Education, Migration and Family Relations Between China and the UK

The Transnational One-Child Generation

Mengwei Tu

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781787548657, 9781787146730
• eBook ISBN: 9781787430051
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Education, Migration and Family Relations between China and the UK: The Transnational One-Child Generation provides a fresh perspective on the understanding of transnational families, examining the one-child generation of Chinese migrants who came to the UK to study, and their parents who remain in China, separated from their only child. As these highly-educated, capital-bearing Chinese migrants continue to pursue their careers and establish families in the West, a deeply significant dilemma emerges: as the only child in the family, how do they balance their personal aspirations with responsibilities to their parents? 

This study is based on interviews conducted with the one-child generation of Chinese migrants in the UK and their parents in China. It charts the life course of these migrants, from their upbringing in China, to their decision to study overseas, and establish their lives abroad. Both children and parents reveal the human complexity that lies behind these choices regarding transnational mobility and immobility, temporal and spatial changes that have challenged the basis of traditional Chinese family values, which dominated intergenerational relations in China for more than two thousand years. 

Ultimately, this fascinating book demonstrates that the shifting multidimensional nature of an individual's identity demands a re-examination of definitions of international students, migrants, and family.

Chapter 1

China’s Modernization: A Generational Leap

Never in history have so many people made so much economic progress in one or two generations.
(Li, 2010, p. 3)

My summer holidays usually involved time with my grandparents. My parents were both working full time, and so I was sent to spend the two months in summer with my paternal grandparents who lived in a nearby city. My grandmother was born in 1940, she went to a teacher-training college and became a primary school teacher in 1959. She taught Chinese literature, but in my young 10-year-old mind I thought she should have taught mathematics because she was very good at numbers, especially to do with saving money. Having retired from a state school with a good pension and enough savings, she was, however, against spending, and she was a passionate supporter of frugality.

My grandparents lived in a pleasant flat, but their bathtub was always half-full of water. The water dripped constantly from the water tap above. It was turned on only slightly to the precisely-measured degree which was loose enough to have 24-hour dripping water, but could not be sensed by the old-style water meter. In this way, we could use the water for most of our daily activities for free. However, compromises had to be made in exchange for ‘free’ water: there was no separate shower facility so we had to clean ourselves from a bucket. For a child frugality meant inconvenience, discipline and no treats. Although in the 1990s, my generation was called ‘little emperors’ and ‘little empress’ and the older generation was supposed to pamper or spoil us, I did not identify with such images nor did the many one-child participants I interviewed for this research.

It occurred to me only much later that my grandparents’ frugality may have been rooted in the resource shortage they experienced in the planned economy from the 1950s to the 1980s, including the period of the Great Famine (1959–1961). In 1959 the monthly ration of grain allocated to my grandmother was 30 kg, and it was reduced to 29 kg in 1960. My parents were born in the mid-1960s. They grew up in a planned economy when, in their words, ‘everybody was poor’. However, the state of being ‘poor’ is relative. In most cases my parents were referring to the lack of diversity in income resources and consumer goods ‘back then’, in comparison to the market economy we have today. Nevertheless there were variations in the income level within the planned economy. For example, my father’s childhood had more financial security because both his parents were professionals while my mother’s parents were not. Nevertheless, growing up in cities, access to food security, education resource, and medical care was much easier for my parents compared to the people who grew up in the countryside.

By the time my parent’s generation started working and establishing families in the 1980s, the modernization policies that were taking shape in the 1970s started to impact on their lives. The 1978 economic reform and the 1979 one-child policy transformed the profile and outlook of Chinese families during the final three decades of the 20th century. At the same time the social, economic and political changes posed challenges for families. Although most of the significant policies we focus in this book were national-level policies, their impact on Chinese families was not clear-cut. To understand the generational leap between the one-child generation and their parents’ generation, we need to go back in time to the social changes before and after the economic reform and the one-child policy.

Pre-1978 Social Stratification

During Mao’s communist era (1950s–1970s), households were classified into ‘red’ and ‘black’ categories. The former referred to the revolutionary class including landless peasants, factory workers and cadres. The latter referred to the so-called ‘anti-revolutionary classes’ including landowners, ‘right-wingers’ (mostly intellectuals) and urban property owners. The classification was largely based on the occupation of the individual’s father as well as the individual’s ‘political performance’ in party-led campaigns (Bian, 2002). Classes in the ‘red’ category, which were regarded as the ‘former exploited classes’, were favoured in school admissions and job assignments, while the ‘former exploiting class’ suffered systematic discrimination (Walder, 1989). Once labelled a certain ‘class’, it was extremely difficult for an individual to switch from one class to another.

