The first episode features Professor Ling Minhua, interviewed by Professor Tim Summers, and her new book, the Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai's Edge. Professor Ling discusses her motivations for pursuing research on Shanghai's migrant youth as well as her personal connection to her research.

Upcoming, Professor John Lagerwey will be featured in a podcast on China as a religious state, his journey through discovering the truth of religion in China, and common misconceptions held on Chinese society.

You can find the Centre for China Studies podcast on Spotify, SoundCloud, and the Apple Podcast app.

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First Episode Full Script

TS: Hello everybody, welcome to this CCS podcast. I’m Tim Summers and I am very pleased today to have with me my colleague Ling Minhua who’s going to talk to us about her book, the Inconvenient Generation. So Minhua, tell us a bit about this book; what got you started on writing this book in the first place?

ML: It started from my dissertation project. I was very interested in how the hukou barriers have been shaping the migrant children’s educational opportunities and their life chances. So, I conducted yearlong fieldwork in Shanghai and Beijing and then I felt like their stories propelled me to keep on following up on their development, so it ended up a longitudinal study about their coming of age experience.

TS: What age are these migrant children? How old were they when you started following them and what time period does the study cover?

ML: So when I started the project I was trying to decide exactly when should I start to look at them, and at that time there had been studies about migrant schools and primary schools and how poorly they were run because of this hukou discrimination and I felt I wanted to study beyond that. I look at these policies and feel that the grade nine in middle school is the watershed for these migrant kids because they are not allowed to take the high school entrance examination in cities like Shanghai and Beijing and they have to decide whether to go back to their registered home town or stay in the city and so I decided to follow two groups of mostly middle school students going up for grade nine and see how they struggle with this choice and how they go through this last year of their middle school and then what it leads them to. So it’s kind of age fourteen fifteen. Now they’re already in their mid-twenties.

TS : Tell us a bit about the hukou system, because maybe not everybody is very familiar with how this works. This is something that really constrains and shapes your choices, if you’re a person in China.

ML: Yeah for anyone who is familiar with China this hukou is not something you can escape from. Since the late 1950s the Chinese government adopted the Soviet model of population control and registration and come up with this hukou system, which also has a long historical legacy. So each household will be assigned to a hukou household registration and then it will have a type, whether you are agricultural or nonagricultural, and then there will be a place attached to it, so if your parents' generation has been living in this village under this county, then your registered hukou place will be this village and this county and then your children will inherit this hukou status. This worked pretty well during the state planned economy because people were not allowed to move that much, but after the economic reform, when people started to move around searching for jobs and better opportunities, this became a real problem. And now keep in mind according to the 2018 census, we have over 280 million people living outside their registered home place for six months, which means 280 million people are facing difficulties or barriers caused by this hukou. Because your hukou status also ties your entitlement to basic education, medical care, and other social benefits.

TS: So, hukou is agricultural and nonagricultural, that sounds rather strange. Now China is majority urban population, something like 60 percent of people live in cities now. Agricultural, nonagricultural: what exactly are these categories?

ML: That’s exactly right. There’s a dilemma, a lot of people who had an official document as agricultural hukou has never been engaged in agricultural work, the students that I studied, they were either born in Shanghai or moved to Shanghai at a young age. They never worked in farms and a lot of them cannot even recognize the difference between rice and wheat. So this agricultural status becomes very nominal and distant. Yet it still plays a huge role in shaping their everyday life because if you have an agricultural hukou registered in Anhui province then you are considered as an outsider in Shanghai even though you grew up there for a decade. And then when you are trying to enroll in schools, especially public schools, in the past, especially before 2000s, you have to pay extra fees, and you also have to use social networks to get yourself a seat in the school. So when I started my dissertation fieldwork, the Shanghai government adopted a relatively aggressive policy to open up its public primary and middle schools and subsidize those schools when enrolling qualified migrants. It’s not a free for all.

TS: What’s a qualified migrant student?

ML: So qualified migrant students require dozens of paperwork so, first they need to prove that their parents have proper employment, stable employment in Shanghai, and they also have been living in Shanghai with a proof of address or tenant or lease or property ownership. And certainly they need to show that they don’t violate the birth control policies, and if you can produce those paperwork you can study in public school for free according to this compulsory education law.

