China’s Left-Behind Children and the Path to Common Prosperity

In 2018, China’s famous #IceBoy attracted widespread media attention after a photo of him went viral. After his 4.5km trek to school in sub-zero temperatures, Wang Fuman was photographed in his classroom with ice-covered hair and swollen cheeks. In a span of a year, Wang’s school and county has received generous foreign donations and government aid, allowing them to build a dormitory nearby and upgrade the school heating. This story is one of hope, but also one that demonstrates the disproportionate role of the media in attracting desperately needed resources. 

Viral image of #IceBoy Source: BBC News

Unfortunately, Wang is one of an estimated 69 million Left-Behind Children (UNICEF, 2018). The story of China’s Left-Behind Children remains one shaped and moulded by the forces of politics and economics. As much as Western media provides a platform for their narratives to reach wider audiences, their fate still largely remains out of their control. Moving forward, how do we break this generational cycle that has left children parenting themselves? In order to attempt this question, we need to first understand the forces that have defined this phenomenon. 

A Difficult but Necessary Decision

Since the 1950s, China’s Hukou system has categorised the population as either rural or urban. This system essentially restricts citizens’ access to public services such as healthcare, pensions, loans, and more (Jaramillo, 2022). With limited employment opportunities in rural villages, parents choose to move into cities to provide for their families, creating a floating population of individuals without local hukou. But if children move along with their parents, they too will lose access to important public services such as schools and hospitals. 

Although there have been efforts to change this longstanding system, there has yet to be any real reform to the hukou policy that can accommodate for the scale of rural migration. In 2014, the National New-Type Urbanisation Plan was rolled out to combat the widening social benefits gap by gradually allowing for more hukou conversions (Jaramillo, 2022). However, the rapid growth in the number of rural migrants have made it difficult for China to make significant progress. By 2020, the migrant population has grown to up to 376 million but only around 100 million people have attained hukou conversion (Chan, 2021). At the same time, higher income earners or university graduates have continued to be the main beneficiaries of recent reform efforts (Jaramillo, 2022).

This Hukou system is undoubtedly not the only factor. Low wages for unskilled labour mean that parents are unable to sustain the high cost of living in China’s big cities for their whole family. As a result, one or both of their parents move away for work, usually leaving these children to be raised by their grandparents. 

In Max Duncan’s Documentary ‘Down from the Cold Mountain’, three siblings live alone and have learnt to take care of themselves, with their parents working in Guangzhou. Eldest daughter Wang Ying is put in charge of the household. At just 14-years-old, Wang Ying cooks, cleans, plants crops, disciplines her siblings, all while having to study herself. 

Wang Ying’s Brother Wang Jie sits in the main room of the family house  Source: Max Duncan, 2016

Wang Ying and her siblings speak about working hard in school in order to achieve their dreams, but the reality is that these dreams are difficult to reach. In the city, their parents, Jiajia and Quhere, work to earn $15 USD daily at an electronics factory. With their parents’ earnings being put to education, the chance of achieving socio-economic mobility undoubtedly increases. For them, leaving is difficult, but out of necessity. 

Familial Bonds and Social Realities

Wang Ying says: ‘I think a family being together is more important than anything’, but laments that her parents do not agree. This sentiment is echoed amongst other Left-Behind Children, not just in China but worldwide. 

According to a study by the Heilongjiang provincial government, 50% of ‘left-behind’ children suffer from depression and anxiety, compared to 30% of urban children. Many also suffer mood swings, low confidence and heightened levels of stress (Branigan, 2014). During childhood, forming attachment with a caregiver reduces vulnerability to depression and anxiety. The absence of a strong parental figure leads to feelings of abandonment and neglect, which is detrimental to their socio-emotional development (Cheng and Sun, 2014). Studies have found that these children are at an increased risk of committing crime and engaging in high risk behaviours (Duan and Zhou, 2005) (Gao et al., 2010). 

We see similar effects on children in cases of transnational migration. In Mexican transnational families, separation alters the relationship between children and their parents. Resentment and new levels of personal freedom blur the lines of authority that allows parents and caregivers to enforce discipline (Dreby, 2007). At the same time, learning about the economic sacrifices made by their parents might even prompt children to forgo education for work (Dreby, 2007). Without education, another generation falls into the recurring cycle of needing to leave the countryside for the city in order to provide for the following generation. 

The question of whether to leave for the city puts families between a rock and a hard place. Having a parental figure is important to ensure that children make the right decisions, and increase their chances for success. But staying behind might just mean jeopardising education which is essential for breaking out of the poverty cycle. There is no correct answer to this dilemma.  

Political and Economic Intersections

For China’s Left-Behind Children, the immediate solution is clear — there needs to be more committed, long-term efforts to integrate rural migrants with the rapid developing urban population. In the 14th Five-Year Plan, Beijing has stated its intention of reducing disparities between urban and rural populations through greater integration by loosening hukou restrictions and increasing affordable housing. 

However, urban residents are naturally unwilling to share their relative prosperity. More significantly, local governments bear a large amount of public service costs (Storey, 2023). For real progress to be possible, wider structural changes have to happen. Local governments need support to cater for migrant’s public services, possibly by local tax reform that will leverage the urban population growth as sources of tax that can fund the steady expansion of social services (Chan, 2021).

Fundamentally, the issue of Left-Behind Children is a symptom of rural inequalities in China. China has claimed to have eradicated absolute poverty, meaning that the number of poor people has decreased by 800 million since economic reform began in the 1980s (Lugo, Raiser and Yemtsov, 2021). This is no mean feat. But even with poverty reduction policies, national income inequality has grown due to China’s high-income group experiencing faster income growth (Luo, Li and Sicular, 2020). China’s social-welfare provisions remain highly unequal, with urban areas receiving higher-calibre services which impact educational outcomes (Roberts, 2021). 

Theoretically, poverty can be reduced through capital investment, but efforts towards poverty alleviation in rural China have historically gone towards infrastructure investment, rather than social assistance and education. Motivated by the strengthening existing power relations amongst established local companies and governments, authorities have allocated poverty alleviation funds to the construction of roads and bridges (Boullenois, 2020). This can be seen as representative of the fact that the reduction of social inequalities is not incentivized by a political system that is perpetuated by hierarchies of wealth and power. 

“As the Chinese saying goes: “If you want to get rich, build roads first.””

China is now facing a rising pile of local debt, with the debt-to-GDP ratio reaching a record high of 288% in 2023 (Xia and Han, 2024). If wealth remains concentrated in the hands of the wealthy few, China will have limited spending power. In order to rebalance its economy, Beijing has shifted its focus to growing domestic consumption. Moving away from a policy of investment that has been driving high growth rates will be a difficult process. But a new focus on promoting consumption means that the interests of the rural population are now intertwined with China’s long-term economic policy. 

Moving Forward

Xi has set 2035 as the target year to achieve ‘common prosperity’. With this new goal, the fate of these Left-Behind Children remains contingent upon whether the nation is willing to take bold steps to resolve its imbalanced economic and social system. Shaped by political forces, the lives of Left-Behind Children continue to compete with the interests of the CCP, urban residents, and local authorities. To treat the sacrifices of these parents as a selfish decision, and the plight of these children as inevitable in the grand scheme of modernization is to ignore the lived experiences of the very people who should be benefiting from China’s growth. 

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