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How Far are the Left-Behind Left
Behind? A Preliminary Study in
Rural China
Xiang Biao*
ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford, 58 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6QS,
UK
Keywords: left-behind; migration and
development; China
INTRODUCTION
Thirty-six-year-old Zheng Xihua was on the
verge of tears when our conversation
turned to her three children: a 15-year-old
daughter and 11-year-old twin sons. Hailing
from the countryside of the northern part of
Liaoning province, northeast China, she works in
a car park during the day and in a beauty salon
at night in Shenyang, the capital city of Liaoning.
Her husband started migrating to cities to work
more than ten years ago. The further away he
went, the less often he visited home, and the less
money he sent back. Zheng said ‘he is not her
man anymore’; however, divorce is not an option
for either of them. To meet the ever-increasing
family expenditure with the growth of their chil-
dren, Zheng went to south China to work three
years ago. When she returned home for Chinese
New Year after being away for one and a half
years, she was dismayed to find that her daugh-
ter refused to call her ‘mother’ and insisted on
dropping out from high school to go to work in
the city. Her two sons were rude to their elderly
neighbour, and one had a long knife scar on his
face, ‘turning his movie-star looks to those of a
gangster’. She did not have the time to check her
sons’ examination scores (when she asked for
the annual reports from the school, the sons
answered that they had thrown them away), but
her father-in-law told her that the teacher had
visited to say that one of her sons would be
expelled if he continued to fight with his school-
mates and failed to turn up for classes. Since
early 2004, she had decided to work in Shenyang
POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE
Popul. Space Place (in press)
Published online in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/psp.437
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
ABSTRACT
While the linkage between migration and
development has attracted much academic and
policy attention, a key aspect of the linkage,
namely those left behind in the community of
origin, remains under-researched. As one of
the first academic attempts to provide a
systematic overview of this group in China,
this paper describes the basic problems faced
by it, discusses the institutional causes of the
problems, and explores long-term and short-
term solutions. The paper first establishes the
fact that, while it seems that individuals
decide who migrates and who stays back,
there are fundamental institutional constraints
on such decisions. The paper then shows that
the three main left-behind groups, namely
wives, the elderly and children, encounter
various problems, but in general their
situation is not much worse than that of those
living with all family members. Their problems
cannot just be attributed to being left-behind
individuals; instead, the fundamental cause is
that many rural communities as a whole have
been left behind economically and socially.
Although migration exacerbates the hardship,
preventing migration is certainly not a
solution. The paper instead calls for measures
to redress the urban–rural divide and to
improve the provision of public goods in rural
communities. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley &
Sons, Ltd.
*Correspondence to: Xiang Biao, ESRC Centre on Migration,
Policy and Society, University of Oxford, 58 Banbury Road,
Oxford, OX2 6QS, UK.
E-mail: biao.xiang@compas.ox.ac.uk
from where she could go home more frequently.
Zheng said:
‘Where my own life is concerned, it’s over...
[but] I can take it. All I am doing now is for the
children. But when you are away earning
money for them, they learn all the bad things.
