A School Vanishes, a Principal Fades Out, and It's as if Nothing Happened | 2018 Stories No. 10

"One more school for migrant workers' children means one less prison in the future."

"Recording the actions and everyday lives of ordinary people," said Walt Harrington, "is something our trade does too little of. These are stories that record people's behavior, motives, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, discontents, hopes, fears, achievements, and longings as they search for meaning and purpose in their lives. They help people understand their place in the world."

He once wrote a story about a family whose teenage son had killed himself two years before. "I struggled to explain to them the kind of story I wanted to write, how deep I wanted to go. The father listened for a long time, and finally said, 'So you want to know what I'm thinking when I pray alone in a quiet room.'"

The simplest form of the question, Harrington said, is this: how do people live, and what do they value?

Each of our lives makes up this world.

"2018 Stories" is a new column from QDaily.

Fewer and fewer people are willing to listen to Chen Enxian.

These days Chen Enxian doesn't get up until eight or nine in the morning. In the afternoons he reads, writes, and watches TV at home; in the evenings, more TV. Compared with the days when he rose at 5 a.m. and spent the whole day busy at the school, Principal Chen now has so much free time it bores him.

"These past few months, this whole thing has faded further and further out of view, as if it never happened. That's pretty frightening. Something this big, and once it's over people just forget it."

Chen Enxian, 56, is from Zhangzhai Village, Linhe Township, Xixian County, Henan Province. He is short and thin, with graying temples, and speaks with a slight accent.

In August 1998, Chen Enxian founded the Migrant Children's School of Shijingshan District, Beijing.

In August 2018, the school — by then renamed Huangzhuang School, and the largest school for migrant workers' children in Beijing — folded.

1.

The school was Chen Enxian's pride.

Of the nearly 20 private schools he founded or had a hand in, this one lasted longest and grew best. It covered 12,000 square meters, with 8,900 square meters of school buildings, and had a kindergarten, a primary school, and a middle school division. It employed more than 120 teachers and staff and enrolled over 1,800 students; roughly counted, more than ten thousand students had graduated from it over the years.

The pride also came from the honors and the support the school had won.

The Shijingshan district government had put several million yuan into this privately run school for migrant children; NBA China had donated and built a playground; the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation had donated equipment and supplies. In 2011, Huangzhuang School appeared in the State Council–commissioned promotional film China's National Image (《中国国家形象宣传片》), becoming one of the examples China used to present itself to the world as "prosperous and developing, democratic and progressive, civilized and open, peaceful and harmonious." In 2017, for having solved the schooling problem for tens of thousands of migrant children, it was named a "2017 Model Livelihood Project" by Minsheng Weekly, a magazine run under the People's Daily.

All of which made Huangzhuang School look like a school that mainstream society had firmly accepted.

In those same years Principal Chen was named one of the "100 Outstanding Principals in China." Together with his fellow townsman Yi Benyao, principal of Xingzhi School, he had represented schools for migrant workers' children in briefing leaders at the State Council. He was one of the heads of the Committee on Schools for Migrant Workers' Children at the Beijing Private Education Association, and he had joined the China National Democratic Construction Association…

For a few years, Principal Chen Enxian — deputy head of the science and education branch of the association's Shijingshan District Working Committee — looked like a successful man.

Then, on August 10, 33 days after that semester's classes ended, the gates of Huangzhuang School were sealed shut.

2.

His landlord no longer wanted to rent to him.

The same explanation given for many businesses that shut down overnight.

The fuller explanation was that the private school's operating license had expired.

The Shijingshan District Education Commission and Beijing Jindu Landscaping Co., Ltd. — the company that leased the land to Huangzhuang School, and the one that sealed the gates — said the school was shut down by force because its operating license had expired and it no longer held the right to use the land.

Chen Enxian tells it differently. Huangzhuang School's operating license was due to expire in March 2018. He applied to the Shijingshan District Education Commission for the annual review, hoping to be issued a new license. By normal practice, a school that passes the annual review gets its license renewed for another three years. But the education commission did not issue a new one. It simply wrote an extension by hand on the original license, pushing the expiration date to August 2018.

"At the time we didn't think much of it. I asked around, and an official told me Jindu Landscaping was planning a demolition — if it didn't go through, they'd process my license."

