The effect of meeting opportunities on local urban residents’ prejudice against migrant children in China

Abstract

This article explores the effect of meeting opportunities between local urban and nonlocal residents on locals’ prejudice against migrant children in China by focusing on three contexts: friendships, schools and neighbourhoods. China’s hukou policy creates a boundary between urban and rural residents, which also takes the form of locals and nonlocals in rural-to-urban migration. Urban public schools with a mix of local and migrant students offer a chance to observe the intergroup relationships between local and nonlocal students as well as their parents. Using two waves of data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), this study examines how changes in migrant friend groups, schoolmates and neighbours of local children affect changes in their parents’ prejudice, as seen among a sample of 1630 student-parent pairs. With longitudinal data, this study mitigates the effect of reverse causality between intergroup contact and prejudice. The findings show that parents whose children have more migrant friends have less prejudice, under certain conditions. Additionally, more nonlocal students in a school relates to less prejudice, especially among parents who are more embedded in the school life. Furthermore, local families with low socio-economic status experience an increase in prejudice, potentially due to an increased feeling of threat. Additionally, this article finds that prejudiced attitudes spread through the social networks of children and parents at the school level. This study emphasises the importance of different contexts of meeting opportunities and sheds new light on the generalisability of the (extended) contact hypothesis to the understudied context of Chinese internal migration.