Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines education as a lived site where non-hukou second-generation migrants forge upward mobility alongside structural exclusion. It explores how their strategic navigations generate future-making possibilities within constrained trajectories.

Paper long abstract

In Shenzhen, China’s “City of the Migrant Bird”, education embodies the central paradox of aspiration and exclusion for the city’s vast non-hukou population. This paper explores how, for second-generation migrant youth, schooling functions as a primary lived site where hopes for upward mobility and urban belonging are simultaneously experienced and structured by the persistent inequalities of the hukou (household registration) system.

While much research has focused on migrant children in Beijing or Shanghai, the distinctive case of Shenzhen, which is built by and for migrants, remains understudied. This gap obscures how polarised futures are configured in a context of pervasive internal migration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and personal narratives, this paper addresses this gap by tracing how educational trajectories in Shenzhen produce and reflect deepening social divisions.

The paper argues that these youth engage in a form of strategic and future-oriented agency. They treat education not merely as a ladder to mobility, but as a critical resource for accumulating cultural capital, negotiating their disadvantaged status, and imagining viable futures within structural constraints. It concludes that their tactical engagement with education represents a significant, though often overlooked, site of possibility in the face of a polarising urban future.

Moving beyond policy-focused research, this paper offers a micro-level understanding of how migrant youth engage with education. It details their creative agency, revealing a site of possibility within the constraints of the hukou system.