Children of migrants in China in the twenty-first century: trends, living arrangements, age-gender structure, and geography

ABSTRACT

Children – including those of migrants – are China’s future. Children of migrants now make up close to 40% of all children in China. This paper analyzes the recent trends from 2000 to 2016 and the major aspects of the children of migrants by distilling data from multiple large national surveys and assessing the very small rural left-behind children (LBC) population figures published by the Ministry of Civil Affairs in 2016. The paper also develops a method to estimate the LBC population generated by migrants in each provincial destination between 2010 and 2015, linking up different but related populations (adult migrants, migrant children, and LBC) in the origins and destinations. This broader “origin-destination” framework allows us to pinpoint clearly a major driver of LBC and hence to identify provinces needing the most attention in national and provincial efforts to alleviate the problem of LBC.

Abbreviations: MC: Migrant Children; LBC: Left-Behind Children; MPR: Migration Participation Rate: LBCG: Left-Behind Children Generated

KEYWORDS:

• Children of migrants
• migrant children
• left-behind children
• migration
• hukou
• China

Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Chengrong Duan and Dr Lidan Lyu of Renmin University, China for providing some of the necessary statistics from the 2015 Population Survey for our research and for their comments. Kam Wing Chan acknowledges the support of a faculty research grant from the China Studies Program at the University of Washington for this project and thanks Xiaxia Yang for producing Figures 3 and 4. Yuan Ren’s research was supported by a grant from the National Social Science Fund of China (No. 17ARK002) and a grant by the School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In Mao’s era, China banned peasants from entering cities, resulting in a low level of urbanization compared to its industrialization level and “under-urbanization” (Chan 1994). This was done through the operation of a household registration (hukou) system, which effectively took away the freedom of migration from the peasantry and their access to many state-provided social services and benefits (Wang 2005; Chan 2009).

2. Migrant children face many legal, social and economic obstacles in accessing education in the destination. Many of them have to return to their parents’ hometown to continue their education, especially after elementary school education ending at grade 5 or 6, and definitely at the end of the middle school education at grade 9. Chinese policy does not permit migrant children to enroll in public schools outside of their hukou place after grade 9. See Chen and Liang (2007), Ming (2013) and Yuan (2017) for detailed explanations of the various education policies, including local variations and changes over time. Even those lucky enough to be enrolled in schools in cities face discrimination and many other problems (see e.g. Lan 2014). The education situation faced by LBC in the rural areas is especially dire. Scott Rozelle, a noted researcher on China’s poverty, has called to attention the “education apocalypse” many children of migrants are facing in China (Normile 2017).

3. A national survey of floating population carried out by the National Commission on Health and Family Planning in 2015 shows that among the migrant population aged 15 and above, 77% of males and 83% of females were married (NCHFP 2016, p.127).

4. And some of these short-distance migrant children are likely LBC, as will be explained below.

5. Generally, one would not expect the ratio and percentage (in rows F and G) to exhibit abrupt changes within a short time, but those for 2005 do. They are quite different from the more reliable figures of 2000 and 2010 derived from microdata of full censuses. Tan (2011) raises a similar question. Obviously, the 1% sample is prone to a larger sampling error. The age composition of rural LBC derived from the 2005 1% survey also shows some anomalies (see Duan, Lai, and Qin 2017; Table 1). Hence, the 2005 data are reported but not used in the analysis. For a report on children of migrants in 2005, see Duan and Yang (2008). An examination of the measurement issues of migrants in the 2005 survey is in Ebenstein and Zhao (2015). More research may be needed.

6. A commentary reports that in recent years, in each of the four first-tier cities, about 70,000 migrant children after completing elementary school in these cities were forced to return to their home villages to continue middle school education (“Shuqiangwan” 2018). See also the large drops of migrant children population in Shanghai and Beijing, reported in Table 6.

7. Using the same and fixed rural boundaries of 2015, the rural LBC population was only 48.27 million in 2010 (NBS et al. 2017, 9). By that definition, the decrease was less than 8 million. A figure of 54.9 million rural LBC for 2015 is also reported earlier by Duan et al. (2017, pp. 53, 59).

8. Indeed, Chinese urban definitions are extremely complex (see Chan 2007; Chan 2012; Shi et al. 2017). In recent years, urban the new-type urbanization plan of 2014, many rural townships (xiang) were converted to towns (hence, statistically “urban”).

9. Thanks to Dr. Lidan Lyu, who has helped us understand this complexity more accurately.

10. The ratio was 0.469 in 2010 and 0.488 in 2015. There would be some provincial variation but the differences should be small enough for us to not consider them in this broad estimation.

11. As pointed out earlier, some of the migrant children are actually LBC living in towns. Adding them, the LBC generated would be larger than what is presented in this exercise.

12. Guangdong and Chonqing also had also a significant percentage of migrants from within the provinces. and this also contributed to the high LBCG% (see Beh and Yao 2012).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China [17ARK002]; Faculty research grant of China Studies Program at the University of Washington; Faculty research grant by the School of Social Development and Public Policy, Fudan University.