This paper explores the neo-liberal policies and practice embraced in the process of the economic and social changes in China over the last three decades and their impacts on the country's education system, particularly on the compulsory education of migrant children who relocate from rural to urban China with their parents. On the basis of ethnographic observation and documentation, the research demonstrates how education policies are devised and revised along the line of neo-liberalism and how privatisation, marketisation, and commodification of educational resources have an impact on migrant children's schooling. The policy shifts reflect the wider social and economic transformations China has been through since the early 1980s, and the attempt of reinventing "socialism" so as to strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equality. (Contains 15 footnotes.)