In the late 1950s, the state introduced a strict household registration system (Hukou 户口) which limited the physical and social mobility between urban and rural residents (Whyte, 2012, Wu & Treiman, 2004). Households registered with their local office were categorized as ‘urban’ or ‘rural’. Based on the household registration system, urban residents participated in work units¹ (Danwei 单位), and rural residents belonged to communes where they took part in agricultural production. The rationing system, which lasted until the late 1980s, was carried out through work units and communes. Unlike the communes system, which was replaced by the Household Responsibility System² (家庭承包责任制), work units still exist today.³ In cities, the work units allocated jobs largely based on the individual’s political ‘class’. A job in a work unit was commonly referred to as an ‘iron rice bowl’, unlike a bowl made of clay or china which is easy to break, indicating the sense of security that came with it (Whyte, 2012). Work units provided for a wide range of welfare including housing, medical care, childcare and children’s schooling (Li, 2005).

Mao’s regime placed the emphasis on an egalitarian income distribution and stressed ‘moral instead of monetary incentives’ (Walder, 1989, p. 407). The salary and welfare provided by work units were (supposed to be) guaranteed for a lifetime. This politically rigid, economically unsustainable system soon faced the pressure of staff redundancy in the 1960s. Two years following the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, 16 million urban youths were allocated to rural areas to be ‘educated through hard manual work’ (Guan, 1995). The number of adolescents involved in the ‘sent-down movement’ accounted for 10.5% of the urban population in 1979 (Pan, 2002). The movement was arguably a measure to suspend the outbreak of the urban employment crisis; it consequently slowed down the rate of urbanization (Li, 2005, Walder, 1989).

Urban children from all ‘classes’ (red and black) were forcibly ‘sent down’, and even parents from a privileged background could not prevent it (Unger, 1980, Bernstein, 1977). The ‘sent-down movement’, which lasted for a decade (1968–1978), disrupted a generation of young people’s education and career paths (Zhou, 2013, Guan, 1995). In my research, parents who were born between the 1940s and early 1950s were affected by the movement, like Bolin’s father, whose education was stopped two days before the start of the Cultural Revolution. Another father, from Guangdong Province, who was also part of the ‘sent-down movement’, described his generation as the ‘lost generation’, a generation which had been dan 耽 (delay) wu 误 (mistake) – delayed by mistake.

When the great waves of the ‘sent-down youth’ returned to the city at the end of the Cultural Revolution, the state attempted to solve the massive job demand by allocating more jobs to the already oversubscribed state-owned companies, meanwhile encouraging individuals to turn to self-employment. The former method eventually led to a large number of staff redundancies during the economic reform of the 1980s and 1990s; the latter attempt witnessed the emergence of various non-state businesses (Whyte, 2012, Wu, 2006, Li, 2005). In addition, some of the ‘sent-down’ members resumed their education after 1976, while the rest were not able to do so for physical, psychological and administrative reasons (Zhou, 2013). Such a difference in education levels further divided the socioeconomic profile of that generation when skills and qualifications became essential in the reformed labour market.

Post-1978: Emerging Middle Class of China

The post-1978 economic reform witnessed the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor as well as the rise of the group in-between. The middle-range income group was commonly referred to as the ‘middle class’. A significant number of laid-off workers in the 1980s and 1990s (mainly in cities) became private business owners (Wu, 2006) while the rest of the laid-off workers struggled in poverty (Li, 2005). The former ‘red’ and ‘black’ divide rapidly blurred. However, the legacy of the communist institutions from the pre-1978 period still had an influence in shaping the new middle class: the emergence of a private sector in China was mainly the product of the transformation of state-owned enterprises. Such companies had, to a large extent, inherited personnel, a managerial system, and a political culture from their former context (Goodman, 2008).

