By Maura Elizabeth Cunningham
Children sleep in a dormitory at a kindergarten, a school for children of migrant workers, on the outskirts of Beijing in November 2013.
 
Reuters















Among the many appeals made at China’s annual legislative sessions earlier this month was a call by political advisers for stronger efforts to protect children against sexual assault.
According to a study published just ahead of the meetings, Chinese authorities uncovered 125 cases of assault involving 419 victims in 2013. Sexual assault of minors is not a problem unique to China, of course, but experts quoted in local media pointed out that sexual predators in China benefit from having unusually vulnerable prey: left-behind children.
An estimated 61 million children live apart from their parents in China today, remaining in the countryside with grandparents while their mothers and fathers stream into cities and factories looking for work. Often left to their own devices, they are an easy target for attackers: Various studies indicate that a shockingly high percentage of assault cases involve left-behind girls—in the range of 90% in some areas of Guangdong province. But sexual predation is not the only problem that left-behind children face. Local and foreign news websites are littered with stories of left-behind children being kidnapped by human traffickers (in Chinese), dying in dumpsters and committing suicide.
Discussion of the plight of left-behind children hearkens back to an earlier era of widespread public concern about child welfare: the 1940s, when China was torn apart by war, first against the Japanese and later between Mao Zedong’s Communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.
At the time, international child-advocacy workers estimated that the Anti-Japanese War (or World War II outside China) left approximately two million children without families. The civil war soon added to their numbers, and the streets of cities like Shanghai became clogged with vagrant children who overwhelmed orphanages and begged for handouts. Bitterly cold winters, disease outbreaks and starvation killed thousands of these youths. Benevolent societies picked up hundreds of corpses at a time from Shanghai’s sidewalks.
After Mao and the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, they made addressing child-welfare problems a high priority. China’s new rulers launched immunization drives and improved midwifery services to lower child-mortality rates. They rounded up street children and placed them in orphanages to eliminate the population of homeless youngsters that had mushroomed during more than a decade of war. Children, like women, were a vulnerable group in pre-1949 China, and the Party derived some of its early legitimacy from achieving real improvements in the lives of the country’s youth.
When the issue of left-behind children comes up, however, the Chinese government cannot claim to be improving their lives. Instead, it is responsible for the biggest obstacle to family reunification—the hukou, or household-registration system, created in the late 1950s to control the flow of people during the Party’s early land-reform movement. Social benefits like subsidized health care and public schooling are linked to the hukou, and an individual can only access full benefits in the jurisdiction where his or her hukouis registered.
Since cities offer significantly better social services than the countryside does, most urban areas prevent an influx of peasant families by barring rural hukou-holders from transferring their registrations into the city.
Migrant parents leave their children behind not because they necessarily want to, but because their sons and daughters will not be able to attend most urban schools. Some smaller cities are relaxing hukou regulations and permitting migrants to become residents, but this is currently only happening on a limited basis. And as China’s vice minister of public security made clear this week, migrants have virtually no hope of becoming residents in the country’s biggest cities any time soon.
In other words, there’s little likelihood that the population of left-behind children will shrink much anytime in the near future.
Export-oriented manufacturing and urbanization, both encouraged by the government, have offered migrant workers the opportunity to earn far more than they would have in their rural hometowns. But if economic security comes at the cost of their children’s health and safety, some migrant parents might ask themselves if the trade-offs are too great.
Today’s left-behind children are becoming a population as vulnerable in some ways as the vagrant children of the late 1940s were. But while the Party worked to help those children as part of its social-welfare reforms in the early 1950s, the problems that left-behind youths suffer are inextricably linked to the hukou system that the Party put in place and continues to maintain.
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham is a historian and writer based in Shanghai. Follow her on Twitter @mauracunningham.