TS: Is that easy to do? How many of these kids are able to provide the documentation that shows they’re qualified?

ML: Not that easy. I don’t have the specific number, but given the fact that there are over 130 private migrant schools still operating in the 2000s in Shanghai, while the public schools are gradually opening up, it shows that the demand and supply is not even. So there are definitely more migrant students but only maybe half, according to official statistics about 70 percent of migrant students go to public schools, while the remaining 30 percent still go to migrant schools run by migrants themselves. But, in reality it’s hard to get specific statistics based on my individual research, but I think it’s not easy. And the story is now getting, it’s getting harder. So since 2014, the Chinese government has this hukou reform and is trying to encourage more urbanization, but mostly in small towns and second tier or third tier cities. But for mega cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, they actually tighten the policies regarding migrants, so in Shanghai they make it harder for migrant students to go into public schools for free.

TS: So when you were doing this research you must have got to know some of these young people quite well. Do you have any stories you can tell us about any of these individuals? Any friends that you made during your research?

ML: Yes, I knew them when they were 12, the eldest around 17. And I have been following them around for over a decade, so indeed I got to know a lot about their personal lives and their growth and also their family situations. There are a lot of stories, but actually I did cut a lot out of the book, to protect individual privacy and to keep the book tight. I feel it’s very hard to pick just one. Because there might be more girls described in detail in my book than boys, so here I probably will talk just a little bit more about the boys. So it’s interesting because in China there is a long standing socio-cultural practice of son preference in which a son was preferred because they continued the family line and they will inherit the family property and perform filial piety, well that’s the social expectation. So sons are often perceived to be the advantaged one. But, I think this whole hukou policy and this migrant status played a very interesting twist on some of these young men’s’ lives and personal growth. So, first, this gender stereotype that girls are more obedient, more mature, actually enables a lot of my female informants to pursue higher education, so parents feel a little bit more comfortable to send them back to their registered home villages to study, because you often have to study in a boarding school. A lot of the boys were kept in Shanghai, so they finished middle school and then went to vocational school, which is probably the only viable formal educational channel for them. So they’d end up having a vocational educational degree which was not highly valued in Shanghai and the majors that were available for them to study were often manufacturing oriented, so a lot of them majored in mechanics, auto repair, so these are considered to be the future manual jobs. And that creates a lot of anxiety, even though they tend not to talk that much in daily life, but when you hang around them you can feel the tension. So in chapter six, when I talk about how consumption has played a huge role in their daily life and identity formation, there’s a vignette I tried to present, in a summer afternoon they were just chatting. A girl came back from her rural home province in Anhui province asking her friends whom she grew up with what she should do, should she continue to pursue college education back in Anhui or return to Shanghai to start a vocational education to find a job. And there’s this guy, I’ve known him since he was ten. He always has had an internal tension about his aspirations and constraints imposed on him, so he was constantly telling the girl how Shanghai is much better than Anhui, she should come back to Shanghai because the schools in Shanghai are simply better, and there will be more opportunities, but then, later, when they shift the topic to something else and suddenly someone mentioned cars, they started to talk about brand names and which brand is considered to be high end, and which is the fancy one, and how they wanted to arrange a Maserati for a wedding car parade. And then he jumped in in the end, “you know what, I should just ride a muddy horse, a brass horse, for my wedding”. So, as you know that phrase is an online pun, referring to a curse word that’s widely used on the internet and among the youths that refers to something shitty, and he laughed and everyone laughed with him. I felt that this moment, is a moment of anxiety, and maybe a little hint of disillusion with a prosperous urban middle class lifestyle, that these young people all aspire to but clearly will be very hard to achieve if you were not encouraged systematically to pursue higher education, actually they were systematically prevented from realizing the higher education aspiration and hence their jobs also tend to be lower end manufacturing or service jobs, so that is discouraging, it hurts. It’s a comic moment, but since I have known him through this whole long period, it hurts when you hear that.

