Migrants fight for equal access to college

Rural migrant student Gui Jingjing will be forced to make a difficult choice this year: stay with her parents in Beijing or return to her remote, landlocked home village in southwest China's Sichuan province for further schooling in the custody of her grandparents.

Gui is one of 20 million rural children who have followed their parents to cities. At just 12 years old, she is in her third year of junior high school, three years ahead of her peers.

The Dandelion School where she studies is in a run-down community on the southern outskirts of Beijing. Sponsored by non-governmental organizations, individual and corporate donors, the hardscrabble school offers three years of junior high education exclusively for migrant children like Gui. Most of the teachers are migrants, too.

Gui said she loves the school, its anthem in particular:

"Dandelion, dandelion, flying to the east, flying to the west; floating in the breeze around the world; landing on the ground without a sound... making friends wherever we go, sending down roots wherever we are."

A member of China's "floating population," Gui says she feels like a dandelion herself, uncertain of her next stop.

Although China's household registration system no longer ties residents to their ancestral homes, migrant children like Gui are still not free to attend senior high schools or take college entrance exams outside of their home provinces.

Born and brought up in Beijing, Gui has only faint memories of her hometown. But unless her family can afford the high tuition -- at least 30,000 yuan (4,761 U.S. dollars) a year -- for private schools that are open to students from different origins, the fact that her household registration ties her to Sichuan will likely force her to return there when she finishes junior high school next summer.

Such heavy expenses are certainly out of the question for her parents, who together make no more than 40,000 yuan a year.

Gui said she often dreams of the Shangri-La that fourth-century poet Tao Yuanming described in his poem "Peach Blossom Spring."

"Life in that secluded utopian village was simple and tranquil and everyone was happy," she said. "On top of it, there was no such thing as 'us' and 'them'."

THE DILEMMA

For Gui and her parents, the biggest dilemma is whether she should stay with her parents in Beijing at the risk of dropping out of school, or go back to Sichuan, where she will have to work hard in seclusion for three years in exchange for a much-desired college education.

In China, unbalanced economic growth has led to the uneven allocation of education resources. Different provinces use different textbooks and testing systems. Colleges and universities offer more spots for urban kids -- sometimes for those with lower scores, too.

Students whose household registration ties them to cities like Beijing and Shanghai therefore have more chances to enter top universities than their peers in other provinces.

Matriculation is also easier in far-flung, scarcely-populated places like Gansu and Xinjiang, compared with the more populous provinces of Hubei, Henan and Sichuan.

So for migrant students like Gui, attending senior high school in Beijing may not necessarily be a wise choice. Under the current policy, they have to return to their hometown for the college entrance exam, or "gaokao," in three years -- and are very likely to fail the test, given the different curriculum and testing systems.

Figures provided by the Beijing education commission indicate that about 400,000 migrant children were studying at primary and middle schools in Beijing last year.

Unofficial statistics provided by migrant parents showed that only about 10,000 stayed on for senior high school in Beijing.

The majority of them chose to leave Beijing during junior high in order to adapt to the curriculum of rural schools in their hometowns and prepare for the gaokao.

"Most students leave in the second or third year," said Zhu Xiangyan, who teaches Chinese to third-year students at the Dandelion School.

Of the school's 158 junior high students, at least 40 percent plan to attend senior high school in their home provinces, she said.

Gui and her classmates are pinning their hopes on a new policy that is widely expected to remove barriers and treat them as native Beijingers by allowing them to finish senior high school in Beijing and compete equally in the gaokao.

The policy initiatives, as Education Minister Yuan Guiren put it, ask Chinese cities to formulate plans before the end of this year allowing migrant workers' children to take the gaokao in those cities.

Recent figures show that China has more than 250 million farmers-turned-workers living in cities. An estimated 20 million children have migrated with their parents to the cities, while more than 10 million are left behind in their rural hometowns.