Image credit: Gaze, by Xiaohan

by Finn Bader

Read the Faculty Introduction.

“But every boy I’ve ever met is a fuckboy”. This is the voice of Ashley, a 20-year old college student interviewed for a Vanity Fair piece titled “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse’” (Sales). The article delves into the intentions and overall psychology of Tinder users, attempting to shed light into the app’s darkest corners. The author, Nancy Jo Sales, concludes that Tinder has changed the dating landscape, with one of the interviewees reaching the gloomy verdict: “Romance is completely dead.” In particular, she denounces the superficiality of the relationships that are created through the app, which focus solely on the physical rather than the emotional aspects of a relationship. For instance, she introduces and describes the attitude of Marty, a Tinder user: “‘We don’t know what the girls are like,’ […]. And yet a lack of an intimate knowledge of his potential sex partners never presents him with an obstacle to physical intimacy” (Sales). Here, Sales problematizes the types of relationships Tinder fosters, by pointing out how the app objectifies Tinder users, promoting the idea of quantity over quality, and making the individual Tinder user replaceable. Besides Vanity Fair, many other publications have released articles engaging with this question, using provocative titles, such as “The End of Courtship?” (from The New York Times), “Tinder: the shallowest dating app ever?” (The Guardian), and “The Five Years That Changed Dating” (The Atlantic). 

But its controversial concept seems to work: Tinder has racked up an astounding 5.9 million paying users for their Gold and Premium features (Iqbal), who account for around 70% of Tinder’s total revenue (Bromwich). And while I understood and sympathized with the experiences and observations of authors such as Sales, who decry the superficiality of the app interface, I was skeptical about the claim that Tinder has changed the dating landscape. Does Tinder really have such a far reach, such a significant impact? Is an app able to single-handedly change an entire generation’s concept of dating and love in the span of a few years?

These far-reaching implications of Sales’ claims prompted me to look into the matter, so I decided to create a fake account for myself.¹ I had seen my friends use Tinder before but decided that it was time for me to personally try it out. But right before I finished setting up my account and could start swiping away, I encountered an advertisement for a Tinder Gold subscription. In its free version, Tinder users are limited to 50 likes in a time frame of 12 hours. Additionally, the geographical distance from the potential match, automatically determined by the device’s GPS function, and the user’s age were always shown on the profile. Cue the Tinder Gold features: unlimited likes, and the ability to hide one’s age and location. After everything I had read and heard about Tinder, this surprised me; despite being criticized severely for its shallow approach to romantic matchmaking, Tinder seemed to double down on its approach by offering a paid version, giving users more power in the app by extending the features they can access. By taking away the limit on likes, Tinder aims at increasing the pace and quantity of matches. At the same time, by rendering information about age and location optional, they reinforce the idea that the user’s pictures and their physical attractiveness are the only things that matter (Tyson et al. 461). Tinder relationships are bound to be of a superficial nature, as the profile layout only allows for a short description of 500 characters, not allowing for much connection on an emotional level. Additionally, a large majority of the screen is taken up by the user’s photos, resulting in users matching with each other by virtue of physical attraction. In fact, Tinder explicitly promotes this value of superficiality — and casualness — in its Gold features. In its blog post titled “Introducing Tinder Gold — A First-Class Swipe Experience,” they promote how these features aim to make the user’s experience as easy and casual as possible: “Now you can sit back, enjoy a fine cocktail, and browse through profiles at your leisure.” (Tinder Blog).

Browsing through Tinder’s website, I was surprised to find that Tinder nonetheless advertises with couples who claim to have found their “love of [their] life” or “soulmate” (Tinder), which stands in stark contrast with the superficial relationships that Sales criticized. Confronted with these seemingly conflicting concepts of love and relationships, I decided to read up on the different definitions of love from a research perspective; the conclusions in this paper will largely draw upon, and be applicable to a European and North American context.² When talking about romantic love in relationships, researchers often distinguish between the concepts of companionate and passionate love, which are often connected and related in a romantic relationship (Felmlee and Sprecher). While companionate love is less intense and most present when partners commit to a romantic relationship, passionate love develops first, playing an especially significant role in initial attraction that often dissipates over time (Sprecher and Felmlee). Defined as a “state of intense longing for union with another,” passionate love is thought to be closely related to sexual desire, similarly defined as “longing for sexual union” (Cacioppo and Hartfield). Researchers often use these terms interchangeably, highlighting the physical nature of passionate love. To examine match-making in Tinder Gold, I will focus on the concept of passionate love, as it pertains to the initial physical attraction in a relationship, which is the exact superficial approach that Sales decries in her article. 

