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Journal of Language, Identity & Education

ISSN: 1534-8458 (Print) 1532-7701 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hlie20

Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School

Jie Dong

To cite this article: Jie Dong (2018) Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 17:5, 336-349, DOI: 10.1080/15348458.2018.1470517

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2018.1470517

Published online: 05 Jun 2018.

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Language and Identity Construction of China’s Rural-Urban Migrant Children: An Ethnographic Study in an Urban Public School Jie Dong

Tsinghua University

ABSTRACT This article investigates the identity construction process of China’s rural- urban migrant children through analyses of their discourses and of their use of language. Rural children have relocated to the urban centers with their parents on a massive scale over the past decades as China has undergone rapid economic changes. Many migrant children are able to attend urban public schools, and their identity construction emerges as an important issue that attracts increasing public and scholarly attention. This study draws on ethnographic data and presents four examples to illustrate the complex process of migrant identity construction. The results show that the migrant children deploy a range of linguistic features and claim multiple identities; in order for their identities to be established in social reality, they have to go through negotiation processes in which their identities are evaluated, ratified, challenged, or denied. Language is at the center of such processes.

KEYWORDS China; discourse analysis; ethnography; identity construction; Putonghua; rural-urban migration

Introduction

Educational institutions such as schools are among the key actors that circulate and reproduce dominant social values in a seemingly neutral way. Children from diverse socioeconomic back- grounds enter into communication with educational practitioners and peer students through lin- guistic exchanges. Moreover, children’s academic performances mostly are evaluated through their discourses, both in written and in spoken forms. Microscopic linguistic differences often index cultural and social factors at a macro language-ideological level and serve as a ground for the dialogical process of identity construction among pupils (Blommaert, 2005; Gumperz, 1982; Hymes, 1980; Spotti, 2007). These linguistic differences are intensified by the massive rural-urban migration that has been going on in China since the early 1980s (Dong, 2009, 2010). The rural-urban migration, or the “internal” migration, leads to complicated sociolinguistic environments in which accents become salient markers of identity, projecting prestige and opportunity, or stigma and social inequality (Dong, 2011).

The migrant population, according to the China National Statistics Bureau, reached 277,470,000 in 2015 (China Economy, 2016). By 2010, more than 35,810,000 migrant children relocated to the cities with their parents (CSSN, 2016). The massive rural-urban migration offers a rich research field in studying discursive processes of identity construction; yet, there has been limited efforts exploring this field (see Dong, 2011). This article therefore is devoted to fill this gap with a close look at the making of migrant children’s identities in urban public schools. It is investigated from four perspectives: the perspective of migrant children, the perspective of their local peer students, the perspective of the teachers, and the perspective of the school and of wider educational managerial

CONTACT Jie Dong dong-jie@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn 310 Wennanlou Tsinghua, Beijing, China 100084. © 2018 Taylor & Francis

JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE, IDENTITY & EDUCATION 2018, VOL. 17, NO. 5, 336–349 https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.2018.1470517

bodies. The selection of the four perspectives are in line with the theoretical notion of discursive identity construction and with the methodological ambition of ethnography which attempts to understand and interpret social phenomena in a holistic and comprehensive manner. In what follows, I first address the notion of identity construction; second, I discuss China’s internal migration in order to prepare the reader for a critical engagement of the empirical data; third, I present a one-year ethnographic case study (Blommaert & Dong, 2010; Dong, 2017a; Hymes, 1996) and perform a discourse analysis (Blommaert, 2005; Fairclough, 1992, 2003) on the migrant identity construction data.

Language and identity construction

Identity has been studied in various disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, linguistics, literature, and education. Many kinds of identities are investigated, for example, ethnic identity, race, class, gender identity, national identity, learning identity (e.g., Barrett, 2012; Block, 2006; Butler, 1990; De Fina, Schiffrin, & Bamberg, 2006; Gao, 2011; Gao, Jia, & Zhou, 2015; Hewitt, 1986; Li, 2015; Norton-Pierce, 2000; Pérez-Milans, 2011; Rampton, 1999; Willis, 1981; Wodak, 1997). Identity constructed through language, or discursive identity, has attracted increasing research attention (e.g., Agha, 2003; Block, 2006; Blommaert, 2005; Coupland, 2007; Dong & Dong, 2013; Gumperz, 1982; Zhang, 2005). Gumperz (1982) argues that social identity is in large part established and maintained through language, and supports this argument with a series of case studies on English accents of various social groups in the UK, the US, Canada and beyond. As a summary of past research, De Fina et al. (2006) brings together a range of theoretical and methodological approaches and provides insights about the connections between what people say (language) and who they are (identity). Edwards (2009) surveys the relationships between languages and identities and showing that language is a “marker” of individual as well as of group identities.

Accent, or the pronunciation dimension of a language variety, is a salient aspect in identity formation, and a small feature of accent can quickly “betray” who one is (Blommaert, 2005; Edwards, 2009). Agha (2003) investigates how the English Received Pronunciation (RP), which used to be an accented variety, is enregistered as a status emblem, an emblem of speaker identities related to specific cultural meanings and values. Silverstein (1998) observes that the evaluation of an accent as “amusing” or “funny” is an ideological utterance highlighting the “defects” of the accent and measuring it against the standard form of the language. For the relationship between identity and Mandarin Chinese, Zhang (2005) provides a variation study on the accents of Beijing native professionals who work for foreign businesses, arguing that the informants creatively deploy linguistic resources from the local and the supra-local to construct a cosmopolitan professional identity. Following this trend on discursive identity research, I sketch four understandings of language and identity construction that are fundamental to the explanation and interpretation of the empirical data.

