After a generation of migration, barriers to social mobility remain…
THE greatest wave of voluntary migration in human history transformed China’s cities, and the global economy, in a single generation. It has also created a huge task for those cities, by raising the expectations of the next generation of migrants from the countryside, and of second-generation migrant children. They have grown up in cities in which neither the jobs nor the education offered them have improved much.
This matters because the next generation of migrants has already arrived in staggering numbers. Shanghai’s migrant population almost trebled between 2000 and 2010, to 9m of the municipality’s 23m people. Nearly 60% of Shanghai’s 7.5m or so 20-to-34-year-olds are migrants.
44% of young migrants worked in manufacturing and another 10% in construction.
Nearly half worried about the monotony of their work and despaired of their career prospects. Only 8.6% reported being “comfortable” at work. One worker told researchers: “We have become robots, and I don’t want to be a robot who only works with machines.”
One obstacle to a better job is their parents. In China’s system of household registration (known as hukou)…They are fated to grow up on a separate path from children of Shanghainese parents. Migrant children are eligible to attend local primary and middle schools, but barred from Shanghai’s high schools. For years reformers have called for changes in the hukou system.
