Page 2 of 5 Migrate or educate in China's borderlands
By Stevan Harrell and Aga Rehamo
Before 1949, Ganluo had no industrial economy whatsoever, but in the early years of the PRC, cement, brick and tile, and other small factories were built. Ganluo was classified as a poor county. Beginning in the 1980s many mineral deposits were discovered, including lead and zinc, copper, aluminum, phosphate, gypsum, limestone, and coal.
Lead and zinc led the way, as both the government and private entrepreneurs opened lead and zinc mines, and there emerged a class of rich men known as "lead bosses," among whom were a few whose wealth reached the tens of millions, as well as bosses
with wealth in the hundreds of thousands, called "mountaintop bosses".
Starting in the 1990s, Ganluo began relatively large-scale mining, which became an important source of tax revenue for the county. Exploitation of mineral resources drove the explosive growth of Ganluo's economy, raised the living standards of some of the county's ordinary citizens, and promoted Yi-Han cooperation. Nevertheless, by statistical measures, Ganluo's rural households are less well-off than Yanyuan's, with a per capita net income of 2,884 yuan in 2010. [4]
Vato Administrative Village belongs to Bobo Township in Jimi district, in the southeast of the County, on the east side of the Ganluo river about 20 kilometers from Ganluo City. There are three village small groups; groups one and two are located in a mountain hollow about 5 km from the highway; group 3 is located on a higher mountain, and until 2007 there was also a group 4, whose 27 households were all moved, because of poor living conditions, to a "temporary village" near Ganluo City.
At present, Vato has 158 households and 668 people, all Yi. Villagers have no local source of cash income other than walnuts, and about 70 young people, out of a total of 120-30 people aged 16-40 have left the village as migrant laborers. Until 2009 there were two village schools, Gujing Village School and Vato Village School; in 2009 both schools were merged into Wagujing Hope School at the foot of the mountain near the highway.
Houses in Vato Village, 2012. (Photo by Stevan Harrell)
Methods
This article draws on both authors' extensive research and teaching experience in Liangshan. [5] For this article, Harrell and Aga conducted nine days of intensive interviewing in March, 2012 in Yanyuan, including living at Yangjuan School and paying visits to elementary and middle schools in the Yanyuan County seat at Yanjing and in Shuhe Township.
We also spent four days in April in Ganluo, paying visits to schools in Vato and Asijue Townships. Harrell also visited and interviewed eight college students at three colleges in Sichuan; Aga participated in the interviews at one of the colleges. We have also made use of statistics available online and in local government reports. On the basis of the materials collected in both longitudinal and recent fieldwork, we attempt to address the questions laid out above.
Changes in education since the 1990s
Twenty years ago, there was little choice of schooling or work careers for most Nuosu children in Ganluo and Yanyuan. Children of cadre families usually went to school, at least through middle school, and in the 1990s their educational goals were to attend specialized high schools, which could lead to careers as low-level officials, health-care workers or primary or middle-school teachers.
Otherwise, people typically attended a few years of school and then dropped out to participate in the local subsistence economy of farming, herding, and forestry. All this has changed radically in the last two decades.
In Yanyuan county as a whole, according to 2010 statistics there were 26,300 secondary school students and 47,200 elementary school students, indicating that about half of elementary school graduates are in middle or high school, and considering that the dropout rate between middle school and high school is still probably rather high, that a majority of elementary graduates now continue to middle school.
However, although we do not have statistics comparing school attendance rates in Yanyuan's basin and mountain areas, evidence strongly suggests that the Yi population, which lives primarily in the mountain districts, has lower rates of school continuation than the Han population: they have fewer and smaller schools and fewer teachers per capita than the basin districts. [6]
Even though Han children still have better access to education, Yi children's schooling opportunities have increased dramatically in the last ten years. In our field site in Yangjuan and Pianshui villages, education was relatively rare before 2000: a 1999 survey showed that only 26% of children between the ages of 7 and 13 were actually attending school.
Although the number shot up to 84% when Yangjuan Primary School was constructed (92% of boys and 76% of girls), it was unclear how long the children would stay in school. When the first class of 34 students graduated from the 6th grade in 2005, however, 23 continued to middle schools, and of those 15 graduated from high school in 2011 and 12 of them began higher education, mostly in three-year teacher-training programs at vocational-technical colleges.
