For many of China's 130 million migrant workers, the month following the end of the Lunar New Year meant a long and uncomfortable journey back from the countryside to the booming cities of the east coast. The train rides, which the Ministry of Railways said involved more than two million people, are taken on impossibly cramped carriages ferrying the armies of migrant workers.
Among the crowds were the millions of children who accompany their parents in the search for a casual job in the construction, manufacturing or service industries. About 20 million of this so-called floating population of rural migrants are children under the age of 18, according to a charity run by the All-China Youth Federation. Many of these children will not find a place in school.
In Beijing alone, home to nearly 300,000 migrant children, the city government admits that more than 80 per cent of migrant children fail to attend secondary school (for 13- to 18- year-olds), and 70,000 receive no schooling.
Under the mainland's rigid hukou or household permit system, most migrant workers are denied access to urban welfare services such as schooling and health care. As the number of migrant workers' children mushroomed during the 1990s, schools began to charge parents 'donation fees' - often thousands of yuan - and additional 'temporary school fees' before allowing their children into the classroom.
According to a survey of migrant workers in the capital by Han Jialing, a professor at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, 20 per cent of 31,000 migrant families surveyed in 2003 lived on about 500 yuan a month, while 43 per cent earned between 500 and 1,000 yuan. Yet they were charged additional school fees of between 1,200 and 2,000 yuan a year per child - for primary and junior middle school respectively - far higher than those charged to wealthier urban parents.
In 2003, the central government ruled that the education of migrant children was the responsibility of the cities in which they lived, and ordered local governments to end price discrimination.