[But] if I stay home, who is going to earn
the money? You don’t know if you should
slap them or slap yourself...I have thought it
over now! It is up to them. If they learn the
rules one day, they grow up properly; other-
wise they will just end up as useless as their
father or they will have a bitter fate (kuming)
like me!’1
Millions of Chinese are facing the same hard-
ships and dilemmas as Zheng – as left-behind
wives coping single-handedly with the children
or as migrant parents leaving their children
behind in the care of others. According to the
latest national population census (2000) and
other surveys in Beijing and Shanghai, there are
106 million rural–urban migrants in China
(National Statistics Bureau of China, 2001).2
Although no data are available on the total
number who are left behind, the magnitude is
surely substantial. The left-behind constitute the
major part of the rural population in many
places, and the countryside is thus said to be
occupied by the ‘38-61-99 Army’: ‘38’ for the left-
behind wives (March 8, Women’s Day), ‘61’ for
children (June 1, Children’s Day), and ‘99’ for old
people (September 9, the day honouring the
elderly in China). The problems faced by the left-
behind have also surfaced, as encapsulated by
the ‘fake milk formula’ incident in the Fuyang
municipality of Anhui province, southern China,
that came to light in 2004. In the space of less than
a year (from May 2003 to late April 2004), 171
infants in the municipality suffered from serious
malnutrition (locally known as ‘big-head disease’
because of the symptom of swelling heads) and
13 died because they were fed extremely low-
quality formula milk.3Similarly low-quality
formula was later found across China, but babies
in Fuyang suffered the most primarily because as
a major migrant-sending region (with 1.7 million
people working in other places in early 2004; see
Hefei Evening News, 2004), Fuyang had a large
number of left-behind babies who were relying
on formula milk. The fake formula was cheap,
thus appealing to poor migrants’ families. In
most cases, the babies were looked after by
poorly-educated grandparents, left-behind pop-
ulation themselves, who were unable to assess
the quality of formula and were also slow in
bringing the babies to hospitals, alerting the
public and going to court, even after the problem
became clear. Recognising the linkage between
the damage by the fake formula and out-
migration, the Shanghai municipality made
special efforts to block similar products from
being sold in places with high levels of out-
migration (XinhuaNet, 2004).
As one of the first academic attempts to
provide a systematic overview of the left-behind
in rural China, this paper describes the basic
problems faced by them, discusses the institu-
tional causes of the problems, and explores long-
term and short-term solutions. The paper will
first establish the fact that, although who
migrates and who stays back seems to be a deci-
sion made by individuals, there are fundamental
institutional constraints on such decisions. For
instance, children and the elderly are left behind
partly because they are denied access to basic
welfare in the city as a result of the household
registration system and the place-based public
finance system. The paper then shows that all
three left-behind groups, namely wives, the
elderly and children, do encounter various prob-
lems, but existing comparative studies show that
in general their situation is not much worse than
that of those living with other family members in
the same community. Thus, the problems cannot
be solely attributed to being left behind; rather,
the fundamental point is that many rural com-
munities as a whole have been left behind eco-
nomically and socially, and the communities are
no longer able to provide any support for those
left behind there. Although migration exacer-
bates the hardship, preventing migration is not a
solution. Instead, the institutions that maintain
the urban–rural divide should be modified to
enable more migrants to settle down in cities
with families. At the same time, the provision of
public goods in the rural communities must be
substantially improved. In this regard, this paper
also calls attention to the limitation of migration
as a developmental tool.
This paper is primarily based on a documen-
tary study of highly dispersed Chinese informa-
tion sources, including academic publications,
Xiang Biao
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place (in press)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
news reports and public commentaries. As a sup-
plement, I conducted in-depth interviews with
eight migrants and left-behind members of their
families in Liaoning province from November
2004 to February 2005. I have also drawn infor-
mation from my earlier long-term research on
migrants in China throughout the major part of
the 1990s, particularly from my work on com-
munities with large numbers of out-migrants in
Wenzhou area of Zhejiang province, southeast-
ern China (Xiang, 2005).
WHY ARE THE LEFT-BEHIND LEFT BEHIND?
Although it appears that practical considerations
lead migrants to leave some family members at
home, and indeed their decision is often concep-
tualised as a rational ‘household strategy’ in aca-
demic literature, the left-behind population in
China is to a large extent an outcome of institu-
tional processes. China established a special
household registration system (known as hukou)
in the 1950s in order to prevent the rural popu-
lation from spontaneously moving to cities and
to keep the price of grain low enough to support
a high rate of industrialisation (particularly in
heavy industries) in cities. Under the hukou
system, people born in urban areas are officially
registered as ‘residents’ (jumin) and those in rural
areas as ‘peasants’ (nongmin). ‘Residents’ and
‘peasants’ are thus two distinct categories of
social status that entail different rights (for
example, ‘residents’ are, in theory, guaranteed
waged employment but ‘peasants’ are not), and
‘peasants’ cannot obtain urban hukou status
unless mandated by the state.4The fact that
migrants are supposed to return to the country-
side eventually is also reflected in the Chinese
narrative of migration. Migrants are normally
called ‘peasant workers’ (nongmingong or
mingong) to highlight their legal status, and the
standard term for the left-behind is ‘liushou zhe’,
literally meaning ‘those who stay and hold the
fort’. While the English phrase ‘left-behind’ is ori-
ented towards those who move (migrants), with
the connotation that the left-behind could have
been brought along during migration, ‘liushou’ is
exactly the opposite and implies that ‘liushou zhe’
are waiting for migrants to return.