Another 11 students from the graduating class of 2006 are now attending colleges, two of them in four-year degree programs and the others in junior-college (da zhuan)programs. Of the graduating classes of 2007-2009, similar proportions are attending high school (about 40% of the classes of 2007 and 2008, and about 75% of the class of 2009), and of the classes of 2010-2012, virtually all are in middle school.[7]
Yangjuan Primary School, Built 2000. (Photo by Haldre Rogers, 2009).
Since 2000, great changes have also come to education in Ganluo. The elementary matriculation rate rose from 75% in 1991 to 98% in 2000. In 2006, there were 148 elementary schools with 28,479 students, and 19 secondary schools, including six middle schools, two secondary sections of nine-year comprehensive schools, one comprehensive secondary school including both middle and high school, and one vocational junior high school.
There were a total of 7,359 secondary students, including 923 high-school students. Here as in Yanyuan, many students quit school during or after middle school.
At present there are two noteworthy trends among Ganluo students. One is going to school outside the county. As perceived quality differences between urban and rural schools grow, people's ambitions have changed from "going to school" to "going to a good school".
In 2010, 1,180 elementary and middle school students with Ganluo household registrations were attending school in other places; 63% of these were Yi students. Two hundred and sixty two of them were attending school within Liangshan Prefecture (mostly in Xichang), while 918 were outside the Prefecture, with 383 in neighboring Ya'an Prefecture, mostly in Hanyuan and Shimian Counties; 191 in Chengdu Municipality, and 124 in Mianyang Municipality. Others were scattered about western Sichuan.
The other trend is students leaving school to migrate for labor before finishing their nine years' compulsory education, or else immediately after graduating from middle school. We have no comprehensive statistics, but one of us (Aga) interviewed a class of 40 sixth-graders, of whom only three expressed the wish to continue to middle school, and the rest wanted to migrate to find a job as soon as they graduated. We can see from this that even though the opportunities for schooling have expanded greatly, there has been some backlash in the form of students quitting school early.
In 2000, Vato village was still a very isolated area, cut off from the world, without electricity or convenient transportation. People's livelihood was poor; they lived in mud houses or in the case of a few families even in straw houses. They ate potatoes and corn, and could eat wheat products or rice only on New Year's and holidays.
Their lifestyle was accordingly simple, working in the daytime and resting at night. Their favorite amusement was to go to market at the Township town, buy a few simple necessities, and if they were in good economic shape, trade some corn for rice.
Rural electrification teams arrived in November 2000, and for the first time there was light in the pitch-black night - every household installed an electric light, but no one had the money to buy a television, so everyone still went to bed early every evening. The villagers had just about no means of recreation; the most frequent was to gather at the entrance to the village and chat.
Everyone spoke Nuosu; other than the village head and party secretary who could speak a little Chinese, almost no one else understood it or could speak it.
In 2000, the village schools were founded and welcomed two regular teachers [8]; before this a villager with an elementary-school education had taught the children. One of the teachers was Han; because of language and perhaps cultural barriers, villagers had very little interaction with him. At that time, the Gujing Village School had four run-down mud-walled rooms, of which three were used for grades two, four, and six; the fourth was the teachers' dormitory. The curriculum consisted mainly of Chinese and mathematics; sometimes there were also music classes.
There were fewer than 30 students; before the two regular teachers arrived their grades were horrible - fourth-graders could not write their own names, and their grades in Chinese and mathematics were in the single-digits out of 100 possible points. School hours were from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m; the students did not eat lunch at the noon hour; at most they would bring a few potatoes to school to eat.
After school, most students would cut grass for pigs and carry it in a backpack basket or help their parents with housework. Students were often absent from school, particularly at busy agricultural seasons, when their families were conducting rituals at home, when they were going to market, or when someone had died in the village.
The remains of Vato's first school, closed 2009, photographed 2012. (Photo by Stevan Harrell).
In 1998, the Chinese government directed that rural schools ought to concentrate human and material resources, and improve the quality of six-year central schools. In order to diminish barriers between villages and townships, the policy demanded that local governments consolidate village and township schools, and in principle not establish any new village schools.
Several villages could establish a complete elementary school together, and such schools should serve students within a radius of 3 kilometers, within which it was not permitted to have or establish new schools. Gujing and Vato Village Schools fell within the scope of this educational reform, and separately in 2005 and 2009 they were incorporated into the Wagujing Hope School, a village complete elementary school with six classes, eight teachers, and 221 students, from Vato, Wagujing, and Guwen Administrative Villages. There was no more school in Vato.