First, identity is not a fixed, stable possession, but is constructed in social practice. This runs against the essentialist notion of the “self” as given, core, natural, and essentially innate to the person (Bucholtz, Liang, & Sutton, 1999; Potter, 2003). Identities are social and performative in nature, being negotiated, enacted, constructed, and perceived in social practices. Various studies demon- strate that identity is dynamic, flexible, and changeable; such research can be found in studies of gender identity, of ethnic identity, and of national identity (Butler, 1990; Foucault, 1984; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983; Roosens, 1989).

Second, identity is not an individual, monolithic construct, but as a repertoire of identities, which suggests that people perform a range of highly complex and ambiguous identities, shifting between as well as simultaneously displaying multiple identities in social interactions (De Fina et al., 2006; Dong & Blommaert, 2016; Edwards, 2009).

Third, the multiple identities are not equal, but are layered and stratified in one’s identity repertoire. People construct identities out of particular identity building resources. As access to such resources is often unequally distributed, identities that are built through identity-building

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resources are stratified (Blommaert, 2005; Dong, 2017b; Spotti, 2007). For instance, acquiring a prestige accent can be costly, and some people may never have the capacity to enact a highly ranked identity due to the lack of access to the highly ranked accent as an identity building resource. In the Chinese context, the access to the standard Mandarin, or Putonghua1 usually requires years of formal education which is not always equally available, and hence the identity established upon a standard Putonghua accent may be seen as higher, and more privileged than those constructed through regional dialects.

Fourth, identities are achieved as well as ascribed. Achieved identity, also known as subscribed identity or inhabited identity, refers to a “self-constructed and self-performed identity . . . through which people claim allegiance to a group” (Blommaert, 2005, p. 253); in contrast to achieved identity, ascribed identity is an “identity attributed to someone by others . . . including that someone in a socially defined category” (p. 251). In this sense, an identity has to be recognized by others in order to be established in and as social reality, and often identities are imposed by others rather than claimed by oneself. Examples can be found in othering processes, of which the use of pronouns such as we, us, they, them signals shifts of alignments to different social groups (see also Goffman, 1981). In some varieties of northern Mandarin Chinese, e.g., the Beijing dialects, there is a subtle difference between zan men and wo men: both are first person plural we, but the former one includes both or all of the interlocutors, while the latter one often refers to the speaker and a third person or third persons who may or may not be present in the conversation, but excludes the hearer. Compare two sentences:

1 zan men yao qu kan dianying. We (you and I) will go to cinema.

2 wo men yao qu kan dianying. We (someone else and I) will go to cinema.

In the first sentence, the speaker uses zan men (meaning we, you and I) to refer to the speaker and the hearer—you and I will go to the cinema. This usage flags a sense of closeness and inclusion between the speaker and the hearer. The second sentence uses wo men (also meaning we, someone else and I) to refer to the speaker and someone else, which the hearer is carefully excluded—someone else and I will go to cinema, but not you. The use of wo men signals a distance between the speaker and the hearer. In both sentences we see an othering process in which the hearer’s in-group identity is either enacted and then established as a social reality, shown in the first sentence, or denied in the second sentence, by the speaker’s delicate use of identity building discourses.

In short, identity is constructed in social practice; multiple identities are layered and stratified in one’s identity repertoire; identities are achieved as well as ascribed. In other words, one’s identity claims are as important as other people’s ratification in a process of identity establishment. In the next section, I sketch the internal rural-urban migration against the backdrop of Chinese economic changes.

China’s rural-urban migration

China’s rural-urban migration occurs within the country’s national borders in a massive scale. More than 10% of the country’s total population is involved in the massive internal migration each year (China Economy, 2016). In term of urban centers, this percentage is much higher; for instance, the migrant population counts for at least one-third of Beijing’s population (Beijing Statistical Bureau, 2013). The most prominent drive behind the migration lies in the rapid economic changes and the uneven regional development (Dong, 2011; Knight & Song, 1999; Kuijs & Wang, 2005). Urbanization and industrialization have attracted millions of laborers to cities from rural and underdeveloped regions of the country. Some of the migrant workers have found better opportu- nities for life; many more still struggle to feed themselves and their families.

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Devised in the 1950s, hukou is a household registration system that can control population movements. It works in two dimensions: first, it tied people to their places of origin through the redistribution of daily necessities between the 1950s and the 1970s; second, it groups people into social categories of agricultural (rural) or non-agricultural (urban) at birth, and transgeneration- ally, as children depend on their parents’ hukou status (Knight & Song, 1999; Mackenzie, 2002). Its function of tying people to localities has been weakened since the 1980s, and people are allowed to move to and work in another locale without changing their household registration records. However, possessing a local hukou still means one is entitled to local resources and social services including healthcare, education, and pension (see Mackenzie, 2002 for a history of hukou).

