Since the first wave of rural-urban migration in the late 1970s (Chen 2012) when older sister Xiang and younger sister Xia migrated, the Chinese government has launched a series of reforms that have changed the situation for the second-generation rural migrants. First, one of the most important of these is the hukou household registration system, mentioned earlier. The
hukou system regulates and restricts population mobility. It was one of three key instruments used by the Chinese government to push industrialization in the Maoist era. Today, it is one of the most important mechanisms determining entitlement to public welfare, urban services and, more broadly, full citizenship. In its application, it is the basis for the most serious form of institutional exclusion against mainly rural residents. Hukou is used to regulate China's population mobility (Chan and Buckingham 2008, 587; Zhao 2018, 22). Reform of China's hukou system has been in progress for many years.
The main step in reform of the hukou system has been implemented in small towns/cities, where obtaining a local hukou became much easier. But in large cities and metropolitan urban areas where many migrants work, progress has been slow. The hukou reform in large cities tends to focus on giving a local hukou to migrants who have relatively high education or those with the ability to purchase commercial housing. Since the majority of floating migrants – including the migrants from the Huang family, fall into neither category, a local hukou continues to be beyond their reach (Liang and Ma 2014, 284). Although the hukou reform has not made significant change to young rural migrants’ livelihood, the relaxation of policy has encouraged more permanent migration (Zhao 2018, 22).
Second, farmers in rural areas were granted more property rights, allowing them more freedom to “transfer, rent out or mortgage collectively-owned rural land on the market” (Zhao 2018, 22). Although the land reform helped to increase the productivity of land and also increased the labor productivity, as noted in chapter two, it also created a significant labor surplus in rural areas. Compared to the first-generation migrant workers, the second-generation of migrant workers have less need to spend less time in the fields, and they have more time and opportunity to do non-farm activities. Therefore, second-generation migrants are more likely to engage in migration than their parents’ generation because they have little incentive and less need to devote their labor to farming, and little desire to join the rural surplus labor force.
Third, due to Chinese state’s increased attention to the education of the rural population, there has been significant expansion of rural education, including the “implementation of the 9- year compulsory education law and the free compulsory education reform in both rural and urban areas” (Zhao 2018, 22). As Montgomery writes, The Compulsory Education Act in 2006 ensured rural migrant children free access to compulsory education (encompassing six years of primary and three years of junior secondary education) in state schools. Wide-scale demolition of private schools continues while migrant children are still turned away from the state school system in large numbers (Montgomery 2012, 593). Nonetheless, increased rural educational attainment has provided the rural youth with more knowledge of urban modernity, wealth, adventures, and more incentive for individual pursuits. These three reforms together have contributed to the changes in migration opportunities and trajectories among the younger generation of migrant workers. To some extent, this is illustrated in the second generation of Huang migrants.
The young adult children of the three siblings are each located differently both geographically and in relation to social class. Older brother Lian’s only son, Hua, and elder sister Xiang's two children, Jia and Jin, all voluntarily dropped out of middle school when they were in their mid-teens, leaving their hometown to go to cities and to follow their migratory dreams. This echoes Pessar and Mahler’s description of “…youth who envision themselves as becoming migrants to such a degree that they stop attending school, seeing very little utility in education…” (2001, 8).
In comparison, younger sister Xia's daughter, Hui, who grew up in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, is the only one of the four cousins in the family who received a college education and now resides overseas. The lives of the third-generation members of this family differ greatly from the lives of their grandparents, Xiu and Chun, who struggled with starvation and lacked education, growing up under the commune system of socialist China. Their lives also differ from those of their parents who, as first-generation migrants, experienced the early turbulent reform era that began in the late 1970s. The members of the younger generation were born with better living conditions, more educational opportunities, and with greater access to urban consumer culture and internet and communication technologies under China's capitalist reform. However, all three cousins who grew up in their rural hometowns chose to drop out of school and followed the example of Xia and Xiang, migrating and becoming urban wage laborers in the manufacturing and service sectors. Throughout my interviews with the two second- generation migrants, specifically, Xiang’s two children, I was intrigued by how their
migration choices were driven by different motives from those of their parents and their aunt Xia. Given their greater educational opportunities and fewer financial constraints, I wondered
why the three cousins voluntarily gave up their educational opportunities and chose instead to engage in migration.