Description
Basic education in China eliminates school choice at the compulsory level by restricting enrolment to school districts or administrative areas based on hukou location, property ownership and social insurance payments by the student's parents. This system also creates new implicit social boundaries along administrative divides, differentiating between urban, suburban, rural, and migrant access to educational resources. Compared to high barriers to education in first-tier cities reported in scholarship, second-tier cities with high-quality educational resources have become new destinations for educational migrants. Using Xi'an as an example, this study uses semi-structured interviews with migrants and secondary sources to investigate the implementation of educational equity policies in China's second-tier cities. I examine how implicit educational boundaries are maintained or altered following the relaxation of hukou settlement restrictions, highlighting asymmetries between implicit social boundaries in education and the geographical boundaries of the city. While policy development and the provision of public resources have not kept pace with the actual rate of urban expansion, the issue of migrant children's education has been prioritised even above that of suburban Xi'an hukou holders, resulting in attention and policy responses through the intervention of higher-level government institutions.| Period | 13 Dec 2023 |
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| Event title | First Wisdom Lake Postgraduate Researcher Development Conference & 2023 XJTLU Postgraduate Research Symposium |
| Event type | Conference |