Among China’s 277 million internal migrants, children form a young but important subgroup, and their education opportunities and living conditions have caused much public concern and debate (Han, 2001; Lu & Zhang, 2001; Woronov, 2004; Zhang, Qu, & Zou, 2003). The main concern is that urban public schools have inadequate capacity to accommodate the influx of migrant children, and therefore migrant parents either have to pay higher fees for their children to be admitted to public schools, or have to send them to privately run shabby migrant schools. Some parents have to leave their children in their hometown, and the left-behind children are cared for by their relatives or by boarding schools, because the parents cannot afford the living and schooling costs of their children in cities.

Policymakers were aware of the unrealistic attempt to discourage children from migrating, as well as the potential negative impacts of underachieving migrant schools on pupils’ development. More importantly, migrant children were effectively segregated from their local counterparts and the mainstream urban communities by the way the education system functioned (Dong, 2010). They might be stigmatized by having to attend “second-class” migrant schools, and mutual mistrust might grow between urban and migrant children who had little contact to each other (Han, 2001). A series of policies were devised to ensure migrant children’s right of public education in cities (Dong, 2009; Zhang et al., 2003). Cities such as Beijing vowed to accommodate all migrant children within the publicly funded education system and to close down underachiev- ing migrant schools. This ambition, however, is not easy to achieve. One of the reasons that discourage migrant children from joining urban public schools is the worry of being discriminated by their urban peer students and teachers; many informants indicate that they believe their regional accents would differentiate them from local Beijing people whose speech was perceived as “accent-less” (Blommaert, 2005; Dong, 2009).

As an outcome of the internal migration, some urban public schools are now populated with both local and migrant children who bring in diverse social, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. When “big” identity features such as nationality and ethnicity are shared, often as a result of political or ideological principles, “small” differences such as accents become salient features that allow peer students and teachers to differentiate between “us” and “them” (Blommaert, 2005; Dong, 2010). Difference often is quickly converted into inequality, which in turn affects migrant children’s identity as well as their academic development in the urban centers.

Migrant children’s identity construction in an urban public school

The data are drawn from my ethnographic fieldwork in Xili School,2 a Beijing urban public school. Xili School is located in a narrow and old lane of central Beijing. The area used to be inhabited by local people, but gradually many of them moved to newly built complexes on the outskirts of Beijing and the area is now largely occupied by urban low-income households and migrant families who rent rooms. Migrant families rent in the area often because they do low skilled jobs in or offer service to the neighborhood, working as cleaners, rubbish recyclers, breakfast sellers, etc. The rent may cost less on the outskirts of the city, but the transport costs are considerable, and many of their jobs require an early starting hour. The children of migrant families who rent in the neighborhood are

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admitted into Xili School. As discussed earlier, many migrant children’s education may be hindered in cities; the school is, however, an exception that receives financial supports from the local educational authority for admitting migrant pupils who do not possess a local hukou. There are around 200 pupils in the school, of which 126 pupils are migrant. They were mostly born and raised in Beijing, although none of them managed to obtain a Beijing hukou. The school offers a rare fieldwork site of observing migrant pupils’ interactions with their local Beijing counterparts and with educational practitioners.

The fieldwork took one year. The data collection instruments include participant and nonparticipant observation, group and individual interview, questionnaire, and document collection.3 During the teaching sessions, I sat at the back of the classroom and conducted non-participant observation; during in-class group work and after-class activities, I joined pupils and did participant observation. I talked to pupils during class breaks and noon breaks. Noon breaks were of longer time (12:00–13:30) and sometimes teachers and principals invited me to their offices for a rest. The observation was focused on three classrooms: grade-one (aged 7 or 8), grade-four (aged 10 or 11), and grade-six (aged 12 or 13). I observed pupil-pupil and pupil-teacher interactions; the observation data as well as interview data were documented with audio recordings and field notes. After six-months of observation, I started interview- ing pupils, teachers, and the principals about their perception on language and identities. The interviews with teachers and school principals emphasized four issues: inequality and discrimination between migrant and local pupils, comparison of language usage between migrant and local pupils, migrant pupils’ identities, and pupil performance evaluation. As for the pupils, I conducted group and individual interviews. From my fieldwork experiences, children could feel intimidated when interviewed alone. Instead, group interview often became friendly “group chat” and thus was a useful tool of eliciting their ideas on various topics starting from their experiences in Beijing, their evaluation on the language of themselves and others, to the often difficult questions about their identities such as who they thought they were and what it meant to be a migrant child. Each group interview session was managed within thirty minutes. Individual interviews were included later to allow pupils to further explore the topic of identity construction.

All interviews were organized around topics, rather than detailed into lists of questions, in order to provide interviewees with the biggest possible room to respond. Six teachers, two principals, and 39 students were interviewed (including eight group interviews and 12 individual interviews). The select criteria for teacher interviewees were (a) class teacher (managing teacher of the classes I observed); (b) Chinese language teacher; and (c) teacher who had close contacts with students. The selection of student interviewees was more random, largely depending on their openness, willingness, and friendship among group participants. However, I managed to strike a balance between local and migrant children. My role as an interviewer was intended to be a curious interlocutor rather than a questioner. In total, I collected about 40 hours of audio- recorded materials and more than 500 pieces of field notes.