TS: So there’s a lot of humor, there’s a lot of personal reflections that come through in your discussions with these young people. I think one of the great things about the book are the stories that you tell, but you also help explain what those stories mean. And it’s an academic book, so you’re putting this in a broader context, in an academic field of inquiry. Can you tell us about some of the concepts or ideas that you used, a little more academic in nature that helped you explain and understand what’s going on.

ML: This book is about urbanization and its ramification on individual lives, so one key issue is about the ongoing mechanism of social stratification and reproduction. So, how inequality has been transferred across generations. This idea I use segmented inclusion to capture or describe what the Shanghai policy has done to this second generation of migrant youth. Because the opening up of the public school is an attempt to include those migrant children which the government realizes is essential to educate them, so that they can provide the very much needed semi-skilled labor for its economic growth and urban development. But various limitations imposed on this inclusion, such as the paperwork and types of schools that are open to them. The type of vocational schools that are welcoming to migrant students and also in terms of employment policies which still discriminate against non-local workers, all these creates this segmentation. So in my second chapter, actually the third chapter, I talk about the yearlong grade nine experience among those students, you can see this spatially, temporally, there are a lot of this practice of differentiation that’s felt by those teenagers in their everyday school life: who gets what kind of homework, who gets to assign what kind of class, with what kind of teacher and who can leave school early. So migrant students are often asked to leave school early and…

TS: By leave school early you mean...

ML: So their class ends around 3:30 while local students will be kept in school to do more exercises because local students are expected to take the high stake high school entrance examination, migrant students since they are non-local students are not eligible for that. So teachers were just discouraged from cultivating them, they just decided to let them go, or some schools keep them in some sort of self-study session. Without much instruction, so that creates a lot of delinquent behavior which creates this vicious circle because some teachers will complain about these migrant students’ rebellious behavior, and it’s kind of...

TS: In the book at one or two points you compared the experiences in other societies, can you talk about that.

ML: Yeah, I think this kind of phenomena is by no means unique to China. In the US or Europe where there are a lot of migrants, especially in the schooling setting, you can see this segregation or limited efforts to integrate students. There’s quite some studies that shows how differentiated practices by teachers and also differentiated language used by teachers to express their different aspiration for those students, because they often expect more from those local, whether it’s white or French students, while with immigrant students they often play down their expectations, which has a very negative feedback mechanism for the migrants or immigrants. So it’s kind of global phenomenon today, especially with nativist sentiments rising around major cities where migrants are often perceived as threats or burdens to the local society, even though they do rely on cheap migrant labor for transportation, domestic help, child care and elderly care. Right, so this tension, I borrowed a phrase from scholar Friedman’s work, “urban growth dilemma”: it’s a dilemma because there is a very contradictory kind of pulling out and pulling in forces felt in the government level also amongst locals and those migrant communities.

TS: Minhua, why Shanghai and how did you get into these schools and find people to talk to?

ML: Actually when I started my research I tried not to focus on Shanghai. I went to Hangzhou and also Beijing, but I found over time that Shanghai presented itself to be the most intriguing and also most viable option for me. First of all I come from Shanghai; I have a lot of networks that can help me to pull strings to get me access to public schools, which usually is very hard because I wanted to do participant observation, so I wanted to sit in the classroom as well as the teacher’s office. You need networks, “guanxi”, social networks, to do that. But more importantly I think politically Shanghai presents a very important and interesting case. So in the 90s most migrant studies in China focus on the Pearl River Delta and gradually Beijing, because there’s a famous Zhejiang village in Beijing so there are several important anthropological work on that community. Shanghai was actually relatively understudied, however Shanghai did see rapid growth in its migrant population, especially after Pudong’s opening up.

TS: The early 1990s.