Meng Yun, deputy secretary of the Communist Party's Shijingshan District Education Working Committee, denied Chen Enxian's account in an interview with Caixin, saying that "after Huangzhuang School's operating license expired, it never applied to the competent authority for a new one; the authority, in order not to disrupt the school's normal teaching, extended its operating status to August in line with the regular teaching cycle."

On land-use rights, Jindu Landscaping held that Huangzhuang School had breached its contract by subletting the land and building without permits, which was why it terminated early a lease originally set to run to 2025. The subletting referred to a staff dormitory building the school had put up jointly with Beijing Dagongguan, of which the school used the first and second floors; the unpermitted construction referred to the school's conversion of dozens of old factory buildings and greenhouses, plus 60 newly built classrooms and other teaching space.

Chen Enxian disputes Jindu Landscaping's version. As early as 2007, he says, Huangzhuang School signed an agreement with the Southwest Suburban Nursery of the Greening Division of the Beijing Municipal Landscaping Bureau — Jindu Landscaping's predecessor — allowing it to sublet part of the land. As for the unpermitted buildings, he admits only some of them had property certificates. But the problem, he says, is that Jindu Landscaping never helped the school complete the paperwork the contract required it to help with.

Chen Enxian suspects money is what drove Jindu Landscaping to end the contract early.

Thirteen years ago the land under Huangzhuang School cost just over 10,000 yuan per mu (about 667 square meters), with total annual rent under 200,000 yuan. Rents on the surrounding land have since risen to around 80,000 yuan per mu.

"Once they tear down the school and put up any old building, several million or even ten million yuan a year in rent is easy. Ordinary rented housing around here goes for more than 2 yuan per square meter per day."

Huangzhuang School's official shutdown date was August 13, 2018.

Forty-one days before the shutdown, Huangzhuang School held its 20th-anniversary celebration, attended by Guo Yongfu, former vice minister of education, Wang Zhiguo, former chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, and others.

Ten days before the shutdown, the Shijingshan District Education Commission and Jindu Landscaping told Chen Enxian that Huangzhuang School would be closed.

Six days before the shutdown, notices about the closure and the redistribution of students went up inside the school.

Four days before the shutdown, Jindu Landscaping issued a notice stating that it would take back the land starting August 10, restrict access, cut off water and electricity when it saw fit, and require everyone connected to the school to move out. It also offered teachers and students who cooperated a one-time relocation bonus of 2,000 yuan a head.

Three days before the shutdown, Jindu Landscaping welded an iron gate across the school entrance, sealing it off.

Two days after the shutdown, Jindu Landscaping posted another letter at the gate, addressed to the residents of Huangzhuang School: water and electricity would be cut on August 24, residents who had already taken the relocation bonus were to leave by August 19, and everyone else still living on campus had to be out by August 24 at the latest.

3.

After the school closed, Chen Enxian went back three times. The first was on August 20, when he wanted to fetch some belongings and found a security guard tailing him the whole way. The second was on August 25, when a news outlet wanted photographs, and he got in by lying down in the trunk of a car. The third was September 1, the day school should have started — and his last time inside. "It's easier not to look; looking just makes it worse," he said. His "head got hot, I wanted to appeal to society, to get people to pay attention" — "I felt terrible, I couldn't control myself." He protested; he wrote a letter in his own blood that read "Save Huangzhuang School"… This time the guards spotted him and held him down, called the police, and he sat in the police station until 8 p.m. before he was allowed to go home.

That stretch was also when the media came around most. More than ten outlets found him for interviews over those 20-odd days, though far fewer stories than that ever ran.

After September, nobody came looking for him.

4.

In 1998, Chen Enxian, a history teacher at Xixian County No. 2 Senior High School in Henan, went to Beijing to visit relatives and friends.

Over more than a month in the city, he took in the following:

Plenty of people from his hometown were working in Beijing, but getting their children into school there was very hard; in the fields and at the secondhand markets he kept seeing clusters of children with nowhere to study; when he visited Xingzhi School — the school for migrant workers' children founded by his fellow townsman Yi Benyao and his wife — he learned it had turned away more than 300 students because it could not afford to expand…

Before that, he had taken unpaid leave from his post to teach for a year and a half at an elite private school in Guangzhou. Students there paid 60,000 to 70,000 yuan a year in tuition; meanwhile, to get a migrant worker's child into a Beijing public school cost a sponsorship fee of 6,000 to 7,000 yuan a year, which many families simply could not pay.

Chen Enxian, who thought of himself as an educated man, believed schooling could change a person's fate, and saw founding a school in Beijing as an opportunity.

At the time he had a school-allocated apartment of more than 40 square meters in the county seat, his son was in school there, and his wife had steady work teaching at a local primary school. The family of three "lived very comfortably." There was no reason to risk his job to go start a school in Beijing.

"My strength and my weakness are the same thing — I'm stubborn. Once I've settled on something, I have to do it. My family objected, and objecting got them nowhere. I made up an excuse and left. I just didn't go back, and there was nothing she could do about it. The principal said if I walked out, I'd be fired. Fine, fire me — my head was hot and I didn't think about the consequences," Chen Enxian recalled.

So, keeping it from his family, he quit his post, took a few thousand yuan, and went to Beijing to start a school for migrant workers' children.

Thinking about where the students would come from, Chen Enxian put the school in Huangzhuang Village, outside Beijing's Fourth Ring Road — one of the places out-of-towners clustered. With the help of a manager surnamed Dai at the Babaoshan Agriculture-Industry-Commerce Company, he rented a site: an abandoned courtyard with over 200 square meters of building space, at about 20,000 yuan a year. He turned the buildings into four classrooms, hired four teachers, and put a relative in charge of the cooking. That was how the Migrant Children's School of Shijingshan District — later Huangzhuang School — came into being.

5.

Set against 20 years of running schools in Beijing, this closure had a lucky side to it.

The more than 1,800 students and over 120 teachers and staff were redistributed to other schools.

Only about half the students were successfully placed, Chen Enxian said. That is not far off the 924 people registered for reassignment that the Shijingshan District Education Commission reported on August 14, 2018. He reckons the more than 900 children who fell through the cracks either went back to their hometowns or found schools on their own.

In early December he made a trip home to look into it, and found that more and more migrant families really are sending their children back from the big cities to become left-behind children in the countryside. "It's hard to get into the public schools back home, and the local rural private schools are basically full," so friends have been urging him to "go home and start a school for left-behind children" — there would be no shortage of students.

Compared with the closures of other schools for migrant workers' children, Chen Enxian thinks Huangzhuang School's case is the most unusual and the most fortunate. The teachers got compensation — one month's salary for every year worked, with teachers earning roughly 5,000-plus yuan a month — and nearly all of them found new positions. "This is the only case like it in all of Beijing."

"Lucky" is relative to the last time. In the sweep of closures around 2006, Chen Enxian lost two schools in Shijingshan District alone.

In September 2005 the Beijing Municipal Education Commission issued the Notice on Strengthening the Management of Schools Self-Established by the Migrant Population, setting out the policy of "support some, approve some, eliminate some." Districts across the city shut down large numbers of schools for migrant workers' children. Chen Enxian's were no exception. He had founded three schools in Shijingshan District, with roughly 5,000 students between them, but in 2006 both Huangzhuang South School and Keyang Hope School were closed, leaving only Huangzhuang School standing.

"It hurt then too, but there was nothing to be done — at least Huangzhuang School was still there. This time it hurts more. Why more? The school's conditions were so good, it had so much support from the government and from society, so many students, an influence at home and abroad — how can a school like that be shut down so easily?"

Chen Enxian has another worry: the teachers were placed, but only for now — "just two-year contracts" — "It's a temporary bridge, not something meant to last. They've stopped taking new students. As enrollment shrinks, the teachers will be phased out on their own."

He has also heard lately that students at the receiving schools without Beijing enrollment status may all be pushed to return to schools where their status is registered. Of Huangzhuang School's more than 1,800 students, only one in six had Beijing enrollment status. The worry has deepened.

