Abstract: In the tide of paterntocracy sweeping the world, parental involvement in Chinese cities shows its own unique characteristics.Firstly, Chinese parental participation largely revolves around academic achievement and has a strong focus on performance outcome; secondly, parents' engagement in school public affairs is very much underdeveloped but family private sphere has expanded dramatically; finally, the class differentiation of parental participation is largely observed among the three groups of migrants, urban workers and middle class people.
Based on a follow-up survey of two junior middle school classes in the same urban district, this article examines the characteristics of Chinese parental participation and the differences in the adaptation by different groups in the context of parentocracy. Chinese urban schools advocate family resource utilization, capability boost and parental responsibility ethics. It enables teachers to place ever higher demands on parental participation in education. In the categories of participation consciousness, participation ability, and participation behavior, the three groups exhibit the following differences: migrant workers, mindful of their own educational disadvantage,respond with passiveness; urban workers, unsure of their own competency, opt to follow and to imitate; the middle class, confident of their own successful education experience, act proactively and purposefully.In meeting school benchmarks and measurements, parental participation is greatly energized through constant interactions between teacher requests and parents responses, and at the same time, the class boundaries of everyday life is also being constantly defined and re-enforced.
Under such circumstances, parental engagement may have become the social filter that for those who fail to respond effectively to teachers' demands, social exclusion is likely. Therefore, empirically,schools have become the ground for social division. From a theoretical viewpoint, research on parental involvement and its division is an important way to further our understanding of the unique mechanism of educational inequality in China.

Key words: parentocracy, parental involvement, group differences, open the black box