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As I have mentioned Shang village is, like so many others in China, a “hollow village 空心村_,”69 _{a village in which younger adults are almost completely absent. Many or most} between the ages of 18 and 45 have gone out to work as migrant laborers, leaving their parents and children back in the village. According to villagers, the first tide of migration started around the early 1990s; by now this has become a established pattern of family life in Shang village.

Let’s start with formal education. There is a primary school and a kindergarten in Shang village; almost every school-age child goes to the village school. The state has been pushing hard to implement the law of “Nine Years of Compulsory Education”九年义 务教育_{since 1986, encouraging an education through junior middle school for every} child.70 However many Shang village children stop after the eighth grade without

69 _{A literal translation of the two characters, 空心(kong xin), is “empty” and “heart”, meaning an important} part (the heart) is missing (emptied out). This has become a common phrase to describe the prevalent phenomenon in rural areas brought on by the tide of migration: young couples who are considered the pillar of the family are physically missing in villagers’ everyday life. This rather evocative term for a

demographic phenomenon reflects some of the tension felt by villagers and sociologists alike concerning the negative impacts of migration and the resulting changes in village communities.

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Rural education is another important topic in China’s rural research, one which goes beyond the range of my dissertation. A useful general review can be found in Emily Hannum, “Political Change and the Urban- Rural Gap in Basic Education in China, 1949 - 1990” in Comparative Education Review, 1999 43(2): 193- 211, among many other studies by education researchers. Other case studies can be referred to, for example, Suzanne Pepper 1996. Radicalism and education reform in 20th-century China: the search for an ideal

development model. Gao Mobo 1999. Gao Village: a portrait of rural life in China, Han Dongping 2000. The unknown cultural revolution: educational reforms and their impact on China's rural development.

Rachael Murphy 2002. How Migrant Labor Is Changing Rural China. One consensus reached in these studies is that basic education in rural China has experienced a radical decline since the 1980s, after a high tide in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution period. And the ideology of education has also shifted from mass education with a focus on egalitarianism and class struggle to an exam-based system emphasizing “quality, competition, individual talents and skills important in the development of science

obtaining a middle school certificate. Some even stop going to school after only six years of primary education. There are at least two main reasons for this: first, the township junior middle school – offering 7th through 9th grades – is in Zhaoying township about six kilometers away from Shang Village, and students are required to board there. It is the only junior middle school they can attend. It is not hard to imagine the inadequate conditions in this, the only secondary school for a township with a population of 80 thousand. When I was staying with Li Shu’s family, his youngest daughter was at the township junior middle school. According to her, there were nine to ten classes in each grade and about 130 – 140 students per class. With three grades all together, the number of students added up to about 4,000.71 I was amazed when she told me her dorm held 48 to 50 students in one room. Second, the courses in middle schools are mainly set up to prepare for the college entrance examination, a highly competitive national exam which is almost impossible for village children to pass. Moreover, the courses – physics,

and technology” (Hannum 1999: 200). According to statistics issued by the State Education Commission, the total number of students in China’s secondary schools in the academic year 1977-8 was 68.9 million, plus another million in specialized schools. In 1980 alone, however, the decline was nearly 14 million and during this year 23,700 secondary schools were closed down in China (see Gao 1999: 114). Since then, key-point schools proliferated, with more concentrated funding. However most of these are located in urban areas and enjoy a national funding priority commensurate with their mandate to produce highly trained graduates capable of passing the college entrance exam. In contrast, the financing of rural schools was relegated to the township and county levels. According to Hannum, “rising direct costs for educating children associated with decentralization of finance to local areas were matched by rising opportunity costs associated with the widespread adoption of for-profit family farming in the early 1980s” (1999: 200). It was against this background that the state issued the Law of Nine-year Compulsory Education, acknowledging urban-rural and regional economic disparities. But as I will show shortly, the law did little to remedy the “liberal meritocracy-oriented” (Hannum 1999) educational system and the uneven financial investment between cities and countryside. Since upward-mobility opportunities for rural children have been greatly curtailed, the population of rural China has witnessed an erosion of educational credentials yet it still produces a huge number of relatively unskilled laborers who, not surprisingly, meet the demand of the world labor markets.