In what follows, I present and analyze four examples that reflect the identity construction of migrant identities from four perspectives. The data selection follows the key incident approach (Erickson, 1977; Green & Bloome, 1997; Kroon & Sturm, 2007). The key incident approach, according to Erickson (1977), is to select a key incident from data, connecting it to other incidents, phenomena, or theoretical constructs, and to show the generic in the particular, the universal in the concrete, the relation between part and the whole. It is to identify microscopic incidents that link to other incidents and that index issues at bigger, higher, and macro levels. An incident is counted as “key,” says Wilcox (1980), “in that it represents concrete instances of the working of abstract principles of social organization” (p. 9). These include recurrent events and incidents that have sustaining influence (Green & Bloome, 1997).

The four examples included in this article are interview discourses produced by (a) migrant children, (b) their local counterpart, (c) their teacher, and (d) a vice principal who functions at an institutional level. I analyze the discourses (Blommaert, 2005; Fairclough, 1992; 2003)

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and demonstrate the construction and negotiation of migrant identities from multiple perspectives.

Migrant children’s achieved identities

Example 1 is concerned with migrant pupils’ discourses on their language and identity. Ling and Hua were classmates, and were both 10 years old (grade-four). There were 23 pupils in the class, twelve girls and eleven boys. The interview was conducted in Putonghua. The interview was conducted in the classroom during a noon break. The pupils were required to stay inside after lunch. They took a nap on a desk, or did their homework quietly. Some pupils chatted in a low voice, but as long as this was not disturbing, the teacher did not interfere. Before the transcribed part of interview, Ling told me that she was sick and her grandpa took care of her, and we started talking about her family. There were five members in her home: her parents, grandpa, her younger sister, and her. She said that she was born in Beijing, and she was a local Beijing child. I was surprised, because her teacher told me that Ling was one of the migrant children. Therefore I asked three times (turn 1, 3, and 5) to make sure that she understood my question. She firmly believed that she was a Beijing child, because she was born in Beijing and did not speak her parents’ home dialect. Ling established a clear connection between identity (being a Beijing person), language (speaking only Beijing dialect), and birthplace (born in Beijing).

However her claimed identity did not hold for a long time. Hua heard our conversation and interrupted “I am from Henan, she (is) from Hebei” (turn 11). There were twofold meanings in Hua’s utterance. First, she rejected Ling’s claimed local identity; second, she identified herself as a migrant child, and thought that Ling was the same. Hua had never been back to her hometown, and “of course do not speak that language” (turn 13). Her parents did speak Henan dialect to Hua. According to Hua, this was the reason that her “accent is not as good as Ling’s” (turn 15), as Ling’s parents use Beijing dialect to Ling in the home. Hua was exposed to her home dialect more frequently than Ling was, and her knowledge of Henan dialect entered into her linguistic repertoire. Her migrant identity was enacted by her awareness of the possible Henan accent in her spoken language (although I did not identify any feature of Henan accent in Hua’s pronunciation). Interestingly, Hua compared her accent to that of Ling’s and believed that Ling’s accent was “better” than that of hers. The value judgment of linguistic features are highly ideological, as the linguistic features themselves are neither “good” nor “bad,” but it is people who attribute social values to the linguistic features and measure them against the linguistic norms of a given society or community.

Ling achieved, or claimed, a local identity, largely through her language and by the fact that she was born in Beijing. This self-claimed local identity was common among the primary school students, especially among lower-grade children. In contrast, higher-grade students (e.g., grade-

Example 1. “I am from Henan, she from Hebei!”4

1 JD: Where do you come from? Where is your hometown? 2 Ling: I was born in Beijing, I am a Beijing people, and, and grandpa comes from Hebei. 3 JD: Your grandpa comes from Hebei, what about your parents? 4 Ling: They are also from Hebei. 5 JD: And where do you come from? 6 Ling: I am from Beijing. 7 JD: You are from Beijing, you speak Beijing dialect, do you speak other dialects? 8 Ling I can’t. 9 JD: (Do your) parents speak Beijing dialect at home? 10 Ling: Yeah, they speak Beijing dialect to me, (and they) speak Hebei dialect to each other 11 Hua: I am from Henan, she (is) from Hebei! 12 JD: Do you speak home dialect? 13 Hua: I am never back to my hometown, I of course do not speak that language 14 JD: You’ve never been back . . . 15 Hua Yeah, but my parent speak that dialect, so my accent is not as good as Ling’s.

[V010-Ling&Hua]

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six) were more aware of their migrant identity (Dong, 2017b). In my conversations with the lower- grade children, it was common to hear a child, of whom his or her teacher informed me as a migrant child, told me that he or she was a local Beijing child. When my gaze moved up to higher-grades of which children were aged around 12, increasingly more of them talked about their hometowns, showed me their home dialects, and told me that they understand the differences between them and the local children. Higher-grade students’ identity formation is reported in another research that offers more detailed comparison and discussion of identity differences between lower-grade and higher-grade students (Dong, 2017b).