Chen Enxian himself has received no compensation. If he does, he wants to use it to rebuild Huangzhuang School. So over these past few months he has spent part of his time resting and part of it scouting sites around Beijing. He knows it has become too hard to build a school for migrant children inside Beijing itself; he should go where the migrant population is newly gathering. Concretely, a great many migrants now cluster along the border between Beijing and Hebei. He wants to rebuild Huangzhuang School in places like Gu'an, Yanjiao, and Zhuozhou in Hebei, and revive the aid projects that social organizations used to fund.

Plenty of relatives and friends have urged him to stop chewing on this, to stop giving interviews. "Do whatever the government says. Take whatever they pay you, and if they pay nothing, so be it — you've got food on the table and clothes on your back, so just do nothing at all."

Chen Enxian has made rebuilding the school the "biggest demand" of the second half of his life. He is dug in.

6.

"This time some officials told me I'm too stubborn. Really it's a question of principle. What principle am I holding to? That it's too hard for migrant children to go to school, and that schools have to be built for them. There are more and more migrant children now, and more left-behind children, and in the end that is not a good thing. Certain factors are making it worse — you could call it unfair to low-income groups. I think the inequality in education for migrant workers' children is the biggest inequality there is."

For a man who has spent 20 years founding schools for migrant workers' children, that conclusion is only natural.

In March 1998 the State Education Commission and the Ministry of Public Security jointly issued the Interim Measures for the Schooling of Migrant Children, which allowed migrant children to be educated at private schools and at simplified schools set up specifically to enroll them, and said that "the conditions for establishing simplified schools may be relaxed as appropriate."

In August 1998 Chen Enxian's school opened, enrolling more than 150 students in its first semester at 300 yuan per student per semester. By September 1999 it had 800 students; by September 2002, 1,600, with a middle-school division added; by March 2003, around 2,000, and a kindergarten division that November; by September 2005, 3,100 — already the largest school for migrant workers' children in Beijing.

After two lean years, such schools got room to grow again in 2008. That year the State Council held that the schooling of children who move with their migrant parents should rely "mainly on the destination city and mainly on public schools," and that schools meeting operating standards should be granted legal accreditation.

The following year Huangzhuang School obtained its operating license and began growing fast again.

Chen Enxian calls that the happiest moment of his life. "I remember, right after we got approved, I pulled the school's leadership and my relatives and friends together, a whole table of us, and we drank ourselves silly. It was wild — everyone got drunk."

He is glad to look back on peaks like that.

"First, government support. After 2009 the government gave us funding, fixed up the buildings, donated desks and chairs — the support was substantial. Second, society gave us a lot of support. On top of that, our own effort. Huangzhuang School's teaching and facilities far surpassed the ordinary public schools back home."

"There are a lot of good people in Beijing," Chen Enxian likes to say. Without Manager Dai's help there would have been no site to begin with; a few tolerant officials at the Shijingshan District Education Commission let the school slip through the 2006 crackdown and later even granted it an operating license; on the kindergarten's first day, a local man in his fifties surnamed Li showed up with a truckload of toys for the students…

Chen Enxian has had plenty of time to size himself up too. Compared with some illiterate principals, he came out of teaching and was better at running instruction; compared with principals who pocket what they earn, he preferred to plow the profits back in, improving conditions and expanding until the scale paid for itself.

…

Now, of course, it has all stopped.

7.

Apart from the dull hours in front of the television, Chen Enxian writes letters to one government department after another, hoping to get someone to take the education of migrant children seriously.

Sometimes letters work.

In 2017 Beijing announced it would tear down more than 40 million square meters of unpermitted structures citywide. That August, Jindu Landscaping told Chen Enxian that, in the name of relieving Beijing of functions non-essential to its role as the capital and clearing unpermitted buildings, it would take back the land leased to Huangzhuang School.

"They even drove a bulldozer up to the front gate, ready to knock it down," Chen Enxian recalled.

That time, through media coverage, letters to higher authorities, and other means, the school survived.

"We thought we'd gotten through it. We never expected this scene again in August 2018."

This time, most of the letters he sent came right back down to the Shijingshan district level.

The Shijingshan District Education Commission and other agencies have met with him five or six times, but each side sticks to its own account and neither can persuade the other. "They have their reasons. Ah — and who is supposed to judge whose reasons are right? We feel hopeless."

These days Chen Enxian often feels how small he is, feels that nothing he says changes anything.

8.