Without the status of full urban citizenship,
migrants often have to work in the informal
sector without secure wages, let alone social
benefits. According to a large survey conducted
by the Ministry of Urban and Rural Develop-
ment, Ministry of Labour and Social Security and
the All-China Federation of Trade Unions in
nine provinces and municipalities in 2004, only
between 10 and 37.5% of the migrant workers
in the construction industry signed contracts,
varying from province to province (Zhongguo
Jianshe Bao, 2004). Jobs are unstable and migrants
often have to keep moving in search of new
opportunities. Spontaneous migrants thus
become a special social category, the ‘floating
population’, in both physical and institutional
terms. Without basic economic security, migrants
to urban areas have to be particularly cautious
about bringing family members with them.
Corresponding to the hukou system, the distri-
bution of political power and responsibility
within the Chinese state is strictly defined along
lines of place (particularly at the province level).
Government departments have no responsibility
for the non-hukou residents in their jurisdiction.
For example, in many towns along China’s coast
and particularly in the Pearl River delta,
migrants outnumber the local population by
large margins, but they are very rarely men-
tioned in local government development plans
and reports. All social and economic develop-
ment indicators, such as the school enrolment
rate and number of hospitals for every thousand
persons, are calculated on the basis of the size of
the permanent population. So is the evaluation of
government performance (Xiang, 1995). This sit-
uation is worsened by the current public finance
system. For example, as part of the wider agenda
of decentralising its public finance management,
China reformed its educational system in 1985
such that different levels of government would
be responsible for the provision, supervision and
financing of education. Budget allocation is
based strictly on the assumption that public edu-
cation is for the hukou population only. Although
it is self-evident that migrant parents are con-
tributing to the local revenue, the local govern-
ment could argue that serving migrants would
violate budget regulations.
In response to the lack of access to formal edu-
cation, migrants in some big cities have set up
their own schools since the early 1990s. But until
very recently, urban authorities refused to grant
them licences and even closed down the schools
and expelled the students. One of the earliest
The Left-Behind in Rural China
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place (in press)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
primary schools of this kind in Beijing opened by
a migrant, Mr Yi Benyao, is the Xingzhi School
(with which I was involved during the early
stages of its development); it had to change its
location three times in the first three months of
1997 due to police crackdowns (for accounts of
migrants’ schools, see Lu and Zhang, 2001; Han,
2003). Why are local governments against these
schools, which are in fact delivering services on
the government’s behalf at their own cost? The
reason is that under the place-based governance
system, while the local authorities are not respon-
sible for migrants’ welfare, they would be
blamed for any accident that occurs in their ‘ter-
ritory’, such as the collapse of buildings or food
poisoning in the migrants’ schools. In the mid-
1990s, the central government recommended the
principle of ‘regulation based on location’ (shudi
guanli) that gave local authorities in the destina-
tion place the final say in any incidents involving
migrants. Aimed primarily at preventing acci-
dents in order to ensure social stability rather
than providing services, this principle has
created an even more hostile policy environment
for migrants, and particularly their dependents.
With a few exceptions, the only way for migrant
children to be admitted to public schools under
the current system is for them to pay extra fees,
often in the name of ‘sponsorship’ (zanzhu fei).
This is normally more than RMB 1000 (US$125)
for the first year, decreasing in subsequent years.
Even when a child manages to enter a school in
the city, he/she has to return to his/her place of
origin (as defined by hukou) to pass the examina-
tion for entry to a higher level of education (e.g.
from junior to senior secondary). This is because
the entire school enrolment system is also place-
based. This also leads to discrepancies between
what migrant students have studied in the place
of destination and the examinations that they
take in the place of origin.
