For years now, the municipal authorities in Beijing have been trying to control the city’s burgeoning population by making life more and more difficult for migrant workers. They have locked migrant workers inside [2] their villages, knocked down their children’s schools [3] and prevented their children from taking the national college exam. The message has been clear: We will tolerate you because we need you but you are not welcome to stay.

Despite all these heavy-handed measures, the city’s population [4] continues to expand. According to official figures, Beijing’s permanent population grew by 455,000 to reach 21.2 million last year – about the same population as Australia. Just over eight million residents (38 percent) were registered migrant workers. Unofficially, there are perhaps another ten million non-permanent or non-registered residents in the greater metropolitan area.

Migrant children in the streets of Picun, northeast Beijing.

And even though dozens of unlicensed schools for the children of migrant workers have been demolished to make way for luxury property and commercial developments, there are still around 100 such schools operating in Beijing with an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 pupils. After demolition, most schools simply relocated to another part of town with a high concentration of migrant workers.

Now it seems that the authorities have come up with a cunning plan [5] to get rid of them for good. They have latched on to moves by the Ministry of Education to create a comprehensive national system of (19 digit) student identification numbers to systematically exclude children in migrant schools from the city’s education system.

Under the national scheme, students will need an ID number to register at a new school or switch schools but the Beijing authorities have decreed that migrant schools in the city (not being proper schools) do not have the authority to issue such IDs. The only way students can get an ID is by going back to their “hometown” and register there.

The Beijing authorities claim that this will be a minor inconvenience for parents. Many parents are rightly concerned however that if their child goes back “home” they might end up being stuck there as a “left-behind child [6]” because there will be no school places left for them in Beijing when they come back.

The point to note here is that, as far as we can see, Beijing is the only city enforcing the new Ministry of Education rules in this way. Other cities are simply not bothering or are taking a much more relaxed approach to them. Shanghai, for example, has a low birth rate and an excess of school places, so migrant children there usually have fewer problems getting a place in school. Beijing on the other hand has always felt overwhelmed by the influx of migrants and feels it can use any means necessary to stop the flow.