M. A. GULEVA Postgraduate student of ISAA MSU Keywords: China, education, migrant children With a population of 1.34 billion. According to the latest data, there are more than 200 million migrants in China2. For a long period of time, too little attention was paid to the education of their children. This situation is due to the system of urban and rural registration of the population. Currently, migrant children do not have access to education in public schools, as they do not have a local residence permit. As the number of rural residents who have left their native villages for the cities in search of work has increased rapidly in recent years, some experts have begun to talk about the emergence of a new social stratum in China and, as a result, new challenges facing society. MIGRANTS - A NEW SOCIAL STRATUM? To begin with, who falls under the term "children of migrants"? According to 1998 data from the Chinese National Education Committee, these are children between the ages of 6 and 14 who live with their parents or guardians in a temporary place of residence for more than half a year. However, in recent years, many Chinese documents refer to teenagers under the age of 17 as migrant children. This allows us to assume that the age limit for them has been raised after all. The number of such children was 12.12 million, including 8.74 million under the age of 14 (see Table 1). Among the migrants who arrived in cities, 78.74% are residents of rural areas. Children make up 12.59% of the total flow of rural migrants to cities. Of this number, 5 million receive compulsory 9-year education in various educational institutions. The main flow of migrants and their children goes to the eastern regions of the country (see figure 1). The share of migrant children in this part of China is 65.32%, while in the Center and West these figures are 20.2% and 14.48%, respectively. This situation is quite understandable and, of course, is associated with the high level of development in ... Read more