For married women, an unusual policy that
deters them from migrating is the mandatory
pregnancy check, which is part of the family
planning policy. In order to prevent ‘unplanned
births’, the family planning authorities in China
require all married women to have four preg-
nancy checks a year. In some places such as
Anhui province in south China, test results from
destination places are not recognised and
migrant women have to return to their place of
origin for the checks (see Lou, 2004: 118–19).
China established the hukou system in con-
junction with the command economy which,
although appearing to be highly centralised, was
in fact managed by cadres at different levels in
different jurisdictions. Market-oriented reform
which started at the end of the 1970s has dra-
matically transformed China’s economy, even as
the governance structure has remained very
much the same. Thus, the mismatch between a
unified market and a fragmented system for the
management of population, welfare and other
social issues stands out as a fundamental charac-
teristic of Chinese society. While citizens can
move elsewhere to search for jobs as labourers
and they can purchase basic subsistence products
as consumers, they cannot settle down as they
wish as social and political subjects. Thus, only
those who expect to find jobs and earn money
immediately can afford to migrate; family
members who need care have to stay behind.
Apart from policy obstacles, cultural norms
and other structural factors are also responsible
for the creation of the left-behind groups, as will
be discussed below in the case of left-behind
wives.
LEFT-BEHIND WIVES: FEMINISATION
OF AGRICULTURE OR
‘AGRICULTURALISATION OF FEMALES’?
Although the proportion of female migrants is
increasing, migration in China remains a male-
dominated phenomenon (more than 60% being
male). Some economists and sociologists have
theorised that this is a rational choice of division
of labour which is conducive to the growth of
household wealth as a whole (Du and Bai, 1997:
40–56; Cai, 2000: 152–9; 2001: 103). Meng (1993,
1995) argued that men’s out-migration makes
women’s labour contribution to the household
more visible and therefore more appreciated,
thus increasing their status. Li Jie (2003) sug-
gested that the out-migration of men led to a
redistribution of agricultural resources along
gender lines, and brought about ‘rare and
valuable’ opportunities for the ‘independent
development’ of women.
However, it can be argued that a division
of labour where women migrate and work in
factories while men take up the more labour-
demanding agricultural activities is equally if not
more ‘rational’. Feminist scholars argue that it is
Xiang Biao
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place (in press)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
in fact the deeply ingrained unequal gender rela-
tions and patriarchal ideology that keep women
behind. For example, it is well documented that
men’s migration is almost independent of mar-
riage, while for women, marriage proves to be a
determinant. Indeed, the overwhelming majority
of female migrants are unmarried (Du and Bai,
1997; Research team on Female Rural Migrant
Labor, Institute of Sociology of CASS, 2000; see
also Tang Mengjun, 2004: 200). One informant
explained to me why this was the case:
‘Before the girls are married, they have nothing
to do at home, so they go cities to work. After
marriage, they have to do the housework for
the in-laws. They can’t go anymore.’
Married women do migrate, leaving husbands
behind, but they do so normally on special occa-
sions, often creating incredible social pressure for
the husbands (Lou, 2004: 115). For most women,
being left behind may not be a voluntary choice
at all and some had supported their husbands’
out-migration precisely because their relation-
ships were already in trouble (Lou, 2004). While
the distinction between voluntary versus forced
migration has been a central theme in migration
studies, a similar distinction for the left-behind
should also be recognised.
Feminist researchers have further pointed out
that left-behind women become more active
in agriculture simply because agriculture has
become a marginal economic sector, rather than
because women have become more powerful
(Jin, 1990; Fei, 1994; Gao, 1994). Gao (1994), for
example, has argued that it is more accurate to
talk about the ‘agriculturalisation of females’
than the ‘feminisation of agriculture’. Jin (1990)
suggested that rural women function as a ‘sec-
ondary reservoir’ for the economic development
of China. While rural labour as a whole serves as
a reservoir for urban-driven economic growth,
rural women contribute to maintaining the rural
reservoir (although in many cases such as in the
Pearl River delta, women of course also consti-
tute the first reservoir for the export-oriented
economic growth). Based on a review of the lit-
erature, Feng (1996) described a process of
‘handing down’ economic activities from men to
women when the activities become undervalued
in the market. This argument is confirmed by the
quantitative analysis of the Research Team on
Migration and Rural Women’s Development
which found that 69.1% of left-behind women
work in agriculture. While most left-behind
wives face various difficulties – agricultural pro-
duction being the primary source of the hardship
– their annual income makes up 27.8% of the total
household income (Tang Mengjun, 2004: 204). An
earlier survey by Zheng (2001) concluded that
husbands’ out-migration has no significant
impact on the wives’ social attitudes towards tra-
ditional gender roles. Migrants and the left-
behind often cite the notion of ‘men in charge of
external affairs, women in charge of internal
affairs’ (nan zhuwai, nü zhunei) to justify why
wives are left behind. The notion, which used to
confine women to the household while men
work outside, now confines women to the rural
community and agricultural production while
men seek urban-based or industrial work (see
also Jacka, 1997: 141–2). While the scale has
changed, the essence remains the same.
