As the end of middle school approached this year, Zhan Haite (占海特), 15, faced two choices: Attend vocational school in Shanghai in the fall or move to her ancestral home in distant Jiangxi Province to take the high-school entrance exam and study there.
Taking the test and going to senior-high school in Shanghai, where she had lived since she was four, was not an option.
Zhan is one of millions of children whose parents belong to China’s vast migrant workforce and are barred from taking senior-high school or college entrance exams where they live by half-century-old policies on household registration, or hukou (戶口).
Photo: Reuters
The hukou system has split China’s population in two for decades, affording different privileges and opportunities to urban and rural residents. It is a major challenge for China’s new economic policymakers under Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang (李克強) as they try to push urbanization as an engine of growth.
Not content with her choices, Zhan launched a microblog in May where she argued her case online, igniting a heated national debate.
In the process, she has become the poster child for a loose-knit, but growing campaign for equal education opportunities.
“She is, of course, very important because she is a victim, and all along we have been hoping one of the children who have been hurt by these policies would stand up and represent all the victims so that the community more broadly can pay attention to the issue,” said Xu Zhiyong (許志永), a Beijing civil rights lawyer, who has campaigned for people like Zhan.
Zhan, who has been home-schooling since May, seems comfortable in the role.
“I am representative of students like me, our needs, our hopes,” she said in the two-bedroom apartment where she lives with her parents, grandmother, brother and sister.
“People should be able to take the tests where they study. There is no need to debate this,” she said.
However, there has been debate and people have taken to the streets. Beijing police yesterday broke up a small protest and detained some of the demonstrators calling for hukou reform.
“We are doing this for the right of our children to an education,” one of the protesters, who gave his family name as Tie (鐵), told reporters on a freezing street.
“We want them to get rid of these restrictive rules on household registration and give equal rights to education. We will keep fighting for it,” he added.
For as long as there have been migrants, after market reforms started more than three decades ago, there have been complaints about the hukou system’s inadequacies. Discussion of hukou reform has circulated for years, but steps have been cautious.
China’s 230 million migrant workers have been the oarsmen of the world’s second-biggest economy, but have long been treated as second-class citizens with unequal access to education, health and other services tied to official residence status.
The education issue has been particularly divisive.
Zhan’s father, Zhan Quanxi (占全喜), was detained for several days this month after publicly protesting for education rights in central Shanghai, but criminal charges were dropped.
However, his online posts have been met with sharp criticism from Shanghai hukou holders, some of whom have claimed to be part of a “Shanghai Defence Alliance.”
The verbal mud-slinging reflects a battle over turf in big cities where high-school seats can help students get into top universities, said Ralph Litzinger, a professor of anthropology at Duke University who studies Chinese migrant issues.
“In an increasingly stratified and almost insanely competitive society, of which the rural-urban hukou system is one part. Zhan Haite’s case is ultimately, in my view, about uncertain and unpredictable Chinese futures,” he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema