By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN
The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 9, 2007; 2:37 PM

SHANGHAI, China -- For 11 years, Shanghai's Yingjian Hope School offered cheap education to poor migrant children, operating from a tumbledown campus squeezed between evil-smelling chemical factories.

But the school lost its lease last year and was ruled illegal and unsafe. Education officials interrupted classes last week to declare it closed and police clashed with protesting parents and teachers outside the campus in the city's industrial Putuo district on Monday.

The dispute underscores one of the knottiest problems faced by China's estimated 150 million migrants. While they provide the raw labor driving China's economic dynamo, their children are effectively barred by high fees from schools in the cities to which they have moved from the countryside.

That has driven demand for migrant schools set up by private groups, which operate on the margins of the law and are frequently harassed or summarily closed by local governments. Strong demand for real estate in Shanghai, Beijing and other cities has sharpened such conflicts.

On Tuesday, a shouting match broke out at the school gates between teachers and employees of a nearby chemical plant that owns the school property.

"Our factory is not to be used for an illegal school," said one Huaheng Chemical Industry Corp. employee, who gave only his surname, Zhang.

"We're talking about education here, about children," shouted back Zhen Maohui, Jianying's director of education.

Inside, weatherbeaten desks and other school furniture were piled in the courtyard.

Under China's strict residency rules, children of the country's tens of millions of migrant workers are generally barred from attending local schools unless they pay steep fees that are far beyond the means of most migrants.

Jianying, one of about 300 schools serving the city's approximately six million migrants, was set up in 1996 by Yao Weijian, a county-level government adviser from Anhui province. Zhen said the school had about 80 teachers and more than 2,100 students, about 80 percent of them from Anhui _ home to many migrants working in Shanghai.

The school charged about $64 in tuition each year _ about one quarter of what it would cost to educate a child in a local school.

Jianying administrators admit their lease expired last April, but say they only wished to finish out the last two weeks of the term. They showed certificates and permits apparently issued by the central government and said they didn't understand why officials were so anxious to move them _ and why they used such blunt tactics.

"We're asking the government for help with salaries and our losses and to investigate the violence by police," said Chen Gennong, an English teacher.

Monday's fracas involved more than 300 officers and government officials who blocked parents and ordered students onto buses, according to eyewitnesses and state media reports.

Officers also attacked reporters and teachers filming the scene and attempted to seize their digital cameras, Jianying teachers said.

Yao Zhangzhang, a sixth grade teacher, said he was punched and police grabbed his digital camera to delete the images.

"We just don't know why they were so anxious to move against us," Yao said.

Li Cuilan said she'd been trying to send her granddaughter to school, but was pushed away and shouted at by officers.

"They say this is a harmonious society," she said, a reference to the Communist Party's slogan for reducing social tensions. "How harmonious is that?"

Putuo district police refused to comment.

Putuo District Education Bureau officials who refused to give their names said the school was closed because it lacked a proper license and its lease had expired.

"We closed this school because it is not operated in a proper way. We are still dealing with relevant government departments on the issue," said a woman reached by telephone at the bureau's information office.

For now, Jianying students have been transferred to a branch of the Caoyang Primary School located nearby, although Jianying teachers said many students are simply staying home. A woman who answered the phone at Caoyang's administrative office refused to comment.

"We are obligated to follow the arrangements made by the Education Bureau," said the woman, who refused to give her name.