THE ELDERLY: CHALLENGES TO THE
HOUSEHOLD-BASED CARE SYSTEM
More than 10% of the Chinese population were
above 60 years of age by 2004, and more than 70%
of them now live in the countryside. Compared
with wives and children, elderly parents are the
least studied. A survey of 252 elderly people in
three villages in Anhui province (Zhang and Wu,
2003; Zhang, 2003), one of the very few studies
on this group, reported that the left-behind
elderly feel more lonely but are more satisfied
with their lives in general. Of those whose sons
had all migrated, 87.5% reported feeling lonely
‘often’ or ‘sometimes’ compared with 31.4% of
those whose sons were working in the home
village (Zhang, 2003: 20). At the same time, 73.5%
of the elderly whose sons were away asserted
that they were ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ satisfied with
their life, compared with 65.7% of those who had
all their sons working in the home village
(Zhang, 2003: 20). In order to make sense of this
seemingly contradictory phenomenon and to
appreciate its policy implications, we should
examine the social setting of the life of the rural
elderly.
The out-migration of adult children has not
brought about crises for the elderly, first of all
because most of the elderly in rural China have
the minimum life security, namely access to land.
The Left-Behind in Rural China
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place (in press)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
Alarge survey conducted by the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences in 2003, of 1400
households in Jiangsu, Guangdong, Jilin, Hebei
and Gansu provinces, indicated that 93.9% of the
elderly are allocated land, which can produce
enough grain for their own consumption and, in
most cases, even a surplus (Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences News, 2004). Thus, the rural
elderly need very limited additional resource for
subsistence – RMB 800 (less than US$ 100) a year
in total according to a small-scale survey in
southeastern China (Gao and Pu, 2003: 35). Pre-
cisely because what the rural elderly have forms
only very minimal security, even a marginal
increase in cash contributions from the children
can lead to great monetary security and thus
more emotional satisfaction. Zhang and Wu’s
(2003) survey itemised the contributions from
migrant and non-migrant sons to their house-
holds (Table 1).
Parents whose sons were all away received
RMB 500 more a year than those whose sons were
all in the home village. Migrant sons contributed
considerably less in subsistence (e.g. grain and
fuel) but much more in gifts, medical care and
cash, which are items most needed by the elderly.
Another reason for the comparatively minor
problems faced by the left-behind elderly is that
they are relatively young: most are below 69
years (Zhang, 2003).
Although out-migration has not brought about
serious problems, it presents potential challenges
to the current household-based rural elderly care
system. The Chinese government had experi-
mented with various measures to provide more
‘socialized’ security (i.e. beyond household)
to the rural elderly. However, from the very
beginning the government had established the
principle that rural elderly care should be ‘based
on individual contribution, supplemented by
collective [community] fund, supported by
government policies’, which clearly frees the
government from any financial commitment.5
The State Council approved the Basic Design of
County-level Insurance Scheme for Rural Elderly
in 1992. Under this scheme, peasants deposit cash
every year and receive a pension from the age of
60. A pilot scheme along these lines was carried
out in Yantai municipality of Shandong province.