As the app’s layout demonstrates, Tinder clearly intends to encourage the formation of passionate love through physical attraction. In Tinder Gold, physical attractiveness is reinforced as a value and consequently takes on an even more important role in the matchmaking process. Research has shown that physical appearance is one of the main factors in determining attraction and desire for a romantic partner, thus providing the basis for passionate love: “[our research] revealed that physical attractiveness predicted romantic evaluations with a moderate-to-strong effect size […]” (Eastwick et al. 623). Furthermore, physical attractiveness as a determining factor in subjects’ ideal partner preference was found to be equally significant for both sexes. This finding is interesting, as it disproves the evolutionary perspective of ideal partner preference — the idea that there are sex differences in ideal partner preferences, where men value physical attractiveness while women value earning prospects, and that “ideal partner preferences are functional” based on these sex differences (Eastwick et al. 626). Instead, physical attractiveness seems to be a determining factor in measuring attraction across both sexes in a Western research context. Additionally, Eastwick et al. found that in a speed-dating context comparable to Tinder, physical attractiveness often influences the subject’s choice, regardless of what they previously stated as valued attributes in a romantic partner:

[…] people’s spontaneous affective reactions to physical attractiveness in a romantic partner were entirely independent of their conscious judgments about whether they believed physical attractiveness to be a valuable attribute in a partner.

(Eastwick et al. 642) 

Overall, these findings strongly indicate that physical attractiveness has played and continues to play a deciding role in determining human attraction, regardless of the individual’s previously stated preferences. 

These findings directly apply to the logic behind Tinder and its Gold feature. By giving the user the ability to hide their location and age, Tinder Gold lessens the value of such information. The user’s sole focus becomes the profile of their potential match, i.e. physical appearance. Furthermore, removing the limit on the number of likes a user can give places emphasis on the value of quantity, generating as many matches as possible, thus lessening the value of the single match. The user is encouraged to keep swiping, to keep matching, as there is no need to be thrifty with one’s likes. Tinder Gold consequently enhances superficiality of the app by increasing the focus on physical appearance and quantity of matches, building on the premise that physical attractiveness alone is able to generate sufficient attraction and produce matches in the app (Cacioppo and Hatfield). Tinder Gold’s enormous potential and success is hardly surprising then, as it directly pertains to and encourages our innate human propensity to be attracted by physical appearance, in the context of passionate love.

Although the underlying factors influencing attraction are thought to be constant and inherent in humans, the expression and experience of passionate love and sexual desire depends heavily on what is acceptable in society (Regan). Romantic partner choice for both companionate and passionate love is continually shaped and influenced by social factors, changing and evolving over centuries with society (Kuchler and Beher 7). The purpose of the simplest forms of human interaction and cooperation — out of which love later sprang — was to acquire an evolutionary advantage to guarantee survival and create offspring (Henrich and Muthukrishna 215). This utilitarian approach to love remained for a long time in the Western hemisphere until the Industrial Revolution in around 1800, when work and private life became increasingly separate, and the individual became removed from societal structures such as class or the extended family structure (Kuchler and Beher 12). The concept of love became increasingly complex after this, with a higher focus on companionate love as a governing quality of relationships (12).  More recently, the internet has proven itself to be a contributing factor to change. It encourages and creates new forms of connecting with people, as well as enables almost immediate communication across the globe. It completely upends the nature of our relationships, eradicating rigid social structures and placing more emphasis on the individual. Sociologist Barry Wellman from the University of Toronto aims to depict this shift with his theory of “Networked Individualism”. According to this theory, an individual’s social environment has been transformed from intimate, contained social circles towards a much larger, broader network with an increased scope of flexibility to move around in it (Boase and Wellman). There are three main characteristics to this theory:  

1. Relationships are both local and long distance.

2. Personal networks are sparsely knit but include densely knit groups.

3. Relationships are more easily formed and abandoned.

(Boase and Wellman)

In summary, Networked Individualism claims that the internet facilitates communication, by expanding our network regardless of location and making relationships less binding. In the context of Tinder Gold, the app promotes the formation of relationships regardless of distance, by rendering age and location as optional information. Previously, the app retrieved the user’s location and only showed profiles in a customizable radius, limited to 100 miles. Since this information was always shown in the profile, it arguably influenced the user’s swiping behavior, as it indicated availability and feasibility to meet up with the match. With Tinder Gold, the user is not subject to this restriction anymore; in fact, Tinder recently added a “Passport Feature,” which allows the user to set their location to anywhere in the world and use the app in this area, completely eliminating any geographical barriers.  

Removing the limit on the number of likes furthermore allows the expansion of the user’s network and facilitates the formation and abandonment of relationships, as there are always a myriad of other users that are just a swipe away — which is the exact behavior of collecting Tinder matches and building a network of superficial acquaintances that Nancy Jo Sales observes in her piece on Tinder dating culture (Sales). Referring back to my own experience of using Tinder, the theory of Networked Individualism might serve to explain the three likes that I got; despite having no picture of myself and no description in my profile, there was still a one-sided attempt by some other users to establish a connection. The app allows this simple formation of a relationship with a single swipe, and the relationship can be abandoned as easily, by not responding or even blocking the other user. Tinder Gold and its functions are thus in line with the development of Networked Individualism, and can be seen as part of a larger societal development in Europe and North America that has changed the way in which we think about relationships. 

Sociologist Eva Ilouz makes similar direct observations about the effects of the internet on dating in Western societies. In her research on online dating platforms, she claims that the internet’s “disembedding of individual romantic choices from the moral and social fabric” has culminated in the “emergence of a self-regulated market of encounters” (41), where partner choice — especially for passionate love partners — becomes an individual choice independent of previous social structures. Furthermore, she claims that media, consumer culture, and the internet have directly promoted superficiality in human attraction. In modern media, the value of “sexiness” — emphasizing sexuality and physical attractiveness — has become increasingly portrayed and idealized (42). “Sexiness” has become a characteristic of its own, independent of a person’s character and detached from emotions: “‘sex appeal,’ ‘sexual desirability,’ or ‘sexiness’ reflects a cultural emphasis on sexuality and physical attractiveness as such, detached from a moral world of values” (42). Though her research does not focus on Tinder specifically, this cultural emphasis includes apps such as Tinder with its Gold features, exploiting our propensity for superficial attraction to a person’s physical attractiveness. Illouz further claims that sexuality has taken on a more central and deciding role in relationships as a consequence of the increasing depiction of sexuality in media and culture:

Undoubtedly, along with the feminist and bohemian claims to sexual freedom, consumer culture has been the most significant cultural force that has contributed to the sexualization of women, and later of men. […] The commodification of the body through the signifiers of youth and beauty entailed its intense eroticization, and its close proximity to romantic love as well.

(Ilouz 42-44)

The increased significance of sexuality in relationships, combined with a general liberalization of societal norms pertaining to the expression of sexual desire, consequently allowed people to pursue passionate love more easily and freely.

In short, societal developments influence the way we choose our romantic partners and the freedom with which we can pursue them. While the concept of romance has changed significantly over time, the underlying mechanisms of our bodies that ultimately determine attraction and desire are uniform across both sexes and have remained the same in a Western context. More recently, the barriers limiting partner choice have broken down and technology has opened up new opportunities to meet romantic partners. Encouraging the value of superficiality as a medium to meet partners, Tinder Gold fits perfectly into this societal development. Against a backdrop of a society developing towards a focus on open sexuality and expanding social circles, Tinder Gold takes advantage of these developments by providing a simplistic medium for meeting romantic partners. Its success in recent years is therefore not surprising. 