Local students and stratified identity-building resources

Example 2 is a local Beijing pupil’s (Kai’s) comments on his migrant classmate’s speech. In his evaluation, the migrant pupil’s linguistic features (e.g. accents) are related to identity and the social category of “migrant” is ascribed to the pupil. Kai was a local boy who sat next to Xiu and they interacted with each other frequently in and out of class. They were both 8 years old (grade-one). The interview was conducted during a class break. The teaching section immediately before the interview was a Chinese lesson focusing on the pupils’ pronunciation of Chinese characters; the teacher wrote Chinese characters on the blackboard and invited pupils to read the characters loudly. The pupils were eager to get a chance by raising hands and shouting “ask me, ask me . . ..” Xiu managed to catch the teacher’s attention, stood up and read a character loudly but with “incorrect” pronunciation. The pupils were disappointed; they shouted to correct her, and Kai was the loudest. They shouted because they had all volunteered to read the character; Xiu got the chance but she did not make a “good” use of the opportunity.

This episode triggered my interview with Kai who spoke with a Beijing accent. After a few casual questions, I asked for his comments on Xiu’s language. In turn 2, he assessed Xiu’s pronunciation to be “very bad” with an emphasis on “very.” I pushed him for more details, and he gave an example of what he pronounced “cuo” (starting with [ts’], meaning “wrong”), but Xiu would pronounce it as “chuo” (starting with [ch’r], meaning “more”). Many dialects do not distinguish the dental sibilants (z, c, s) from the retroflexes (zhi, ch, sh). As Ramsey (1987) demonstrates, the distinction is a marker of standard Putonghua and the mastery of such subtle differences is much admired by people living outside of the capital; they are often unable to pronounce these sounds in the “right” way. In practice people get along without the distinctions (Ramsey, 1987).

However, the small linguistic feature indexed big identity issues. Immediately after describing Xiu’s perceived accents, Kai pointed out that Xiu “is a migrant child.” This did not answer my question “Does she have an accent?” Instead of commenting on her language, Kai linked her accent with identity. This direct connection between accent and identity was a classic example of indexi- cality, in which an accent pointed to an identity (Blommaert, 2005; Coupland, 2007; De Fina et al.,

Example 2. “She is a migrant and can’t get it right.”

1 JD: How is her Chinese, her pronunciation? 2 Kai: Pronunciation, very bad. 3 JD: Is her (pronunciation) unclear? 4 Kai: Yeah, like, we say “cuo,” she says “chuo”. 5 JD: Does she have an accent? 6 Kai: She is a migrant child. 7 JD: So (is that’s why) she is not very clear (in her pronunciation)? 8 Kai: I am from here. 9 JD: I know you are from here {with a smiling voice}. But do you think (her accent) 10 Kai: influences her performance (in Chinese lessons)? 11 JD: Yeah. People from other places are always unclear. 12 Kai: Do you help her with her pronunciation?

Yeah I do help her, but she just can’t make it right! She (is) a migrant and can’t get it right.

[V049-Kai&Xiu]

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2006; Silverstein, 1998). I kept on asking Kai about Xiu’s way of talking (turn 7), but again Kai put the inquiry aside and focused on identity “I am from here” in turn 8. This comment was interesting in several ways. First, Kai dodged my question again, which indicated that the idea that Xiu was a migrant was strong enough for him to ignore the questions of a class observer who was respected as a second teacher in the classroom.

Second, there were jumps in his answers: in turn 6 he said “She is a migrant child” and in turn 8 “I am from here.” What was missing in his comments could be interpreted as “she is a migrant child” and therefore she spoke with an accent, and “I am from here” a local Beijing person who spoke the “right” language and thus was able to judge her accent. This interpretation was confirmed by his later comments. In this sense, Kai answered my questions by relating linguistic features with identities again, and the identities were not equal; Kai was a local child and had the access to the prestige resource of the Beijing accent. Xiu’s identity was ranked lower as the semiotic resources she had were stigmatizing. The two identities—migrant identity and local Beijing identity—were organized unequally in relation to the access of the identity-building resources—a regional dialect and a Beijing accent—and as the semiotic resources were stratified (i.e., the Beijing accent was higher than Xiu’s dialect), so were the identities.

In a reflexive look of the data, I discovered that my “smiling voice” in turn 9 should be read with caution because it might signal encouraging attitudes from me toward Kai’s comments on Xiu. This was one of the occasions that going through audio recorded interviews was a humbling task: to listen to myself as the interviewer articulating a comment or signalling an attitude which might have a leading effect. The interviewer played a role in the conversations and this role should be adequately reflected in the analysis. I, the researcher, am also a “native speaker” of a Beijing dialect, and my accent indexes a local Beijing identity. Although being a trained ethnographer, I am still caught up in ideologies, even ideologies that I critique. The linguistic and non-linguistic products of these ideological processes appeared in the fieldwork, for example the “{smiling voice}” in turn 9, which was meant to emphasize alignment and to create an unthreatening atmosphere for the eight-year-old; this non-verbal sign, however, could influence the interviewee’s responses. This is a learning process, and what an ethno- grapher could do is but to document such occasions and to be reflexive on her own role in the research.

It was not clear from this example whether Xiu would be perceived by her local peers as a “Beijing child” if she spoke Putonghua without a regional accent; but throughout the transcript, we could see how Xiu’s language was evaluated and disqualified, how she was grouped into a community of “non- Beijing speakers,” and how her “migrant” identity was ascribed by her local counterpart. Language, in this sense, was the most immediate and direct identity marker. One might wonder how Xiu and Kai could still get along with each other when Kai was rather discriminating. It was worth mentioning, and it was an ethnographer’s obligation to observe holistically, that Kai also sang praises of Xiu about her being funny, friendly and helpful to others. Throughout the semester I observed many occasions of Kai and Xiu being good friends.

