Zhen Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at Zhejiang University. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from Brown University and worked as a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong before joining Zhejiang University. Her current research focuses on processes of internal migration in China and immigrant assimilation in the United States, as well as their impact on family members in migrant households. 

While previous studies and policies have focused exclusively on rural children affected by parental migration, this project argues that urban left-behind children also deserve scholarly and public policy attention, as they might also face challenges resulted from absence of parents due to migration. Building on the literature of migration, intergenerational transfer of inequality and sociology of education, this project uses the first two waves of China Education Panel Survey to examine the following research questions: 1) How does migration (both parental migration and children’s own migration) affect adolescents’ cognitive development and school enrollment? 2) Does the effect of parental and child migration on children’s developmental outcomes vary by urban/rural origin of the children? In particular, this study investigates how parental social capital and school-level contextual factors contribute to shaping educational inequalities between migrant and non-migrant students and also by rural and urban origin. Results show that urban left-behind are not immune to the potential adverse impact of parental migration. Although the impact of migration on children’s cognitive development is limited after adjusting for selection of migration, children left-behind, particularly those completely left-behind, are much more likely to drop out of junior high school compared to their counterparts in non-migrant families and those who migrate with their parents, regardless of urban/rural hukou type. The adverse impact of being left-behind is shown to be even stronger for children of urban hukou, as they are less likely to have extended family support networks and might be less adjusted to the migration culture prevalent in rural communities. Causal analysis adjusting for selection of child migration suggest that policies enabling more children to migrate with their parents and enroll in urban public schools would significantly benefit those left-behind by their migrant parents. 

Jaap Nieuwenhuis works at the Department of Sociology at Zhejiang University. He received his PhD at Utrecht University and worked as a postdoc at Delft University of Technology. His major research interests include understanding whether neighborhood and school characteristics matter for adolescents’ developmental and educational outcomes.