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Though Li Shu also told me the number of students was larger than usual in his daughter’s school years, due to an extraordinarily high birth rate in the three years from 1989 to 1991. In these three years Shang Village had respectively 106, 104, and 87 newborn babies, in comparison to an average of 40 babies as usual. But still, an national investigation has shown a rather low ratio of teachers and students in rural schools (at 1:23) compared to the urban schools (1:18), see

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chemistry, mathematics – are felt to be especially hard for students from village schools to study. Students needing help don’t receive sufficient guidance due to the low number (about 120) of teachers and poor teaching facilities. Further, these courses, oriented toward a style of “elite education” 精英式教育_{, in which knowledge taught is based on the} expectation of a more or less lettered life, seem quite irrelevant to rural children’s

everyday life, which has much to do with manual labor.72

Knowing perfectly well that going to college is the best way to “jump out of the fate of being a peasant” 跳农门_{, parents seldom encourage their children to halt their studies} for labor migration to the cities. Rather, it is usually the child who decides to quit school or stop pursuing further education after junior middle school. On the other hand, once the child has made up his/her mind, parents do not insist on their own opinion. After all, the chance to go to college is extremely remote for rural children, in comparison to their urban counterparts, as many education scholars have indicated. And senior middle school education, for which the state no longer provides funding, is expensive.73 When young people start to work early they can at least reduce the family economic burden减轻家庭负

72 _{The plain fact that a learning habitus needs to be acquired is greatly taken for granted by the school} system. Teachers don’t ever teach students how to sit down and read books page by page. During my volunteer experience building the library room in Shang village, I noted the prevalent tendency among the school children to rub the book page so as to turn it over, which crumpled the books in a rather short amount of time, even though the children’s eagerness to read any books that are outside their class demonstrated the shortage of outside readings in the village.

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In 1985 the central government decided to shift the burden of basic education to local governments, mainly at the county level, while the latter then turned to the peasants to charge the “additional tax for education教育附加费” to support the school education. Since then, villagers had been seeing ever increasing charge of high school tuition. For a scholarly review of the unequal rural and urban education, see Zhang Yulin, “分级办学制度下的教育资源分配与城乡教育差距——关于教育机会均等问题的政治经济学探讨The educational resource distribution under the hierarchical school system and the gap between rural and urban education – an inquiry into the political economy of equal opportunities in education” at

http://www.usc.cuhk.edu.hk/wk_wzdetails.asp?id=1863, retrieved on October 20, 2008. According to a villager whose daughter was studying in a senior middle school in the county town, the average expense for a semester, including school fees, books, lodging and food, is at least 5,000RMB. While the average annual income for a Shang villager in 2005, according to the document I found in the village committee office, was about 3,400RMB.

担, as Shang villagers often said to me. If a child goes to primary school at the age of seven, after the six-year primary school education s/he will be 13 or 14 years old. After spending two to three years in junior middle school they are 15 to 17 years old. Some may stay at home for a year or two after dropping out of school, while others go to work as migrant laborers with the help of relatives or neighbors. In general, youngsters migrate to the cities to work at an age ranging from 15 to 18, usually following in the tracks of their brothers, sisters, or other fellow villagers. During their working years, they may move from one place to another, but they always tend to shift within family networks; only a few adventurers might move along a network they build on their own from relations established on the job, far from Shang village.

When young people reach the age of 18 to 20, their parents start to consider their marriage and ask the village match-makers to find a partner for their child. The difference from the procedures involved in arranging marriages in the past, however, is that before making any move, the parents consult over the phone with their children, who usually call home once a week or every other week. Even if young people have agreed to the arrangement, nothing significant will take place until they come home, usually during the spring festival, the high season for marriage. The matchmakers are supposed to know both families well, and during these home visits the intended spouses are introduced to each other. Only if the young ones feel interested in each other will arrangements continue. Negotiations over bride price, dowry, and gifts follow an expression of

willingness by the young couple to allow marriage arrangements to move forward. These issues are usually more of a concern for the parents than the young couple, though they do matter in deciding whether to continue the marriage arranging process.