China’s middle class has unique attributes defined by the pace of its emergence, its scale, and the political environment. China’s dramatic economic development and social change started with fiscal reform in the 1980s: ‘wealth creation’ and ‘wealth concentration’ redistributed all forms of resources. The rapid privatization of state-controlled enterprises opened up the market and made available goods, jobs and services, as well as intensifying competition for economic, cultural and political resources. Within two decades social stratification became the salient feature based on the individual’s performance in a market-orientated economy (Bian, 2002). So rapid was the economic change that Biao and Shen were able to claim that, ‘class formation and class closure are underway’ (2009, p. 513).

‘Middle class’ is an overused term. It has become more difficult to define with the formerly deprived population becoming ‘richer than before’ (Donald & Yi, 2008, p. 71). However, ‘middle class’ is also a useful term that reflects, to some extent, a group’s economic, social and cultural characteristics all at once. Overused as it is, I struggle to find a better term which helps more sharply to convey the essential features of this group to a diverse readership. Therefore, we will have to settle for a broad stipulative definition regarding the general demographic that the term ‘middle class’ refers to, but keep in mind that in China there are different ‘middle classes’. In China, the projection of the middle class derived initially from advertisements that were associated with ‘real estates, automobiles and other expensive commodities’ (Li, Chunling, 2010, p. 140). In general, the most direct middle-class aspirations were a ‘relatively high and stable’ income, a ‘professional or managerial’ occupation, a ‘higher’ education and the enjoyment of a ‘comfortable’ lifestyle (Li, Chunling, 2010, pp. 139–140).

Little did the major middle-class aspirations resemble the traditional Chinese culture; rather, the aspirations originated from the image of the affluent West. According to her in-depth study of average income Chinese families in Dalian, China, in the 1990s, Vanessa Fong reported an overwhelming admiration by Chinese parents and children for the ‘First World’ (2004). Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s analysis of a ‘capital world system’ (1974) which divided the world into ‘core’ (First World), ‘peripheral’ (Third World) and ‘semi-peripheral’, Fong employed the ‘culture model of modernization’ promoted by the ‘capital world system’ as a way to explain Chinese people’s admiration for the ‘West’: it ‘motivates people to desire First World affluence and believe that participation in a modern economy will enable them to attain that affluence’[sic.] (2004, p. 14).

Unlike the emergence of the middle class in Europe, China’s middle class is believed to have emerged as a state-planned phenomenon rather than ‘a real historical force’ out of ‘a history of political struggle and mobilization’ (Crossley, 2012, p. 96). The Chinese middle class grew in a society that had a state-imposed and state-maintained economic policy which incorporated both agrarian and urban-industrial bases (Li, Chunling, 2010, Li, Cheng, 2010, Goodman, 2008). The context of the emergence of the middle class was ‘a very particular post-socialist Chinese ‘situation’ where social, cultural, political and economic forces, including the party, the state and multinational capital, intersect and jostle for legitimacy and success’ (Donald & Yi, 2008, p. 76). The Chinese leadership ‘called for “enlarging the size of the middle-income group” to give hope to the country’s still massive underclass’ (Li, Cheng, 2010, p. 11). Developing a middle class was said to be a way of expanding individual initiatives and self-driven economic growth (Goodman, 2008).

The membership of the middle class expanded rapidly. The scale of the middle class in China varies depending on the source of information as well as the criteria of definition. The Times estimated that the membership of the Chinese middle class was 250 million (Lewis, 2013b), the McKinsey model suggested that the number of middle-class people was 290 million in 2011, and will be 520 million by 2025 (Farrell et al., 2006). Because residents in the cities have more opportunities to enter middle-class professions and education, the urbanized feature of the distribution of middle-class membership is significant. The Chinese government announced that 78% of city residents will be members of the middle class by 2020 (Li, Cheng, 2010). Meanwhile, because sociologists are adopting different measuring criteria (Li, Chunling, 2010), the estimated size of the current urban middle-class ranges from 8% to 50%.

Numbers aside, the middle class in China is heterogeneous; individuals from variously labelled political ‘classes’ could acquire middle-class statu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. China’s Modernization: A Generational Leap
• Chapter 2. Growing Up, Gender and Education in China
• Chapter 3. One-Child Migrants in the UK: The Decision-Making Process, Mobility Trajectory and Parental Involvement
• Chapter 4. The One-Child Family as a Transnational Dynamic Field: Money, Childcare and Aspiration
• Chapter 5. Between Space and Time: Long-Term Home-Making in the UK and in China
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Index