The current Village School has a three-story classroom building and a broad playground, and since June 2012 the government has instituted Mountain District Lunch Programs, so that students no longer need to bring potatoes to school; every day children can have a carton of milk and a roll to eat.
The boom in labor migration
The increasing availability of education has, however, not been the only change to the life course expectations for Nuosu village children. During the last 15 years, labor migration opportunities have also opened up, so that families need to choose between sending children to further education and sending them out to work.
Although rural people from core areas of China had already begun in the 1980s to migrate in large numbers to work in cities, Liangshan people were slower to take up migration. And in the 1990s and early 2000s, labor migration did not necessarily produce income. Liu and Vermander and Monteil have both told stories of Nuosu people who went to work in factory, service, or construction jobs during this time, and ended up with very little income; indeed, some wound up with drug habits and HIV, instead (Liu 2010). But in the past few years, things have been changing. Labor migration increasingly presents genuine opportunities to earn extra income, and that has influenced family strategies and life courses of many people.
This has resulted, quite naturally, in increased numbers of people going out to work, despite improved opportunities for education. A 2012 survey of 69 Vato residents revealed that of the 40 young people in the survey who were no longer in school, 38 were currently working outside, and two were temporarily at home helping their wives take care of infants. Of the 38 working outside, 22 were elementary graduates, five had completed the first year of middle school, six had completed the second year, and five had graduated from middle school before going out to work.
Those who left after primary school were mostly people in their twenties who had gone to school before the "two waivers and one supplement" program, which eliminated tuition and miscellaneous fees and provided small living stipends for boarding students, so most families could not afford to send children to middle school; in addition, at that time there was no good transportation to the middle school at the township headquarters.
In the White Yi district on the other side of the county, by contrast, residents identified more strongly with education and had a somewhat higher standard of living, and most of the students who went out to work did so after completing the first two years of middle school or after middle school graduation. It seems likely that as the policy of free education gradually expands, more Vato villagers will complete two years or graduate from middle school before going out to work.
But even those who wait until middle school graduation still go out to work, for several reasons. First, by the time they graduate from middle school, most Yi students are already 16 years old, which is the official minimum age for non-child laborers. Second, when students in the second year of middle school begin to think about their academic future, those who come from poor families or have poor grades begin to think they should give up studies.
Third, while elementary and middle-school are almost free, good high school education in Ganluo is in short supply and expensive; at present there is only one high school, and competition is tough. Students who do not score high on the admissions test can only attend if they pay a high fee of 10,000 yuan.
The yearly expenses for a high school student in Ganluo, 2011-12:
Tuition at 800 yuan per semester, 1,600
Living expenses at 600 yuan per month, 6,000
Fee for extra classes at 280 yuan per semester, 560
Transportation at 20 yuan per week, 800
Miscellaneous expenses at 10 yuan per week, 400
This brings expenses to 9,360 for a student who tested in, with an additional 10,000 yuan supplemental fee for a student who did not test in. Since the per capita income of ordinary people did not exceed 2,500 yuan per year, if no one from the family is outside earning money, there is no way to support a student in high school even at the lower rate. As a consequence, we found only one student in Vato who was currently in high school; he was the son of the village head, who had borrowed 10,000 yuan to support his son's education.
Discussing labor migration, Vato 2012. (Photo by Stevan Harrell.)
In these circumstances, most students migrate to work of their own accord, and are not compelled to do so by their parents; most parents hope that their children can continue for a few more years of school. One villager expressed it, "Of course we would like our children to go to school longer, but they don't want to continue; they follow along with those who migrate for labor, and we can't hold them back.".
But a complex web of circumstances leads to the students' decision. The most important of these are poor school performance, high family expenses for things other than education, and the attractions of labor migration and the city itself:
1) Poor school performance. Students from Yi villages such as Vato are studying in an unfamiliar cultural environment, and language and cultural differences are among the reasons why they do not do well in school. The average Chinese and mathematics scores in the village schools were less than 30%. Another big factor is the students' poor attendance record. Teachers indicated that the students were often absent because of rituals conducted at home, going to market, or relatives' marriages and deaths.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