Teachers’ diligent work in “correcting” migrant children’s language

In many cultures, teachers are the powerful party in teacher-pupil relations, and their assessment of pupils’ performance is largely based on the pupils’ spoken and written output. Consequently, teachers often play an important role in pupils’ learning process as well as in their identity formation. In Xili School, all teachers were Beijing people, and they mostly were aged between 25 and 45. While observing many teachers’ practice in the school, I focused on four teachers of the classes in which I did regular observation (i.e., Miss Liu of a grade-one class, Miss Li of a grade-four class, and Miss Ding of a grade-six class, and Miss Wang the vice principal). The interview presented in Example 3 was conducted in the staff office during a noon break. There were about ten teachers in the office, while some of them had a nap, others chatted in a low voice, marked students’ homework, read books, or surfed on the Internet. Miss Li was a Chinese language teacher of the grade-four class. In the transcribed extract of the interview, Miss Li gave her opinions about the migrant and the local

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children. Her opinions can be analyzed into two parts. The first part (turn 1–8) began with her comments on Ping’s performance. Ping was one of the top students in the grade-four class. During the early weeks of the fieldwork, I observed the class and had an impression of him as a local child. I later discovered that he registered as a migrant pupil, as he had no local hukou. In Miss Li’s utterance, it was clear that she was fond of Ping, despite he was migrant. She commented that Ping was good at studying the school subjects and indicated that Ping was a capable student who was able to deliver an impromptu speech on a serious topic (turn 3). She pointed out that Ping and other migrant children speak standard Putonghua and they “have no accent at all” (turn 5). Putonghua was perceived as “accent-less”; it was however evidently accented, and perhaps the most noticeable accent suggesting a baggage of identities such as social class, education, and family background (Dong, 2010).

Miss Li believed that the migrant and the local were the same. She was not the only teacher who told me that they did not distinguish between the migrant and the local; several teachers had informed me that the school tried to create an egalitarian atmosphere in order to protect the migrant children from being alienated or discriminated against. As a consequence, Miss Li concluded that the students had no knowledge of who were urban and who were not (turn 7). It was well intended to neutralize the rural-urban divide, and I observed many friendly interactions between the migrant and the local pupils. Moreover, my fieldwork data demonstrated that most teachers were fair, kind, professional, and they did everything in their power to help and support the migrant pupils. However, such a rural-urban, or local-migrant divide was a social construct and school (pupils and teachers alike) could hardly function in a social vacuum.

This social construct was evident in the second part of the extract (turn 9). In this part, Miss Li tried to provide me with a more precise understanding of the pupils’ language situation. She explained that the pupils in grade-four were “good” in speaking Putonghua, because they had been through intensive pronunciation correction exercises. As a Chinese language teacher, Miss Li believed that there was a critical stage (presumably around grade-one and grade-two, or aged between 6 and 8) for the migrant pupils to “correct” their pronunciation; they would acquire the standard language if they managed to “correct” their pronunciation; if they missed this stage, they might never have a second chance. Therefore, the teachers invested much time and efforts in “correcting” the migrant pupils. Producing nonstandard languages often was seen as “incorrect” at least in schools or other state hegemonic institutions, and therefore the educational practitioners felt that it was their responsibility to make sure that their pupils were speaking the standard language so that the pupils might have a fair chance in academic development. However, it is a highly ideological process that one language variety was upscaled to the level of standard, and against which other varieties were measured and downscale; differences were converted into inequality, and value judgment such as “good,” “bad,” “correct,” “incorrect” were made with reference to the standardized form. A provincial or regional accent indexed a migrant identity, an identity of rural origin, of lower

Example 3. “They don’t know who’s migrant, who’s local.”

1 Li: He {Ping} is very good at studying 2 JD: Yeah he seems work hard 3 Li: He knows how to study, and once I taught about enviromental protection in class, he 4 JD: gave a brilliant talk, without preparation, he is very aticulate 5 Li: Where does he come from? 6 JD: He, well, he comes from Zhejiang, his parents are from Zhejiang, but you see they 7 Li: {he and other migrant children in the class} have no accent at all 8 JD: That’s true, I don’t hear any difference 9 Li: They are the same (with the local children), they don’t know who’s migrant, who’s local, we treat them in the same way,

we never tell them who is migrant, or who is local, and so they don’t know Hmm, their Putonghua is very good They are grade-four, they have corrected (their own pronunciation). When they just came (to the school in grade-one), they were very difficult (in pronouncing correctly), we teachers spent a lot of time to correct them, we knew that if they could correct (their accent) then, they were OK, if they couldn’t, it would be very difficult to change anymore in the future

[V106-TeacherLi]

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social status, an identity that was stigmatized and stigmatizing, in the sense of Goffman (1974). Stigma is an undesirable difference people bear, when measured against the “normal.” The teachers’ diligent work of “correction” might reproduce such stigma.