ML: Shanghai has very low or negative natural population growth by birth because Shanghai urban households produce less and less children, so the population growth was very much triggered, contributed by the migrants, so one out of three children in Shanghai do not have a Shanghai hukou. So I think it’s very important to understand how those non-local children grow up in Shanghai and make turns with all those differentiated policies. Certainly, Shanghai is a metropolitan city that has been shaped by migrants. Even back in the late 19th century and early 20^th century and there’s quite a lot of historical studies about the social discrimination and stratification within the city in the Republican era, so we know this notorious label people use against this certain kind of people, the Subei people, so prejudice, pride and prejudice is a constant theme in Shanghai. Shanghai, local Shanghainese, are often very self-conscious about their own identity and the advantage and prestige that this city gives and a lot of migrants self-consciously talking about how we are the “waidiren”, we are the outsiders. There is a spatial, cultural, and political hierarchy pre-existing in this city, so I am very interested to see how this hierarchy might be changing or being reinforced, in which ways, so I think a case study of Shanghai will be very interesting to study the politics of differentiation and citizenship.

TS: How do you feel doing research in Shanghai, you’re from Shanghai. What was it like?

ML: It was a very interesting process, and I think a lot of authors would start their first books with a lot of biographical details, because that’s where you draw your insights from. So for me this project is partly personal, I am from Shanghai but I grew up in Pudong, so I witnessed the transformation of the former rural area of Shanghai which was considered to be the lower end or inferior part of Shanghai, and people are very self-conscious about this, Pudong, Puxi, upper and lower sides of the city divided by the Huangpu river. So I have been interested in the issue of differentiation and prejudice since childhood. Growing up in Pudong allowed me to witness the changing social and demographic structure of the local society because when I was in primary school all students were local coming from nearby towns…

TS: Did you speak Shanghainese at that stage a lot in school?

ML: No, so when I grew up the Chinese government had this Putonghua campaign. So we grew up speaking more Putonghua than Shanghai dialect. Of course when our teachers, especially those senior teachers cannot pop up dialect or speak with a very strong Shanghainese accent, but I think my generation grew up very used to speaking Putonghua, and this Shanghai local identity has been…

TS: Diluted a bit...

ML: Yeah, it’s become weaker. But later when I re-visited my primary school you can see in front of the gate there’s a Chinese map indicating where all the students come from, and my teacher who still remains there cannot help telling me my primary school has become a migrant school. Even though it remains public, the student body is composed almost entirely of non-local students coming from different parts of China. So I got interested in their lives and when I was thinking about my dissertation project I was back in Shanghai visiting my family, there was a carpenter from Zhejiang province who came to my house and asked me for advice on her daughter’s college application and I realized, wow, here is the carpenter who moved to Shanghai in the early 80s making furniture and helping do interior decoration, now his children are already in college or thinking about applying for college. So a whole generation is now coming of age. Around 2004 or 2005 there was very little studied about them. I decided to follow that thread and do that research. So it is personal in that sense. And while I was doing my field work I was hanging out with my own local friends who are mostly professionals working in joint ventures, multinational companies and to hear how they…

TS: School friends, friends from secondary, primary school?

ML: Yes, and it’s kind of interesting to see and hear how they, their perceptions of the migrants and how they complain about public hospitals being crowded and the schools, increasing competition for a limited number of good schools.

TS: So again it sounds like urban politics elsewhere in some ways.

ML: Yeah, the story of those migrants in Shanghai can find a lot of resonance across the world where you have pre-existing social stratus and newcomers have to navigate through a very complex web of prejudice and discrimination.

TS: What was the biggest challenge in writing the book?

ML: To find a voice, and to come up with an overall framework that can pull all the stories, spread over ten years, to come together to tell a story, and compose a narrative that is coherent. And in the process the selection is very hard, because I said I left out a lot of material, even though my readers will tell you that’s very common, you always end up using much less data than you have collected. But because the project becomes personal as you follow up with those informants it’s harder to pick and choose and present in a way that becomes like a theoretical argument. So that part is pretty hard, you are shredding a lot of things that you still maybe feel emotionally attached to.

TS: Well congratulations Minhua on the book, it’s a great read. Lots of wonderful stories and insights into the complexity and diversity of life in contemporary China. Thanks very much for talking to us today on our CCS podcast.

ML: Thanks very much for giving me the chance to talk about my book, and I hope to hear you talk about your book too. Thank you very much.

TS: Great, thank you very much, everybody.

This transcript has been edited slightly for readability.