This article focuses on Chinese state conceptualisations of the educated person, seen to be necessary for the continued national progress. Government campaigns provide clear narratives about the quality citizens that will ensure this will happen. Such narratives paradoxically also target rural people, migrant workers and their offspring for holding the country's development back, despite their cheap labour being fundamental to the country's economic boom. Based on child and youth-focused anthropological research in Shanghai between 2010 and 2012, this article focuses on how migrant youths reflect on, challenge and appropriate state narratives about who the educated person is in contemporary China.