We observe ambivalence in Miss Li’s comments on the migrant children’s language and identity. On the one hand, she (and many colleagues of hers) did believe that they treated the local and the migrant children equally; on the other hand, this equal treatment was based on an assumption that the migrant children should become one of “us,” not one of the “other.” In other words, they should be “corrected” and mainstreamed: behaving in “our” way, speaking in “our” accent, and all these should be measured against “our” norms. In the end, they should become a ‘normal’ person and they are treated equally.

The school and identity categorization

Apart from teachers and students, school often plays an important role in migrant pupils’ identity construction. In what follows, I present an example of institutional discourse and analyze its connections with migrant identity establishment. The interviewee was Miss Wang, vice principal of the school. The interview is about the “merit student award” (sanhao xuesheng, literally “three-good student”), a national award system for primary and secondary school students. The winners of the merit student award should be outstanding in all three aspects of academic record, morality, and physical fitness. The system works at several levels: from the elementary level of class wide, to school wide, district wide, city wide, province wide, and up to nationwide. At the lower levels of class and school wide awards, pupils vote for merit students of their own class or school. At the higher levels, school recommendations are necessary. As Miss Wang indicated in the interview, those who were merit students for the final three years (aged 10, 11 and 12) of their primary education are recommended candidates by the school for the district and city-wide competitions. Miss Wang started the topic by stressing the difference between migrant and local pupils

Example 4. The “Three-good student” award.

1 Wang: if the local pupils and the migrant pupils are similar, we could still hope (for local pupils to be elected as merit students). But they are too different.

2 JD: What do you mean by being “similar” and “different?” 3 Wang: Performance. (For example,) in grade-three the migrant pupils are very good and the local pupils are

mostly underachieving, they were to elect four school wide merit students, the result of the election was that three were migrant pupils and only one was a local. They (the local pupils) are not as good and we couldn’t do anything. The merit students are mostly migrant pupils, but that (their awards) is not useful.

4 JD: Do you mean ‘useful’, for example, in their entering a middle school? 5 Wang: Yes, in finding themselves a good middle school, holding a merit student award is an advantage for a

local pupil in searching for a good middle school. 6 JD: How does it work (for middle school entrance)? 7 Wang: (It is useful if one is the merit student of a) successive three-year: grade-four, five and six. 8 JD: Hmm . . . 9 Wang: There is nothing we could do. We only have more migrant pupils. There are about 20 pupils in one class

and only six (of them) are local, we could hardly find qualified local candidates for the merit students’ award.

10 JD: Hmm 11 Wang: It happens that the merit student award is wasted; such as in a nearby school, there was no city-wide

merit student candidate last year, I asked why, they said that there used to be two (candidates for the city-wide merit student award), one was a migrant pupil, the other was local. The local pupil moved to another school. The merit student award is not useful for a migrant pupil.

12 JD: Hmm . . . 13 Wang: They gave up the appraisal for the city-wide merit student award, they could send one candidate, but they

had no one to send. JD: But why? Couldn’t the migrant pupil compete for city-wide merit student? Wang: They could compete, but that would be a waste of opportunity after all . . . no matter how good he (a

migrant pupil) is, he will end up with Jian Qiang middle school, or if his parents are rich, they could pay high tuition for a good middle school, then he does not need that (merit student award) after all.

[V179-Wang]

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of her school (turn 1–3); she explained what she meant by “too different” with an example of the grade- three class (pupils aged about nine): the migrant pupils of that class were satisfactory in their performance, whereas the local Beijing pupils were underachieving. In their election of the merit students of the class, three out of the four candidates were migrant pupils. Winning the merit student award was “not useful,” however, for the migrant students (turn 3). According to her, the usefulness of merit student award lied in enhancing local Beijing pupils’ chance of being admitted to a top middle school (turn 5). Miss Wang explained that it would be an “advantage” for a local pupil, a pupil of Beijing hukou-holder, in hunting for a good middle school if he or she was a merit student, especially a merit student of the final three successive years of primary schooling (turn 7).

Miss Wang indicated that the school was powerless when facing such a situation when the school was increasingly populated with migrant pupils. Miss Wang was informed of similar situations faced by other schools, due to her position as vice principal. She gave an example of another primary school which “wasted” (turn 11) its opportunity of recommending a candidate for the city wide merit student award. “The merit student award is not useful for a migrant pupil,” Miss Wang repeated and stressed toward the end of turn 11. The school gave up the opportunity as the local candidate moved elsewhere and the school was left with no candidate. This explanation did not include the possibility of recommending the migrant candidate for the award. Miss Wang’s explanation “They could compete, but that would be a waste of opportunity after all” (turn 14) was in a weaker voice than the rest of her utterance, which signaled her hesitation in giving the opinion. According to Miss Wang, whether the migrant candidate entered the city wide award competition or not, and whether she would win or not, the opportunity would be “wasted” because the award would not be an advantage for a migrant pupil in being admitted by a prestige Beijing middle school. She confided that no matter what award a migrant pupil held, the middle school she normally entered was Jian Qiang School, an underachieving middle school that received a special subsidy from the district government for admitting migrant pupils of the district, unless their parents could purchase them a place in a prestigious middle school with a big price, in which case neither performance nor award would be relevant (turn 14).

