China Strains to Fit Migrants Into Mainstream Classes

By Howard W. French | The New York Times
January 25, 2007

SHANGHAI, Jan. 24 — It seemed like an ordinary day earlier this month at the Jianying Hope School for migrant children here, with fidgety students settling down in their modest classrooms as their teachers prepared for the day’s lessons.

Then the police officers arrived. At least 100 of them, according to witnesses, along with even larger numbers of security agents and local officials, who quickly filled the school’s courtyard and cordoned off the site. The private elementary school, the teachers and their 2,000 students were informed, was being closed.

“They just showed up and closed the school while we were teaching,” said one teacher, who asked that her name not be used for fear of official retribution. “Children were crying, teachers were crying and people were very scared. You know in China that the police are the most frightening thing.”

The school closing has been widely criticized — even on the Web site of the state-run People’s Daily. Yet, for all the professed shock, the heavy-handed operation was just one of scores of closings in China’s big eastern cities recently as national and local authorities wrestle with a mandate that they provide a public education for the children of migrant workers, who until recently were barred from public schools in their parents’ adopted cities.

Indeed, the closing of the Jianying school, far from an effort to deprive the children of an education, was the logical, if rough-edged, consequence of the new measure.

Under complex rules governing social mobility that are a legacy of Maoist times, the laborers from rural China — who have streamed to the country’s rich eastern cities by the millions to build their towering skylines, clean and cook for others and do all kinds of work that more prosperous city dwellers shun — face widespread discrimination.

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