I have neglected writing in this blog, largely because of poor health (three months in hospital last year) and because I have been writing essays for John Menadue's blog.
I have in mind writing there about Taiwan and Hong Kong but have limited hours a day for writing. Several years ago I wrote about Taiwan and Hong Kong in another blog I created to try to clear my focus, a task I abandoned :-).
A new subject arose arising from conversations via Telegram with daughters living in other countries. For a two year old granddaughter I had bought these items from eBay at modest price.
This second is a set of cylinders used in Montessori kindergartens.
These latter were AUD37 postage paid. A son in 1976 astonished his Washington Montessori teachers by doing all four of the block tasks at once, aged 2.
This particular set is made of beechwood. Beautiful. Made in Shenzhen. That sent me hunting for Montessori in Shenzhen, on YouTube. Revealing this new world class Montessori school in Shenzhen.
Then I found this ESL teacher in a kindergarten in Shenzhen recruited under a Chinese government program assisting with training as well as recruitment of ESL teachers from abroad.
But then of course, other daughter who writes science fiction and horror and works in AI chimed in to ask me "what's the hukou population of Shenzhen?"
from which we can see that a majority of the Shenzhen population is not entitled to public education or public health services. Money will get many of non-Shenzhen-hukou people access to such. Most not. You will see the extraordinary focus on recruiting a highly educated city.
This is a fascinating if small masters thesis from Sweden on the question of whether hukou is a factor in recruitment in Shezhen.
A lot of things described about the differences between the first ranked cities, and how personal connections and home town connection are important and, much the same, how of course the gaming business hunts gaming nerds out of Shenzhen colleges. Hukou not really a factor and some with rural hukou not wanting to lose that thus losing their entitlement to own land. Discriminations in recruitment, especially gender discrimination
and discrimination against many internal migrants in China. Important to note that the internal migrant population in China exceeds ten ozpops (ozpop is my term for one Australian population, it's handy when comparing with China's 56 ozpops in total)... and of course we have active policies and programs discriminating against migrants in provision of services in Australia. Without the hukou system the openness of reform processes in the 1980s would have drowned the coastal cities that have been growth engines. Now there appears to be encouragement of shift of people to cities in the centre and west.
A beautiful example of someone who abandoned her migrant situation to go back to look after grandma on the farm is the wildly popular (in China and abroad on youtube) Li Ziqi.
There has been a valuable essay on China as a model for early childhood services at the Menadue blog today.
China's only Nobel Prize winning author Mo Yan, during five years as a member of the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Committee "delivered proposals for improving preschool education in rural areas, shortening the school year and increasing subsidies for families that lost their only child."
