By Liu Jinsong (劉金松)
Nation, page 10
Issue No. 568, May 7, 2012
Translated by Zhu Na
Original article: [Chinese]

When they wake up on Thursday morning, final-year high school students across China will begin one of most stressful tests of their lives, the national college entrance examination, which is held over two days in a series of two-hour sessions.

But, for some of those candidates – the children of migrant workers – the stress began many months ago, when they had to leave their parents, travel thousands of kilometers and enroll at schools in towns they thought they’d left behind. 

The approach of the exam, or gaokao, focuses people’s attention on the predicament of those children, who are barred for sitting the test anywhere except their home provinces.

However, there are signs that things may be changing, particularly in Shandong and Guangdong.

Shandong will become the first province to launch the policy allowing students without a local registration, or hukou, to sit the exam at its schools. It announced the policy early in May and the changes will come into effect in 2014. Fujian is introducing a similar scheme.

Also in May, Guangdong announced plans for a 2014 pilot program that will open the exam up to migrant workers’ children studying in Guangdong.

Guangdong had a migrant population of 36.67 million, the largest of any Chinese province; 3.39 million of their children are in mandatory education - primary and junior high schools – and the figure is rising by 250,000 a year.

Not instant answer

One migrant worker from Hunan, Ms. He, isn’t celebrating so fast.

“When my daughter heard this news, she was so excited, but I still have my concerns,” said Ms. He, whose 12-year-old is in the second year of junior high school and will next year sit an exam for high school entry. Ms. He is concerned about the lack of details on university enrollment for migrants’ children.

The biggest question with gaokao reform concerns university admission, rather than the location of the tests. At the moment, different provinces and cities have different thresholds for admission to the same universities. For example, students from Beijing and Shanghai who might get places at top universities would have ended up at an average university if they had got the same gaokao scores in other provinces.

18-year-old Xiaoji (小吉) came to Guangdong with his parents and has been studying here since he enrolled at primary school in Guangzhou, the province’s capital. He’s now in his third year at high school, but will have return to his hometown in Chongqing and enroll at school there in order to sit the gaokao.

He can’t sit the exam in any province other than his place of registration (hukou), but he can’t even sit the exam there unless he is enrolled at a local school.

“It’s unfair. My parents have worked so hard in Guangdong for many years, why do their children have to go back to start from the beginning?” said Xiaoji.

As of 2010, there were more than 220 million Chinese working or living in cities other than their hometowns. In Beijing, the number of permanent residents without a Beijing hukou reached seven million, or 36 percent of the resident population. The proportion is slightly higher in Shanghai, and in Shenzhen it’s 77 percent.

A huge number of the people living in cities for which they don’t have a hukou will never go back to their hometowns - their career, family, property and social life are rooted in the cities where they now live.

However, according to China's current college enrollment system, students can only take the gaokao in the cities, villages and counties where their household registration is held.

The issue with migrant workers’ children involves the redistribution of education resources as well as local governments’ budgets.

The number of registered high school students determines the size of local government subsidies, said Zhang Jishun (張濟(jì)順), who was formerly the communist party secretary at East China Normal University. If migrant workers’ children can take gaokao in different cities then the allocation of those subsidies will be confused. 

Any solution to the problem will have to be led by the central government.

Any would-be reformers will need the courage to create a new system, balancing the interests of local governments, education departments, colleges, universities, local residents and migrants.

This story also uses material from two other stories that appeared in the same May edition of the newspaper:  2014山東破冰   廣東：預(yù)告“派糖”