Peasants there paid RMB 48 a year in 1991 (which
was increased to RMB 135 in 2002) to the county-
level pension fund; this was sometimes matched
by village funds. But the experiment was not suc-
cessful, mainly due to the lack of matching funds
from communities. Participants in the scheme are
now receiving an average of RMB 90 a year as
pension, far less than the amount that is sufficient
for security (Li et al., 2004). In Kunming munici-
pality of Yunnan province, similar schemes were
put in place in the 1990s. But since deposits are
small and the bank interest rate has been decreas-
ing over the last few years, elderly peasants are
now receiving as little as RMB 2.2 a month (Tang
Zhilan, 2003: 85). Nationwide, the number of par-
ticipants in the rural pension scheme dropped
from 80.2 million at its peak in 1998 to 54.6
million in 2002 (Yang and Li, 2003; Li et al., 2004).
By the end of 2003, only 19.8 million rural elderly
had received insurance (State Council Press
Office, 2004), out of more than 800 million rural
residents.
An alternative measure to social insurance lies
with elderly care centres. But government- or
community-run care centres (jinglaoyuan)6are
normally in very bad shape due to a serious lack
of funds. At the same time, self-financing care
centres have turned out to be too expensive for
most peasants. For example, a care centre in
Sichuan province, southwestern China, charges
RMB 3600 a year for accommodation and another
3000 for food. The Jiu’an Apartment for the
Elderly in Zhejiang provides free accommoda-
tion, but only after one pays a deposit of RMB
60,000–80,000 and an additional RMB 3000 for
food per year (Gao and Pu, 2003: 36). They are far
too costly, given that the per capita income of
Xiang Biao
Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Popul. Space Place (in press)
DOI: 10.1002/psp
Table 1. Average value of sons’ contributions to the elderly in kind and cash (RMB).
Grain Fuel Cooking oil Gifts Medical care Cash Total
Households with all sons around 230.00 31.43 13.46 98.86 333.71 224.57 932.06
Households with all sons migrated 153.46 14.59 7.44 136.52 470.23 649.9 1427.30
Source:Zhang and Wu (2003: 32).
peasants was merely RMB 2936 in 2004, after a
6.8% increase from the previous year.
Acknowledging these difficulties, the central
government has basically given up on establish-
ing a universal pension system for the rural
elderly. In 1999, the central government decided
not to expand the rural elderly insurance scheme
(Gao and Pu, 2003: 36), and in 2002 it emphasised
again that households should take primary
responsibility for rural elderly care. To reinforce
the household-based elderly care practice, the
government has encouraged practices that are
novel elsewhere but are common across China,
such as selecting ‘model families’ (wuhao family
literally meaning ‘five-good’ family) in villages
and, more importantly, encouraging adult chil-
dren and the parents to sign formal agreements
as the legal basis for care provision. With the
agreements, the parents can sue children for neg-
ligence. But by no means does this constitute an
effective solution given the long-term absence of
migrant adult children on a large scale. Migrants
and left-behind elderly themselves have come up
with some measures to address their problems,
particularly by seeking ‘commodified socialised
services’ in the village. For instance, it has
become increasingly common for the left-behind
elderly to hire fellow villagers to provide services
either on an ad hoc or on a regular basis by using
remittances from their adult children. Although
one can expect neighbours to lend a hand for free,
the elderly prefer paying them to avoid accumu-
lating excessive social obligations (Zhang, 2003).
Acommon arrangement for elderly care in China
has been the rotation of the elderly among dif-
ferent sons. For instance, if an old couple has
three sons, they would stay with each son for
four months a year. In the case of migration, the
migrant son would pay a certain amount of
money, normally RMB 500–1000 a month accord-
ing to my field research in northeastern and
southeastern China, to the brothers who stay
back home, to ‘buy out’ their duty. In rural places
close to towns, groceries would be delivered for
free as long as one has a telephone. The devel-
opment of commodified socialised services has
also been facilitated by rural–rural migration. In
the villages where I did my fieldwork in south-
east China, peasants from nearby mountainous
and poorer areas constitute the majority of the
agricultural labourers and also care-givers to the
elderly.
THE CHILDREN: LEFT BEHIND BY WHOM?
