circumstances. Teachers openly blamed migrant children and their work ethic for their school failures, ignoring the structural conditions that place migrant children at disadvantage in performing well. At Beijing public primary schools, rural migrant students had the opportunity to study in the same classroom as urban students, but they are structurally disadvantaged because they cannot access or acquire resources, such as parental support and supplementary classes, to academically succeed.[13] Migrant parents recognized the importance of education for their children to move up the socioeconomic ladder, but their subprime labour conditions prevent them from adequately supporting their children’s schoolwork themselves or affording them after-school programs.[14] Critical pedagogy theorist Henry Giroux argues that the moral ideologies of teachers and other authority figures are embedded into their lessons, whether it is intentional or not.[15] By placing blame squarely on the shoulders of rural migrant children for their academic failures and disregarding the structural forces that hinder their performance, the teachers communicate and reinforce the individualistic and meritocratic ideologies on migrant children: that the cause of their personal failures at school is owing to their flawed and inferior character, rather than the structural inequalities of the present system.[16]
Praise and power from authority figures in the classroom are directly related. Perceiving that “schools are marked by a basic, concrete division between the powerful and the powerless”, Giroux argues that there is an inherent structure embedded within the classroom that grants teachers immense corporeal and ideological power over their students.[17] Teachers not only have the authority to regulate the actions of students, but the power to shape their academic and non-academic ideas on what is superior and what is inferior, particularly through their praise and criticism. While the classroom is a space where students have the opportunity to perceive and evaluate each other, teachers hold the unquestioned source of approval and disapproval.[18] Writing that “the administration of positive and negative sanctions is the teacher’s most visible symbol of power”, Giroux contends that the teacher’s feedback is an effective ideological instrument that teaches students to recognize which behaviours, attributes, personality traits are superior.[19] Teachers at Beijing public primary schools publicly communicated their evaluation of their students; they “praised the high-performing students openly and recommended them to participate in school-wide contests” and made visible the low-performing students’ lack of success “through frequent test score rankings”.[20] The instrument of public feedback present in the structures of Beijing public primary schools, combined with the teachers’ belief that academic failures are owed to the student’s character, communicate unspoken yet powerful messages that call on rural migrant children to recognize themselves as deservedly inferior compared to their urban peers, and reflects and reproduces the social hierarchical relations in the larger Chinese society.
Peer Interactions
Schools are a space where children are not only evaluated but are positioned to evaluate themselves in contrast to other races, classes, or groups of people. Even when rural migrant children in Beijing public primary schools are placed in the same environment as the local students, micro-level peer-to-peer interactions inside and outside the classroom reinforce existing social inequalities, reproduce the distinction and segregation between migrant and local students, and subject migrant children to become aware of their marginality and position at the lower rungs of the Chinese social hierarchy. Bourdieu and Passeron note how schools continuously reproduce the larger social hierarchy by imposing norms, values, and beliefs of the dominant class as universal standards and subordinating those who do not possess them.[21] According to Bourdieu, schools are structured to reward students who have already acquired social capital in form of knowledge, skills, speech codes, style, and tastes, and exert non-physical violence on disadvantaged students who lack these forms of capital. Social hierarchies are thereby reproduced as students who do not possess the cultural capital are reduced to an inferior social status at school.[22] This pattern of social reproduction is exhibited at the Beijing public primary schools, where rural migrant children possess neither financial capital to participate in extracurricular activities, nor the social capital manifested in academic excellence, style, and mannerisms to gain the friendship of and integrate with local students.[23] In suffering social segregation and often becoming objects of derision and humiliation through their daily interactions with local students, these implicit mechanisms operating in the social spheres at school assign migrant children to subordinate social positions which reinforce the rural-urban hierarchical configuration that exists in the larger Chinese society.
A. Financial and Cultural Capital
The structures within academic and social environment of Beijing public primary schools use the lack of financial capital of rural migrant students to produce a de facto segregation that subjugates rural migrant students to discrimination, spatially and socially isolate them from their urban peers, and convey and reinforce their inferiority. Poor academic performance, lack of extracurricular activities, and residential segregation from their urban peers are all by-products of the structural inequalities that deprive rural migrant families of financial capital. Yet, the social interactions occurring within Beijing public primary schools communicate to migrant children that their inability to attain social assets such as educational success, intellect, and hobbies are proof of their low quality. Public academic rankings and extracurricular activities are both seemingly neutral structures present within Beijing public primary schools, yet they function to magnify migrant children’s lack of financial and cultural capital to continuously reproduce hierarchical distinctions between urban and migrant children.
