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China’s contemporary rural migration has brought to Chinese cities over 200 million adults and more than fifty percent of these adults’ children by 2011. What are the educational opportunities for children of rural migrants? How does rural migration reshape the landscape of educational inequality? This paper unites two separate strands of theories on rural migration and educational inequality to understand the emerging new forms of inequality of educational opportunity measured by enrollment status and types of schools among rural migrant children aged 7-15. A rare source of data from a large sample of nearly all rural migrants nationwide provides this key information for up to five children of each rural migrant family, regardless of whether the children live with the parents or left behind. Descriptive and multivariate analysis finds the overwhelming importance of rural migration systems and differentially stringent policy on destinations’ household registration in the changing educational inequality, manifesting the missing theoretical linkages between rural migration and educational inequality. Building on these patterns, the paper discusses the rising conceptual issues in our effort to formulate a theoretical framework guiding our next-step research on the structural and institutional mechanisms by which China’s urban schools are transformed.
* CEAS Issues in Contemporary East Asia Colloquium Series, co-sponsored with Penn Sociology Department Education and Inequality Workshop