My time as a Tinder user remained short-lived and despite my curiosity, I did not decide to purchase Tinder Gold. Trying out Tinder and flipping casually through profiles is superficial and felt weird, and I could certainly sympathize with the experience of Nancy Jo Sales and other authors. But returning to my original question of whether Tinder destroyed romance and changed a generation’s concept of dating, I realize that this is not the case. While Tinder may have changed how we find our partners, it has not changed how we become attracted to them. And this is exactly why Tinder — and Tinder Gold — have found such success. Physical attractiveness has always played a deciding role in determining initial attraction, and it will only continue to do so in the future, strengthened by societal developments in Europe and North America towards heavily individualized societies that cherish sexiness as a value. 

We should see Tinder as a product of these larger societal developments towards expanding social circles and superficiality in human relationships. Being one of the largest and most popular dating apps, Tinder obviously plays an active role in promoting these values, and exploits the human propensity and societal changes towards a more sexualized society, but its reach is certainly not far enough to be a driving factor. Ultimately, whether this new way of meeting new partners is “right” or “wrong” is not the point of this paper — and I am highly doubtful that there are “right” or “wrong” ways to meet partners — but studying Tinder Gold and its success can reveal the role that superficiality plays in modern human relationships. No offense, but maybe Ashley had a point after all: we have some fuckboy qualities in all of us. Swipe on then.

Endnotes

¹ Giving a false name (simply the letter G), age (27), no bio, and adding a single picture of the lake in the local park, I was actually able to garner three likes on my profile. I don’t know who they were though; only Tinder Gold knows…

² However, it would be interesting to investigate further how these findings could apply to the way Tinder is used in other dating landscapes, e.g. in societies with more traditional or conservative dating customs.

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Works Cited

Baxter, Holly, and Pete Cashmore. “Tinder: the shallowest dating app ever?” The Guardian, 23 November 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/23/tinder-shallowest-dating-app-ever. Accessed 05 May 2020. 

Boase, Jeffrey, and Barry Wellman. “Personal Relationships: On and Off the Internet.” Cambridge Handbook of Personal Relationships, edited by Anita L. Vangelisti and Daniel Perlman, Cambridge University Press, 1st edition, 2006. Credo Reference, http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/cuppr/personal_relationships_on_and_off_the_internet/0?institutionId=577. Accessed 17 May 2020.

Bromwich, Jonah E. “Wait, People Pay for Tinder?” The New York Times, 6 August 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/style/tinder-gold.html. Accessed 08 May 2020.

Cacioppo, Stephanie, and Elaine Hatfield. “Passionate love and sexual desire.” The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, edited by Patricia Whelehan, and Anne Bolin, Wiley, 1st edition, 2015. Credo Reference, http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/wileyhs/passionate_love_and_sexual_desire/0?institutionId=577. Accessed 06 May 2020.

Eastwick, P. W., Luchies, L. B., Finkel, E. J., & Hunt, L. L. “The predictive validity of ideal partner preferences: A review and meta-analysis.” Psychological Bulletin, 140(3), 2014, pp. 623–665. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032432.

Fetters, Ashley. “The Five Years That Changed Dating.” The Atlantic, 21 December 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/12/tinder-changed-dating/578698/. Accessed 06 May 2020. 

G. Tyson, V. C. Perta, H. Haddadi and M. C. Seto, “A first look at user activity on Tinder.” IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), San Francisco, CA, 2016, pp. 461-466. doi: 10.1109/ASONAM.2016.7752275.

Henrich, Joseph, and Michael Muthukrishna. “The Origins and Psychology of Human Cooperation.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 72:207-240, 2021, pp. 207-240. doi: 10.1146/annurev-psych-081920-042106.   

Illouz, Eva. “Why Love Hurts — A Sociological Explanation.” Polity Press, 2012, pp. 19-58.

Iqbal, Mansoor. “Tinder Revenue and User Statistics (2020).” 24 April 2020, https://www.businessofapps.com/data/tinder-statistics/#4.

Kuchler, Barbara, and Stefan Behler. Soziologie der Liebe: Romantische Beziehungen in theoretischer Perspektive. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2014. 

Regan, Pamela C. “Desire, sexual.” The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, edited by Patricia Whelehan, and Anne Bolin, Wiley, 1st edition, 2015. Credo Reference, http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/wileyhs/desire_sexual/0?institutionId=577. Accessed 06 May 2020.

Sales, Nancy J. “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse.’” Vanity Fair, 06 August 2015. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating.