The routine practices of publicizing and ranking test performances exercised at Beijing public primary schools (often through visual means such as graphs and flags displaying each student’s achievements) directly inculcates students with a clear sense of who is ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’.[24] Not only did migrant students at Beijing public primary schools “seemed to be very clear about who were academically ‘good’” but these practices also exert the Bourdieusian concept of ‘symbolic violence’ on migrant children.[25] Bourdieu describes symbolic violence to be a type of non-physical violence imposed by the social group possessing greater social capital on the disadvantaged group that legitimizes the status quo.[26] A salient example is the publicization of academic rankings to students, which made low-performing migrant children “a laughing stock” amongst their peers and encouraged local students to view migrants as inherently stupid and academically behind their age group.[27] Such practices present within Beijing public primary school environments are effective mechanisms that simultaneously exert symbolic violence on migrant children and communicate the message that migrant students are stunted and of lower quality. These experiences of petty humiliation, combined with the recognition of their low academic performance, work together to reproduce the larger Chinese social hierarchy at school, and legitimize the distinctions between the ‘inferior’ migrant students and their ‘superior’ urban peers.
The lack of participation in extracurricular activities in Beijing further reinforces the distinction between local and migrant students. Beijing rural migrant children are excluded from most of the extracurricular activities at school because their parents either could not afford these activities or have no time to get involved. As a result, they are shut out of important channels for acquiring informal skills that promote upward mobility and for forming friendships with local students, which reinforces the rural-urban divide.[28]
B. Cultural Identity Makers
Despite living in the same city and being in the same classrooms, cultural markers segregate rural migrant children from local Beijing students and mark them as out of place. Kwong argues that it is the dominant class, that being the Beijing middle class, whose characteristics set the criteria against which rural migrants are to be measured.[29] Thus, these cultural markers function as a way of maintaining class-based differences, allowing the dominant urban middle class to claim superiority over the rural working class and reproduce existing social relations. Beijing locals generally possess higher levels of education, greater economic prosperity, and more prestigious job statuses than migrants.[30] Their accents, dress, tastes, mannerisms, and collection of material belongings set them apart from migrants. Centering their own characteristics as the norm, locals call migrants ‘waidi ren’ (people from the outside).[31] This label is not just a reference to geographic migration — it bears a derogatory connotation that equates rurality as a deficiency in the qualities they deem desirable. In being constantly disturbed by identity distinctions at school, particular differences in speech, dress, and mannerisms of migrant children are actively emphasized in contrast to their local peers. Their differences, embodied in their speech, appearances, and mannerisms are not trivial; their rural accents and ragged dress are used to construct and legitimize the identity of rural migrant children as backwards, out of place, and low quality.[32]
The upscaling of the ‘Beijing’ pronunciation of Putonghua as the linguistic standard in the Beijing public primary education system is used to ideologically produce and control the image of rural migrants as naturally in need of correction. Pupils and teachers assign value judgments on linguistic features, understanding certain accents to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ by measuring them against the linguistic norms of the Beijing middle class.[33] As accents themselves are neither ‘good’ or ‘bad’, the critique of the accents of students at school functions as an ideological mechanism to transmit and to maintain the hierarchical relations between local Beijing children and migrant children. Teachers invest their time and effort to ‘correct’ the pronunciation of migrant students so that they can pronounce their sounds in the ‘right’ way, that being the ‘standard’ (Beijing) pronunciation.[34] One teacher remarked that her “pupils in grade-four were ‘good’ in speaking Putonghua, because they had been through intensive pronunciation correction exercises”.[35] As teachers hold the power in the teacher-student relationship, their efforts to ‘correct’ nonstandard linguistic features consequently influence how their students evaluate each other and themselves; local students learn to interpret linguistic differences as signifiers of quality, and attribute highly ideological value judgments on the accents of their migrant classmates. One eight-year-old local student who spoke with a Beijing accent assessed his classmate’s accent as “very bad” because she “is a migrant child”, linking accent with identity, rather than language.[36] Implicit in his comments was that he is a local Beijing person who speaks with the ‘right’ language and thus was able to judge his classmate, who spoke with a ‘bad’ accent because she is a migrant. Hua, a migrant student who compared her Putonghua to her local Beijing classmate, believed that the local student’s accent was “better” than hers.[37] These interactions and comments on language and identity work together to construct the identity of migrant students as inherently in need of being ‘fixed’, and bring them to recognize and internalize their inferiority compared to the local Beijing students.
