Christine Wen

informal schooling for China's migrant children

One key feature of urbanization in contemporary China is the exclusion of rural migrants from certain basic urban services. To this day, about two million migrant children are still denied access to urban public schools. This exclusion has resulted in the proliferation of low-fee private schools in China's cities that almost exclusively serve rural migrant children. Scholars disagree on the extent to which low-fee private schools can adequately supply education to poor children in developing countries. This research contributes to the debate with a qualitative study in interior China where the privatization of education intersects with rural-urban migration, using grounded theory to examine how informal schooling affects settlement and integration for migrant families. Fieldwork in the country’s interior region reveals that migrant schools are oriented toward meeting the immediate needs of migrant families but do so at the cost of children’s future prospects and thus perpetuate urban inequality.

when and where to put down roots

This project examines the determinants of urban homeownership in destination cities for China's rural migrant families. For the past few years, the country's urbanization policy has focused on expanding social provisions for rural migrants so as to encourage them to put down roots in the city. There are two dominant theories in the international literature on the relationship between housing ownership and welfare access. Competing theories suggest that housing can be either a substitute for or a result of welfare. Using national survey data, this research shows that ties to the city such as enrollment in local pensions and health insurance as well as co-habitation with family are associated with a higher likelihood of homeownership. This suggests that rural migrants might be more willing to purchase homes, which is a policy goal, if the risk and precarity are lowered and that cities should adopt a family-friendly approach.

engineering urbanization

This is a doctoral dissertation project looking at Chinese government policy on migrant integration and local implementation of this central directive. By 2013-2014, a plan had been formulated to get more rural residents settled in cities and entitled to the same services as urban dwellers. However, the geopolitical configuration that has resulted from decades of regionally uneven policies presents a major roadblock. As megacities increasingly tighten restrictions on migrants, this research investigates the approach of ordinary cities toward receiving and integrating rural mgirants.

groundwater management and governance

Groundwater is a common-pool resource that poses unique governance challenges. This research investigates the temporal and spatial relationship between groundwater levels and extraction rates, precipitation anomalies, and climate cycles. The results show sensitivity to the Pacific decadal oscillations and widespread decline, particularly the central and southern Ogallala aquifer, lower Mississippi basin, the southeast basin, and the Atlantic Coastal Plain. California and Nevada were chosen for case studies for their contrasting approaches to managing groundwater in close proximity. These show that more fragmented governance as is the case of California is linked to spatial unevenness in groundwater trends as well as data collection frequency, suggesting the need for state oversight.

Back to top

Back to Home