Over 20 years, Chen Enxian's working role as a principal and his social role as a member of the China National Democratic Construction Association have put him a world away from the high school history teacher he was.

Twenty years of running schools also lifted him financially, into a life where he "doesn't worry about food or clothes." His relatives, friends, and family joined the business of schooling migrant workers' children and improved their own lives as well. His older sister, Chen Yuying, founded Xinweilai Experimental School in Beijing's Tongzhou District; his wife's older sister, Wan Suping, founded Yongfeng Experimental School in Beijing's Haidian District; and so on.

"If you want to call us profit-seekers, I won't argue — of course we make money, there's no way we wouldn't, and we have made money. But the money we earn mostly goes back into running the schools. Fees this low, and we solved the schooling problem for that many children — the public-good side should still outweigh the profit side."

The hardest part of running the schools, Chen Enxian said, was satisfying the demands of every department above him. "Whichever department comes to inspect, you have to drop everything and deal with it. There are a lot of them — public security, urban management, health, fire, the education commission… when officials come to inspect, you have to fix what they flag. You have to think about whether the buildings are safe."

His busiest time was the school holidays, because that was when he could renovate, add on, repair, and plan the buildings.

"Teachers' pay, parents asking for a tuition break — whatever the difficulty, people come to me. I'm easy to talk to. I consider myself kind-hearted; sometimes I just can't stand watching someone struggle. The moment someone says they're in trouble, I sign off on it." Though he admits that "normally I don't lose my temper, but once I do, I can't control myself."

Looking back on 20 years of rise and fall for Beijing's schools for migrant workers' children, Chen Enxian thinks, "Beijing has grown too fast and demolished too hard — that's one big factor. But to put it plainly, the most basic factor is policy. If policy is loose and the government backs you, demolition can be handled — you just move. Somewhere like Guangdong, which is more supportive of these schools, you could run one for decades and do quite well. Running a school in Beijing, too much changes."

After Huangzhuang School was shut down, the only school Chen Enxian had left in Beijing was one he runs with a partner in Tongzhou; all his others died off one by one over these 20 years of rise and fall — Changying Experimental School, Magezhuang Experimental School, Dongba Experimental School, Xinzhuang Experimental School…

"Beijing always uses the same excuses to shut down schools for migrant workers' children: safety hazards; buildings that don't meet code or were built without permits; being illegal, having no operating license. I've had enough schools shut down to tell you it always comes down to one of those three," he said.

9.

With time on his hands, Chen Enxian reads and writes essays, and can now reel off some of Lu Ming's arguments.

"For a country to keep developing, the future always lies with today's children. For China to go from a populous nation to a nation rich in human resources, the more than 60 million left-behind children and the more than 30 million migrant children in its cities are an enormous latent human resource. If these 100 million children can get a good education today, they will be a crucial human resource for China's modernization and for clearing the middle-income trap. If they cannot get a good education, they will become a burden and a hidden danger to society instead…"

The passage comes from the preface Lu Ming wrote for the book Dandelions in the Wind: A Report on the Lives of China's Migrant Children (《风中的蒲公英：中国流动儿童生存报告》). Lu Ming is the author of Great Nation, Great City (《大国大城》) and a distinguished professor at the School of Economics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University; his academic views on big cities differ considerably from the thinking on urban development that now prevails in policy circles.

"I came from the countryside to Beijing and built schools for migrant workers' children, and I got a great deal out of it. Given that, if I don't speak up now, I can't square it with my own conscience. I'm an ordinary person, but I do have some feeling for the country and its people. Seeing the state such a huge group is in — migrant workers, migrant children, left-behind children — doesn't sit right with me; it grieves me. If the education of migrant workers' children isn't sorted out, it won't just shape those children's whole lives; it will affect their families, and it's very bad for the country's development too. I remember a French television reporter once said: one more school for migrant workers' children means one less prison in the future."

Chen Enxian has changed his WeChat display name to "Conscience."

A French speaker would hardly reach for a phrase like "school for migrant workers' children"; some trace the line to Victor Hugo — "One more school, one less prison in the future."

The cover image shows students at Huangzhuang School in its early days; the banner image shows Chen Enxian in the school's early days. Both courtesy of Chen Enxian.