At public primary schools in Beijing, the body and the appearance of the migrant student are subject to daily interactions that contrast them starkly against the qualities of local students, and mark them as unsophisticated outsiders. According to Sun, when migrants move to the city from their home regions “their place of origin has already been abstracted into a signifier of rurality and low suzhi [quality] which, against their wishes, is reinscribed onto their mobile body”.[38] When the migrant child walks into the classroom in the same uniform as the local Beijing student, visual signs on their body emit that they are rural and mark them as non-city and second tier. Local students wear new uniforms at the beginning of each term, while the financially constrained migrant children often wear worn-out, cheap, and ill-fitting uniforms.[39] In a social environment that actively emphasized appearances of rural children as inferior in contrast to local dress codes, many local students view migrant students as dirty, unkempt, and backward misfits in the city. Unable to afford the trendy school bags or accessories that local students wear, migrant children do not possess the cultural capital manifested in dress and style to win the respect of their peers and position themselves as of equal status.[40] Their subsequent experience of exclusion and humiliation brings migrant children to believe that their bodily features and appearances are truly inferior.
The implicit practices and structures within Beijing public primary schools that place constant emphasis on the academic, social, and cultural qualities migrant children lack work as ideological instruments that control the mode in which the image and identity of migrant youth are perceived by others, and more crucially, by themselves. The continuous reproduction of rural-urban distinctions through daily school interactions and practices leads to a de facto segregation between migrant and local youth and legitimizes the migrant children’s identity as waidi ren. This is evidencedin Ming’s 2014 survey in which a dominant majority of migrant students attending Beijing public schoolsexpressed a strong preference in forming friendships with fellow migrant children and declared themselves as non-Beijing ren, despite that many lived and grown up in Beijing for most of their lives, and some were born in the city and never visited their hometown.[41] By systematically producing a common experience of marginalization amongst migrant youth and communicating unspoken social messages that emphasize their personal qualities as undesirable, the school works to reinforce the local–migrant boundary and teach migrant youth to internalize their collective identity as outsiders who are obviously and unquestionably of lesser status than the locals.
False Consciousness
The ability to do well in school is not simply a direct outcome of how much effort a student puts in studying, but hinges on other hidden factors, such as one’s family background, parental involvement, teaching methods and expectations, and participation in extracurricular activities. Rural migrant parents are unable to meaningfully support their children’s schoolwork and to afford supplementary training classes, and are unable to afford or acquire the financial and cultural capital so that their children successfully integrate with local students. The exploitative nature of the existing class structure that drives the rural population to migrate to the city and work for low-wage work directly contributes to migrant children’s poor academic performance. Migrant children are deemed of ‘low-quality’ as they are evaluated against the characteristics of the Beijing middle class, which they could only acquire by being a part of Beijing middle class. For migrant children, the urban public primary education system does not provide a level playing field where they have an equal chance to succeed; instead, the system amplifies the structural inequalities they face to reinforce the image of migrants as low-quality students and individuals.
Implicit practices and structures present within Beijing public primary schools naturalize the structural inequalities that students face as disparities in academic and personal ‘quality’ to make existing urban-rural hierarchical relations appear “natural” or “inevitable”. Thus, the school functions as a crucial apparatus that sustains the existing rural-urban hegemonic arrangement. Teachers, as well as other mechanisms operating in Beijing primary schools, reduce structural class inequalities to differences in personal efforts and qualities and teach students to place blame on themselves for their educational failures. When migrant pupils performed poorly, teachers blamed them for their lack of effort, ignoring the harsh labour conditions that prevented migrant parents from meaningfully supporting their children’s schooling. Chen and Wang’s 2020 survey conducted at Beijing primary schools found that migrant children identified education and moral character as the causes of the adversities faced by the migrant working class.[42] Migrant children saw educational failure as the main reason why workers, such as their parents and other migrants were limited to menial labour and poor economic prospects, and attributed unjust employment arrangements to the poor moral quality of individual bosses.[43] By recruiting migrant children to commit firmly to the ideology that individualizes success and failure, Beijing primary schools inculcate the belief that the existing class structure that positions migrants as subordinate to locals appears to be a fair and just outcome.
Conclusion and Implications on Collective Action
In conditioning students to explain the rural-urban and local-migrant class inequality in an apolitical and individualized way, Beijing primary schools ideologically equip migrant children with a meritocratic interpretation of social classes that features self-blame and passive acceptance of their role at the bottom of the existing Chinese social order. The ideological mechanisms underlying the daily practices and structures at Beijing public primary schools simultaneously emphasize education as an equal path for all to strive for upward mobility, while creating and reinforcing the identity of migrant children as of low academic and social quality. As such, Beijing public primary schools make it difficult for migrant youth to engage in political resistance and collective action. Yet, without collective action, education is perhaps the only opportunity for migrant children to break out of class exploitation. Thus, Beijing public primary educational system, as an Althusserian institution, perfectly sustains the existing ideological hegemony: migrant children willingly commit to and reinforce meritocratic ideology, even when its structures and ideas obstruct them to form a truly critical understanding of class inequality.