Sprecher, Susan, and Diane Felmlee. “Love.” Encyclopedia of Social Psychology, Roy F. Baumeister, and Kathleen D. Vohs, Sage Publications, 1st edition, 2007. Credo Reference, http://proxy.library.nyu.edu/login?url=https://search.credoreference.com/content/entry/sagesocpsyc/love/0?institutionId=577. Accessed 16 May 2020.

Tinder. “Introducing Tinder Gold — A First-Class Swipe Experience.” Official blog of Tinder, 28 June 2017, https://blog.gotinder.com/introducing-tinder-gold-a-first-class-swipe-experience/.

Tinder. “Swipe Right.” Tinder, https://tinder.com/en. 

Williams, Alex. “The End of Courtship?” The New York Times, 11 January 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/fashion/the-end-of-courtship.html. Accessed 05 May 2020.

Image credit: Pathway to Home, by Xiaohan

by Chen Kuntian

Read the Faculty Introduction.

Around 5 years ago, Chinese scholar Qian Liu examined the “social integration status” of migrant workers’ children in urban public schools, attempting to understand whether migrant workers’ children were accepted as part of the urban communities they were living in (395). According to an entry in his field diary, a teacher from an urban primary school told him: “… since the parents (migrant workers) aren’t well mannered, it is hard for us to manage them, and the parents don’t understand what we are saying” (398). The quote displays a negative view of migrant workers and their children, where they are viewed as illiterate and bad-mannered in the urban spaces that they live and study in.

In this essay, I define migrant workers (‘农民工’ in Mandarin) as  people who grew up in rural areas, and moved to urban areas for work in China. Migrant workers are commonly considered as a group ‘in-between’ urban and rural residents in China, in that they grew up in rural areas but are now working and living in cities. By the term ‘urban residents’, I refer to Chinese nationals who are born and have lived continuously in cities in China, as contrasted against rural residents, who are born and live in rural areas. 

With urban residents and migrant workers now living together in closer proximity, migrant workers are often blamed for their children’s lack of literacy skills, and perceived as lacking in their own sense of personal responsibility for their children. This is evident in surveys conducted in four major cities by the Chinese sociologist Li Zhu, who noted the presence of strong negative reactions against migrant laborers in urban populations (48). Such negative reactions include instances where migrant workers, their children, and larger rural populations are considered as illiterate and lacking any ability or potential to become literate (48). Read together with Qian’s field research, Li’s surveys illustrate how negative attitudes about the literacy of migrant workers and their children are common among urban residents. However, I argue that such negative attitudes against migrant workers are unreasonable. Lower literacy skills in migrant workers’ children are due to long working hours imposed upon their parents, where their parents are unable to provide adequate informal literacy activities to support their children’s education. Rather than seeing migrant workers’ children as incapable of becoming literate, and their parents as irresponsible, we should see migrant workers and their children as victims of a cycle of low income and inadequate education, and inherently capable of achieving stronger literacy skills, instead of placing the blame of lower literacy skills on them. 

Some children of migrant workers have relatively weaker literacy skills because their parents move into the cities to find better jobs, leaving them unattended and lacking in informal literacy activities. These children are commonly referred to as ‘left-behind children’ in China, whose parents migrate from rural areas into the cities for better jobs, but leave their children behind in these rural areas. In their study on the effects of family involvement on the development of literacy skills, Jingying Wang, Hui Li, and Dan Wang have defined daily activities between parents and children which help children practice their language as “informal literacy activities,” which complement the “formal” literacy activities offered by public schools (119). Moreover, according to their research, these activities play a vital role in the development of children’s literacy skills, where the presence of such informal literacy activities are linked to better academic performance in primary school children (130). 

However, children of migrant workers have fewer chances to meet and interact with their parents, and would thus lack the opportunity to have such essential informal literacy activities. In a study by labor scholars Guanglun Michael Mu and Yang Hu, both authors highlight the living conditions of ‘left-behind’ children by conducting interviews with them. One of these children said: 

At the New Year Party, all other kids had their parents around, but my parents were busy at work… When the show started, all the other kids were lifted above by their parents… so they could still see what’s going on out there… At that time, I just want my parents to be with me. 

