Lingering Educational Inequities under the Chinese Hukou System: A Human Opportunities Perspective

Abstract: China, an Asian powerhouse, has reached record levels of economic growth since milestone market reforms started in the late 1970s. It is poised to enter the next phase of development to join the ranks of advanced nations. Although it aspires to be a model of growth with equity by 2030, it seems unlikely to happen without further institutional progress. Institutional legacies like the Chinese hukou system has effectively created a highly stratified, segregated, and exclusive society. Hukou is more than a population census, it is also associated with rights to an array of important social services like education in the cities. It continues to institutionally exclude internal migrants from access to these entitlements, penalizing their life opportunities. The aim of the study is to quantify and compare the available and equitably allocated opportunities to access basic public education in the cities between rural migrant children and urban non-migrant children, under hukou. It uses the World Bank’s Human Opportunity Index (HOI) methodology built on an ‘equality of opportunity’ framework to analyze a cross-sectional data from the 2008 Longitudinal Survey on Rural Urban Migration in China. It further makes a Shapley decomposition to identify important factors that contribute to these total inequalities. Results indicate that although overall opportunities were comparable, a disaggregation reveals worrying disparities. Opportunities for rural migrant children were consistently the lowest and the least equitably allocated in the coastal provinces. Hukou status was the largest significant contributor to total inequalities. Those at the junior middle school stage were relatively disadvantaged compared to their younger peers. These findings highlight that more affirmative action in the education of rural migrant children is needed to close opportunity gaps.