Young Women Rural Migrant Workers in China’s West: Benefits of Schooling?

This paper explores the association of rural schooling with empowerment of female rural migrant workers in remote Western China.It asks what school-related intrinsic and instrumental capabilities enhanced their urban lives and their role as“drivers for development”in urbanizing China.The analysis of a long-term observational study of the females of one cluster of villages shows that recently-arrived(2015)young rural new-migrant workers manifested enhanced capabilities associated with their schooling in four dimensions of social freedoms:protective security against early arranged marriage,enhanced occupational opportunity,constructive social arrangements founded in rural identity,and cognitive and aspirational capabilities.Lower educational attainment and achievement are associated with fewer and weaker empowerment capabilities across all dimensions.Political empowerment capabilities in the sense of civil rights and entitlements have no foundation in earlier education and are lacking in their urban lives.However,a sense of“voice”is beginning to take hold among young rural migrant women.Taking a female-centric capability perspective uncovers beneficial aspects of internal migration,contributing to a more holistically theorized understanding of associated social changes.

BOOK REVIEW

Different from the emerging studies on rural migrant children,a recent hot topic is one that largely focuses on self-funded,marginalized migrant children’s schools that operate without government support(打工子弟学校,dagong zidi xuexiao).This book provides a glimpse of migrant children’s schooling experiences in an urban public school named Fly School(pseudonym),located in a southeastern Chinese city.As the author claims(p.30),this group of the migrant students enrolling in urban public schools is the majority beneficiary of the“Two Mainlies”(两为主,liangweizhu)policy,issued by the Chinese central government in 2001,that has entitled rural migrant children to access public schools in their destination cities.

Do Village Girls Gain Empowering Capabilities through Schooling and What Functionings Do They Value?

This paper explores the relationship between girls’schooling and empowerment in western China in the first decade of the 21st century.This paper adopted a capability-empowerment framework based on Sen’s capability approach into which were integrated concepts by Bourdieu,Appadurai,Nussbaum,Kabeer,and Unterhalter,to help to understand the tenacity with which village girls pursued schooling.In interviews with a group of 23 girls and young women,several valued functionings of intrinsic capability sets in the freedom dimensions of well-being and agency and their association with rising levels of school attainment were found.The girls were found to be gaining empowering capabilities through schooling,but that these were not equally distributed,neatly slicing the group into two sharply defined groups with different life paths.One set dropped out in the middle school years with a smaller set of empowerment capabilities to work in low-skilled jobs in cities,which offered them new places to change.The other set remained in school longer to achieve a larger set of empowering functionings that they converted into more substantive freedoms in a variety of settings.