Industrial ecology and local citizenship of migrant children in urban China

Abstract The discrepancies in the implementation and enactment of policies on migrant children’s education in China’s largest city centers (i.e. Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen) have received increasing attention. Drawing upon data from a longitudinal ethnographic study conducted in Shanghai and policy documents issued by other city centers, we propose the concept of industrial ecology to explicate the divergent trajectories of municipal-level education policies and regulations on the systematic relocation of migrant children to local public schools. We maintain that the industrial ecology of host cities resembling either a pipeline-shaped network of companies or a root-like network of companies has a decisive impact on the inclusiveness of city-level policies. In addition, by ‘voting with their feet’ migrants relocate to other cities to acquire their fundamental citizenship rights. Therefore, China’s largest city centers implement different policies to integrate migrant children into the public education system because of the interplay between the mechanism of competition between the host city and adjacent cities for retaining the workforce and the ‘voting with their feet’ mechanism of migrants.