Nicole Shi is a fifth-year undergraduate student currently studying Contemporary Asian studies, Political Science, and Philosophy. Her research interests are lies in the intersection of equality of opportunity and education. Through her work with Synergy, she hopes to promote discourse on the role of education in realizing social ideals, and a deeper understanding of the structural inequalities and power differentials within education systems in Asia today.
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[1] Fengshu Liu, “Social Transformation in China (1979-2010),” in Urban Youth in China, First (New York: Routledge, 2010): 15.
[2] Liu, “Social Transformation in China (1979-2010),” 13-24.
[3] Holly H. Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future : The Urban Left Behind, Routledge Studies in Asia’s Transformations; 32 (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014): 19.
[4] Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future: The Urban Left Behind, 19.
[5] Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future: The Urban Left Behind, 5.
[6] Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future: The Urban Left Behind, 5.
[7] T. E. (Terry Ellen) Woronov, Class Work: Vocational Schools and China’s Urban Youth (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2016), 8-20, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804796934.
[8] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation (NY: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127–86.
[9] Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 155.
[10] Michel Foucault, “Truth and Judicial Forms,” in Power. Vol. 3 of The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984 (Review), vol. 30 (NY: The New Press, 1973), 57.
[11] Donghui Zhang and Yun Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” British Journal of Educational Studies 64, no. 2 (April 2, 2016): 218, https://doi.org/10.1080/00071005.2015.1105359.
[12] Zhang and Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” 225.
[13] Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future: The Urban Left Behind, 67.
[14] Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future: The Urban Left Behind, 67.
[15] Henry A. Giroux and David E. Purpel, The Hidden Curriculum and Moral Education : Deception or Discovery? (Berkeley, Calif.: McCutchan Pub. Corp., 1983). https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.1979.10506048.
[16] Dylan Clark, “Interpellating Young Women in China: ‘Femininity,’ Class, and ‘Quality’ in the Body” (University of Toronto, November 4, 2021).
[17] Henry A. Giroux and Anthony N. Penna, “Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum,” Theory & Research in Social Education 7, no. 1 (March 1, 1979): 30.
[18] Giroux and Penna, “Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum,” 21–42.
[19] Giroux and Penna, “Social Education in the Classroom: The Dynamics of the Hidden Curriculum,” 31.
[20] Zhang and Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” 229.
[21] Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1990), 60.
[22] Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, 30.
[23] Zhang and Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” 215-34.
[24] Zhang and Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” 215-34.
[25] Zhang and Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” 229.
[26] Bourdieu and Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society, and Culture, 4.
[27] Zhang and Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” 229.
[28] Zhang and Luo, “Social Exclusion and the Hidden Curriculum: The Schooling Experiences of Chinese Rural Migrant Children in an Urban Public School,” 215-34.
[29] Julia Kwong, “Education and Identity: The Marginalisation of Migrant Youths in Beijing,” Journal of Youth Studies 14, no. 8 (2011): 871–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2011.607435.
[30] Kwong, “Education and Identity: The Marginalisation of Migrant Youths in Beijing,” 872.
[31] Kwong, “Education and Identity: The Marginalisation of Migrant Youths in Beijing,” 872.
[32] T.E Woronov, “In the Eye of the Chicken: Hierarchy and Marginality among Beijing’s Migrant Schoolchildren,” Ethnography 5, no. 3 (2004): 301, https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138104044631.
[33] Jie Dong, “Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School,” Journal of Language, Identity & Education 17, no. 5 (September 3, 2018): 336–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2018.1470517.
[34] Dong, “Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School,” 336–49.
[35] Dong, “Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School,” 337.
[36] Dong, “Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School,” 342.
[37] Dong, “Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School,” 341.
[38] Wanning Sun, “Suzhi on the Move: Body, Place, and Power,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 624, https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-2009-017.
[39] Kwong, “Education and Identity: The Marginalisation of Migrant Youths in Beijing,” 876.
[40] Kwong, “Education and Identity: The Marginalisation of Migrant Youths in Beijing,” 876.
[41] Ming, The Education of Migrant Children and China’s Future: The Urban Left Behind, 73.
[42] Jiaxin Chen and Dan Wang, “Class Consciousness of Rural Migrant Children in China,” The China Quarterly, no. 247 (2021): 814–34, https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S0305741020001083.
[43] Chen and Wang, “Class Consciousness of Rural Migrant Children in China,” 829.