Contemporary Chinese Identity And Political Socialization: An Urban Migrant Children, Empirical Research,

The traditional political socialization theories pay special attention to class, stratum, socio-economic status, race, and other objective factors; however, this paper based on an empirical study finds that the identity of Children of migrant workers has a crucial impact on their political attitudes and behavior patterns.This paper attempts to answer these questions: First, How did children of migrant workers form their identities? What roles did different agents of political socialization play in the processes? Second, How the identity of Children of migrant workers influence their political attitudes and behavior patterns? Third, if the identity of Children of migrant workers does influence their political opinions and behavior, then how much is the differentiaton formed based on identity difference between their political attitudes and behavior patterns? Did Children of migrant workers created their own subaltern culture which was independent of the mainstream ideology? As a result, the identity politics as the consequences of modernity interweaved the traditional topics of political science, including political culture, political socialization and class reproduction.1. The author put forward the idea that families, schools, governments (the local state and Ideological State Apparatus), social intervention (NGO and Volunteers) are the main agents of migrant children's political socialization. Migrant children conduct their political socialization with two mechanisms of institutionized political learning and event-driven political learning respectively, to recognize political life. The former shapes their values, and the latter has a vital important influence on their stocks of knowledge. For the children of migrant workers, the event-driven political learning played a more prominent role in their political socialization processes.2. In these forms of social interaction between migrant children and agents of political socialization, the struggle and compromise for identitis is the most important, this's to say, identity production is the centre of political socialization. It is not a life-long identity, but a contingent equilibrium under the social structure and the specific context. If it loses the external forces, a specific identity would cease to function. Identity is never the expression of free will, but exists in the particular power structure all the time. When the children of migrant workers attempt to express their own identities, they will encounter restriction from the outside group and government unavoidably, Then Defensive identity and aggressive identity thus arised. The author invents "working identity" to describe this peculiarity of migrant children's identity producing.3. Compare the private schools for migrant children with public schools, though migrant kids at public schools have greater enthusiasm on learning than their counterparts at private schools, they more strongly felt the discrimination from urban mainstream society, as a result, they have a more pessimistic attitude or a lower expectation on their future.The author call this phenomenon "the ceiling effect", That is to say, giving up the efforts on study voluntarily because of their low expectation on society flow. There is a counter-school culture at the private schools for migrant children. If migrant children at public schools choose to "give up oneself "because of their low expectation, then, the counter-school culture at private schools is not because of their attitude of "giving oneself up as hopeless ", on the contrary, the students are rather proud of their disobedient actions and misbehavior than self-disqualified. By denial of shool's value and authority, they won independence and self-esteem; however, these preadults access willingly to secondary labor market and lose the opportunities for social mobility.However counter-school culture isn't an independent subaltern culture, our analysis of the questionnaires shows that migrant kids and urban children have the almost same basic values, but the latter's political attitude is closer to political correctness. That is to say, as to the view supported by the mainstream values, urban children express stronger support; as to the view denied by the mainstream values, urban children express firmer opposition. Compared with urban children, migrant kids alienate but not to oppose the mainstream values, there is a great difference in stocks of knowledge between migrant kids and urban children. After encountering inter-group conflict incidents, migrant kids will process these incidents and adjust them as corresponding "stories", when similar incidents take place in the future, the knowledge stock formed by the memory of life will become the basis that they judge and take action.The last chapter discusses the scope of application of our conclusion and concepts, the author attempts to generalize that transcending the case study, on the same time avoid to exaggerate the explanatory power of the conclusions. On the one hand, this paper wants to reveal the special mechanisms of migrant kids' political socialization, on the other hand, to amend and supplement the general theory of political socialization.