(25)

This excerpt highlights how these children are affected by their parents being “busy at work,” who cannot spend time with their children even on New Year’s Eve. Given this geographical separation and the lack of time with their children, migrant workers have generally fewer opportunities for interaction and activities with their children, as compared with urban residents. Given such circumstances, it is understandable that these children would face greater challenges developing stronger literacy skills, as compared with urban residents.

Some children of migrant workers do move and live together with their parents in urban areas. While such children would live in closer proximity to migrant workers, they still face limited opportunities in strengthening their literacy skills — not due to any irresponsibility on the part of their parents, but due to the economic hardships and labor conditions they face. Most migrant workers have to work fairly long hours, leaving them with less time to spend with their children, as highlighted in a report by Hong Kong labor scholar Kaston Siu. Siu spent several months living with migrant workers to observe their living and working conditions. He writes that a typical factory migrant worker in Shenzhen needs to work 9 to 10 hours a day, but this can go up to 14 hours a day in the rush season (55). In contrast, according to the China Labor Statistical Yearbook, the average weekly working hours of urban employees is 46.2 hours in 2018 (“Survey of Average Weekly Working Hours”). Though urban employees also work quite long hours, migrant workers still work longer hours on a more consistent basis than urban residents. Furthermore, as most of them work in factories and other industrial areas, these workers are faced with more rigid working conditions and hours, leaving them with less time to spend with their children as compared with urban residents. Under such difficult economic and labor arrangements imposed upon them, migrant workers face considerable challenges in helping their children to develop stronger literacy skills.

We have discussed how migrant workers’ children have poorer literacy skills than the children of urban residents, due to lack of informal literacy activities and the economic conditions faced by their parents, instead of some born inferiority. With this understanding, we might wonder: how might these children perform, if they have the same material conditions and educational opportunities as their urban counterparts? Under the same conditions, it is likely that migrant workers’ children will display a similar level of literacy skills and academic performance as the children of urban residents. This is supported by a study by Gerard A. Postiglione and several Chinese scholars, who randomly sampled the academic scores of students from urban and rural areas who were admitted to top Chinese universities. When comparing the scores of these two groups of students, the authors found out that the average Grade Point Average (GPA) of urban students is 77.75 out of 100, while the average GPA of rural students is 76.74 out of 100 (68). Though urban students have a slightly better academic performance, this difference is, in the researchers’ own words, “not statistically significant” and can almost be ignored (71). Since the children of migrant workers are born in rural areas, they are more likely to take college entrance examinations in their hometown, and so may be considered as a part of the group of “rural students” examined by the authors. These scores highlight how there is no inherent inferiority in the children of migrant workers; if given more opportunities to receive a better education, these children have the potential to develop strong literacy skills, and to achieve academic success as well.

 In light of this study, we should reconsider the common negative perceptions of the children of migrant workers. Rather than adopting a view of them as inferior by their own or their parents’ faults, we should see such children as possessing great and equal potential for academic success. Furthermore, we ought to see the children of migrant workers as victims of a cycle of low income and weak literacy skills. In light of their parents’ lower income levels, the children of migrant workers are less likely to get high-income jobs because of their weaker literacy skills, thus perpetuating and transmitting lower income levels into future generations. Many studies have been done on the intergenerational transmission of poverty in China, but most focus on the specific conditions faced by poorer rural residents of being unable to work while not fully accounting for the specific challenges faced by migrant workers and their children (Zhang 56). For instance, migrant workers’ children can attend the same public schools as their urban counterparts, but still face a greater difficulty in achieving academic success under the economic and social challenges faced by their parents. 

Consequently, migrant workers’ children continue to face the effects of intergenerational poverty. In their study, Fangwei Wu, Deyuan Zhang, and Jinghua Zhang used mathematical models to explore the relationship between inadequate education and low income. Their study highlights that families with the same initial income level but different educational backgrounds may have differing economic outcomes, forming an income gap after some time (314). Moreover, if a family begins with a lower educational background and with poorer economic conditions, the income gap grows in severity, as time progresses (314). This model applies to the migrant workers’ children, as their weaker literacy skills makes it more challenging for them to achieve academic success and gain access to higher paying occupations and positions. While the children of migrant workers may possibly attain marginally higher income levels in the future, they will remain as victims of a more severe income gap, thus transmitting poor economic outcomes into future generations. The model therefore demonstrates the effects of lower literacy levels among the children of migrant workers, painting a more complete picture of the vicious cycle of poverty and poor educational outcomes faced by this population. 