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Villagers call this preliminary process “kan jia看家”, literally meaning “to see the family” or even, to see the house. Indeed, the house is such an important element in marriage that building a new house has become the most often-encountered topic in everyday conversation, as I have depicted in the previous section. Before Xusheng, Li Shu’s neighbor’s son, finally got married, his in-laws did a literal inspection of his house during the “kan jia” process. I was at Li Shu’s clinic when Xusheng’s in-law-to-bes came over to compare the neighbor’s house with Li Shu’s. I was surprised that they were so particular about the housing conditions, from the quality of house materials such as the concrete and paint, to the infrastructure including the floor, stairs, and toilet. Furniture usually is not a major issue for the groom’s family because the bride’s family generally would offer to buy a whole new set of furniture as dowry unless they are extraordinarily poor.74

Marriage is still considered to be a linkage between two families, not something simply “private” between two young individuals. And the matchmaker plays an important role in this process, because s/he is responsible for conveying his/her knowledge of the two families as completely as s/he can. A matchmaker can be a relative, a neighbor, a friend, or a fellow villager. S/he need not be, any longer, an expert in fortune telling. But if the matchmaker does not know fortune telling, villagers would usually consult

someone who can “suanming算命_” (calculate the fate) of the young people after the potential marriage has been proposed (“ti qin”提亲_{). Runhe, Li Shu’s “elder brother” with} whom I had conversed at the clinic, is the most popular yinyang xiansheng 阴阳先生 (master of yinyang) in Shang village. Even those involved with the Christian community

rely on village fortune tellers to predict whether their children will have a good marriage and also to choose the day of the wedding festivities.

In the process of “kan jia”, the prospective groom’s family, usually composed of the boy and his parents, pays a first visit to the prospective bride’s family. As a matter of course, the matchmaker is also there. A midday banquet is usually expected, and over the dinner table the seasoned parents can learn much about the personalities and lifestyles of their counterparts. The banquet is therefore considered a very important factor in decision making.75 The next step, then, will be a visit from the prospective bride’s family to the groom’s family, including a banquet hosted by the groom’s side. At this point, an important factor is housing conditions: is the house old-style or new-style, how long ago was it built, what are the furnishings in the house, how many family members live there, etc. All these household arrangements reflect well on the promise of the groom.

There are many rules involved in wedding ceremony, which I will explain more in the next chapter, which deals with local culture. Here the point at issue is that villagers, both old and young, emphasize the importance of “looking for a family” (找个人家zhao ge ren jia). They see this as a shared collective process that goes far beyond the potential

relationship between the two people to-be-married, invoking much wider networks. I talked once with Shang Sheng, Li Shu’s neighbor’s son, who came home in the Chinese New Year holiday to kan jia (see a family or house). Sheng had left home at the age of 18 and had been working in a big umbrella factory in Hangzhou for over three

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years after leaving his first job in a factory in Dongguan.76 He would turn 24 after the Chinese New Year. Along with his parents, Sheng had been looking around for marriage prospects in the Zhaoying township area, and they had just decided on one family who lived to the south of Shang village about 5 kilometers away. I asked him, “Sheng, don’t you have any girlfriends when you’re out working in the city?” He admitted that he did, but with an explanation that “most of us have boyfriends and girlfriends in the work place, but we all know at the same time that the relationship is only temporary, because both sides don’t know each other well enough. We’re just playing. It’s different back home because my parents would know her parents and her whole family better. I would feel more secure.”

After the wedding the young couple may spend a month or two at the groom’s home, and then both go back to the city to work again as migrant laborers. They usually leave together. Then the wife will return home when she is expecting a child. After staying home for another year or two, the wife will often go out again to join her husband, leaving their child with the paternal grand parents, coming home once or twice a year to visit.

This pattern holds for most of the families of Shang village. Since the tide of migration began to swell in the 1990s, so far there have only been a few couples who have returned from a faraway work sites to re-establish permanent residence in the village. These couples have seen their children going out as second-generation migrant laborers in cities.

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Hangzhou is the provincial capital city of Zhejiang on the east coast, one of the ten biggest cities in China. Dongguan is a rising city in Guangdong province, famous for its cluster of labor-intensive enterprises, especially electrical appliances.