Two Aspects of the Rural-Urban Divide and Educational Stratification in China: A Trajectory Analysis

Contextualized in China's social change of the past half-century, this article conceptualizes the two aspects of China's rural-urban divide in educational inequality the household registration system (hukou) assigns people to a hierarchy, and the rural-urban schooling system institutionalizes unequal resource distribution and diverse school mission. To test a Chinese version of the maximally maintained inequality (MMI) hypothesis, we capitalize on the individual educational history data from the 2008 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) and use growth mixture modeling to estimate the differential effects of the two aspects of rural-urban divide on educational inequality in China. Findings indicate that (1) the hukou system places rural-hukou people at the very bottom of educational stratification, (2) the penalty of attending rural pretertiary school increases with educational stages, and (3) there is a cumulative disadvantage of rural hukou and rural school. Overall, our findings attest to the Chinese-version of MMI and inequality reproduction.