They live and work in the cities. They pay taxes in cities. Some even grow up in cities. But no matter how hard they work they are still treated differently from other urban residents.

Although the second generation of migrant workers, those born in the late 1980s or later, are better educated than their predecessors - thanks to the 9-year compulsory education introduced in 1986 - their status and treatment in cities has not substantially improved as they still hold their rural hukou, or household registration, which nails people to their place of birth.

While the first generation of migrant workers were not treated the same as other urban residents, they were content to move to urban areas to work as they could earn more money than they would back home.

However, the second generation of migrant workers want greater equality and access to the benefits of city life, in terms of social security, healthcare, housing and especially better education for their children.

China's urbanization ratio has increased from 24 percent in 1985 to almost 50 percent in 2010. But that has not changed the fundamental divisions between rural and urban China.

The average income of urban residents is now 2.77 times that of their rural counterparts. If the advantage urban residents get from the social security system is counted in, the disparity is even greater.

As the second-generation migrant workers' children are reaching schooling age if the hukou system is not reformed their migrant-worker identity will be handed down to their children.

Many second-generation migrant workers are striving to change the status and fate of their children through education, because a student's hukou can be temporarily transferred from their villages to the city where the university at which they are studying is located. And if they can find a stable job with a State-owned employer after graduation, their hukou can then be transferred to their city of employment.

But the education in rural areas lags behind that available to urban children, and even if they are lucky enough to attend a school in a city, the children of migrant workers students must return to the places where their hukou are registered in order to take part in the national college entrance examination.

How to allocate more balanced and fair public and financial resources between rural and urban areas is a challenge the government must seek to overcome in the next decade in order to address the issues arising from the army of migrant workers.

(China Daily 12/13/2011 page8)