What is striking in this interview is the use of the adjectives “not useful” and “wasted”; becoming a merit student was “not useful” for a migrant pupil and the advantage of being a merit student would be “wasted” if it was granted to a migrant pupil. Miss Wang produced these utterances in the way that it was a mere pragmatic concern to maximizing the advantage of the award by having the local pupils, not the migrant, become merit students. I trust that she did not intentionally treat the local and the migrant unequally; she perhaps saw the selectiveness of award candidates as simply a pragmatic issue. Miss Wang was one of my key informants, and as an ethnographer, I worked with her on a daily basis. Similar to Miss Li, Miss Wang was highly professional in dealing with pupils, both the migrant and the local. In everyday communicative exchanges, it was rare to observe any differential treatment between the local and the migrant. It was only when my fieldwork approached the end of the semester, and my gaze moved to the school perspective, that the pattern of inequality and institutional differentiation started emerging.

Miss Wang’s discourse on the connection between merit student award and identity of the award holders were determined by the tacit institutional policy, the unspoken rule that favored local pupils over migrant pupils in selecting candidates. Miss Wang seemed to believe that it was natural and practical to favor local pupils, because of how the award system worked. It only brought benefits to local award holders, not to the migrants; it would make no difference for a migrant pupil’s academic career. There was no doubt a practical layer, but behind this practical layer stood the fact that the “merit” student awards were not concerned only with “merits,” but that social category, a local hukou holder or a non-local hukou holder, played an important role in the performance-based student appraisal.

From the school perspective, one encounters very clearly defined and strictly categorized identi- fications. The line is drawn between the rural and the urban, and although such a distinction is in many ways diminishing, it is printed in one’s hukou. This distinction often can enter interactional events and condition what one can get in everyday life. Yet it is important to underline the specificity of the kind of identities: they are not individual but categorical, and held to be dominant. In other

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words, they are of a general validity that overrides the particularities of individual cases and are rooted in the big structure of society.

Conclusion

In this article, I investigate the identity construction of China’s rural-urban migrant children from multiple perspectives, and show that various players are involved in and may have an impact on the identity establishment of these children. Example 1 demonstrates migrant identity making from migrant children’s perspective. The migrant children claim various identities; they may claim a local urban identity and in order for this claimed identity to establish in social reality, they often have to obtain other people’s ratification. Example 2 addresses local children’s perspective and shows that identities are enacted and negotiated through the access to and deployment of identity-building resources; as the resources are layered and stratified, so are identities. Example 3 illustrates teachers’ perspective: the teachers believe that the pupils have no knowledge about the differences between “them” and “us”, but they insist that the migrant children have to become one of “us” first notably through mainstreaming their language. From the school perspective, we observe that institutional tools systematically discriminate migrant children; the discrimination appear in a pragmatic form. When people function at the institutional level, identity becomes strictly categorized identification, highly rigid and of a general validity. Identities of this kind are embedded in the big social and ideological structure and go beyond peculiar individual cases.

The identity construction of migrant children is dynamic and procedural; on the one hand, children develop rapidly as they socialize into various social groups; on the other hand, they are surrounded by a fast-changing society. While studying such complex and dynamic social phenomena, it is important to be reflexive of the theories and the methodologies of the research. The theoretical reflection is concerned with choice and constraints of identity. When I first arrived at the fieldwork site, I observed many occasions that the migrant children were able to choose and to switch between identities; as I immersed myself longer in the fieldwork site, it appeared that their choices were constrained by the general pattern of inequality, and these constraints might enter their everyday life and might have an impact on what identities they could establish, and what they could not.

The methodological reflection is concerned with the role of the ethnographer in data collec- tion. I reflect in Example 2 that my smiling voice may give an encouraging signal to Kai, and as a consequence he may feel that he should talk more about Xiu’s “incorrect” language; similar moments can be detected in the audio recorded interviews. It is important to reflect on the ethnographer’s involvement, and with such reflections the ethnographer may interpret the data more precisely. Instead of writing herself out of the research, the researcher need to be honest about her influence on the fieldwork site and on other participants. It is a learning process (Blommaert & Dong, 2010) for the ethnographer, that by reflecting on her role in the fieldwork, she may adjust her strategies and beomes more comfortable in the subsequent fieldworks. However, this does not mean that the purpose of conducting ethnographic research reflexively is to limit the ethnographer’s influence on the fieldwork. It is important to note that the ethnographer will influence the fieldwork one way or another, and at the same time being changed by the fieldwork; it is impossible to contain the influence. Rather, the purposes are, first, to understand and analyze the ethnographic data more acurately and holistically; second, to be aware that doing ethnography is a learning process that changes both sides. Reflexivity is regressive, constitutive, but also is productive. The ethnographer can only try her best to reflect on the mutual influence, to include such reflection in analysis, and to internalize the learning process into her ethnographer’s “habitus.”

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Notes

1. Putonghua, or common speech, is the linguistic form standardized upon Beijing dialects in the 1950s. Putonghua and Beijing dialects are mutually intelligible, although there are minor phonological and lexical differences.

2. School name and informant names are anonymized. 3. As no data from questionnaire and document collection is presented in this article, I do not describe these two

methods, due to word limitation. 4. Transcription symbols and conventions

_ (Underline) stress * * Segment quieter than surrounding talk, or weaker than the rest of the sentence () Omitted part in the utterance {} Transcriber’s explanation Unless otherwise specified, the transcriptions and translations are my own.

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