Academic Resilience in Rural Chinese Children: Individual and Contextual Influences

Although urbanization in China is growing at a fast pace, there is still a large section of population (45%) living in rural or remote locations. In this developing country with the world’s largest population, the government’s strict household registration (hukou) control policy results in less opportunity for children with rural hukou status to have access to adequate education resources. The aim of this study is to explore the individual and contextual factors that are conducive to rural students’ academic resilience. We use data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies (2012 wave) that include 1729 Chinese children aged 10–15 years (boys 53.8%; girls 46.2%) from more than 25 provinces. Among them, 70.1% are from the rural area, 25.2% are of urban hukou, 4.7% are those with no hukou or foreigners, and 50.1% are primary school students. Through comparison between rural non-resilient and resilient groups, this paper finds different pathways for rural Chinese children’s academic resilience. Having high parental expectation and attending key schools are important in the Chinese context while helping to check homework seems ineffective in improving Chinese rural children’s academic performance. The findings provide empirical evidence that understanding resilience needs to take contexts and culture into consideration.