    In this essay, I have explored how poorer literacy skills in migrant workers’ children are not due to the personal irresponsibility of their parents or family members, but due to economic and labor conditions — such as the parents’ movement away from home and longer working hours, which prevent them from playing a more active role in supporting the development of literacy skills in their children. Understanding the causes of lower literacy skills in these children helps us to see migrant workers as victims of the unbalanced economic development of rural and urban areas, and as victims of cycles of low income and inadequate education. As ordinary citizens, we may not have the ability to solve this complex problem comprehensively, but understanding the causes of the literacy gap helps us to show respect to migrant workers and their children that we meet in daily life. While policymakers have made great efforts to ensure the minimal income of migrant workers, more attention should also be paid towards protecting their rights and improving their working conditions, while also investing more in schools and educational programs for left-behind children. Such investments would improve the well-being and literacy skills of migrant workers’ children, and may eventually free them from the vicious cycle of low income and inadequate education. 

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Works Cited

Gerard A., Postiglione, et al. “Rural Students in a Chinese Top-Tier University: Family Background, School Effects, and Academic Performance.” Chinese Education and Society, vol. 50, no. 2, 2017, pp. 63–74, doi:10.1080/10611932.2017.1326774. 

Li, Jie and Nikolas Rose. “Urban Social Exclusion and Mental Health of China’s Rural-Urban Migrants – A Review and Call for Research.” Health & Place, vol. 48, 2017, pp. 20–30, doi: 10.1016/j.healthplace.2017.08.009.

Li, Nan. “The Left-behind and Migrant Children of China: 2017 Statistics.” Translated by Luxia Broadbent, China Development Brief, 2018, www.chinadevelopmentbrief.cn/news/the-left-behind-and-migrant-children-of-china-2017-statistics-full-translation/

Mu, Guanglun Michael, and Yang Hu. “The Wellbeing of Floating Children and Left-Behind Children.” Living with Vulnerabilities and Opportunities in a Migration Context: Floating Children and Left-behind Children in China, Sense Publishers, 2016, pp. 25–46. 

Qian, Liu. “Three Types of Social Integration Status among Children of Migrant Workers in China: Scenes of Superiority of City Residents, Co-Existence of Urban Culture and Rural Hometown Culture, and Weak Social Capital under Strong Policy Discourse.” Chinese Education & Society, vol. 50, no. 4, 2017, pp. 393–408, doi:10.1080/10611932.2017.1382132.

Siu, Kaxton. “Continuity and Change in the Everyday Lives of Chinese Migrant Factory Workers.” The China Journal, vol. 74, 2015, pp. 43–65. 

“Survey of Average Weekly Working Hours of Employees in Cities and Towns”, People’s Republic of China, National Bureau of Statistics of China.  China Labour Statistical Yearbook 2018, China Statistics Press, 2019.

Wang, Jingying, et al. “Bridging the Rural-Urban Literacy Gap in China: A Mediation Analysis of Family Effects.” Journal of Research in Childhood Education, vol. 32, no. 1, 2017, pp. 119–134, doi: 10.1080/02568543.2017.1388308. 

Wu, Fangwei, et al. “Unequal Education, Poverty and Low Growth—A Theoretical Framework for Rural Education of China.” Economics of Education Review, vol. 27, no. 3, 2008, pp. 308–318, doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2006.09.008. 

Zhang, Huafeng. “The Poverty Trap of Education: Education–Poverty Connections in Western China.” International Journal of Educational Development, vol. 38, 2014, pp. 47–58, doi: 10.1016/j.ijedudev.2014.05.003. 

Zhu, Li. “Quntixing Pianjian Yu Qishi-Nongmingong Yu Shimin De Mocaxing Hudong [Group Prejudice and Discrimination-Grinding Interaction between Peasant Worker and City Residents].” Jianghai Academic Journal, 2001, pp. 48–53.