Anews report in a prominent Chinese national
daily stated that a ‘conservative’ estimate of at
least 10 million children are either looked after by
their mothers alone or by grandparents as a
result of their parents’ migration (Li Chenxu,
2003). According to estimates by local officials in
a major out-migration county of Anhui province,
every 1000 migrants leave around 125–250 chil-
dren behind (Li Lijin, 2004: 18). If this estimate is
valid and applicable nationwide, there would be
13–26 million children left behind. A survey
(Qian, 2004) of a primary school in Tian Chang
city, Anhui province, found that 58.5% of the stu-
dents had at least one parent who was away from
home, and 37.2% had parents who were both
away. Left-behind children have attracted the
most public attention. News reports about young
girls being raped and children dying in accidents
while their parents are away have raised public
concern. The discourse of familism, which has
been popularised recently with the growth of the
middle class and as a reaction to the dramatic
social transformation in urban China, tends to
construe leaving one’s children behind as a sin.
Aresearcher at the Mother Education Institute,
East China Communications University, declared
that: ‘...mother’s smile forms the best environ-
ment for the growth of children. Thus mothers
have no excuse whatsoever to leave children
behind...otherwise [the regret] would be a
millstone around your neck all your life’ (cited
in Wang and Wu, 2003: 9) (one wonders why
fathers’ necks are not similarly weighed down).
While it is easy to impose moral millstones on
mothers, what we need is a careful assessment of
the situation in reality.
Surveys of the left-behind children have por-
trayed a fairly grim picture. For example, a study
of 250 junior high school students who had expe-
rienced being left behind for more than six
months in Jichun county, Hubei province, found
that more than half of them had difficulties
adapting to the left-behind life, 16.6% felt aban-
doned, 12.3% had problems expressing difficul-
ties or obtaining help, and 6.5% felt ‘anguished’
about being left behind (Liang, 2004: 26). The
Sichuan Agricultural Survey Team investigated
1184 left-behind children in Da county in 2003,
and found that 47% of the students performed
poorly in their studies, 41% were in the medium
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DOI: 10.1002/psp
to low range and only 12% performed better than
average (Zhao, 2004). A survey by the Women’s
Federation of Meishan city, Sichuan province, in
2004 (probably one of the largest of its kind to
date) sampled nearly 12,000 students, of which
51.2% were left-behind children, from 21 rural
schools. The report suggested that the left-behind
children have high drop-out rates, poor academic
performance, and problems in socialisation and
psychological development, although the con-
cepts in the paper are poorly defined and the
descriptions are unclear (Women’s Federation of
Meishan municipality, Sichuan province and
Office of the Committee for the Work of Women
and Children of Meishan municipality, Sichuan
province, 2004).
Qualitative observations consistently suggest
that left-behind children often develop behaviour
at two extremes: either they are withdrawn or
excessively aggressive (Li Lijin, 2004: 18; Qian,
2004; Zhao, 2004). This is commonly attributed to
the fact that the grandparents who are looking
after the children either spoil the children or fail
to give them enough emotional care (e.g. Qian,
2004; Zhao, 2004). According to Li Quanmian’s
(2004: 34) survey of six villages in Jiangxi
province in 2003, 85% of the elderly reported
difficulties in looking after grandchildren,
mainly due to their physical weakness and low
education levels.
But the above research tended to focus only on
the left-behind children, without comparing them
with those who live with their parents. Compar-
ative studies have found that the differences
between the two groups are marginal. According
to a highly technical psychological study, left-
behind children are less healthy than other chil-
dren, but only very marginally (Huang, 2004: 351,
353). The research conducted by Zhu et al. (2002)
in Jiangxi, Hunan and Henan provinces on the
educational achievement of left-behind children
and those whose parents have not migrated
found no significant difference between the two
groups’ school behaviours (e.g. school atten-
dance) or outcomes (primarily measured by
examination scores). The authors attributed this
to the general negligence of most rural parents
towards their children’s education, regardless of
whether they are home or away. Another survey
done by Jiang and Fen (2002, cited in Wang, 2003)
also suggested that, despite the general impres-
sion that left-behind children are more likely to
drop out from school, parents’ migration does not
appear to be a factor – at least not an independent
one – in affecting school-children’s withdrawal.
Thus, similar to the situation of the elderly, left-
behind children face various problems, but they
are not evidently worse off than those who live
with their parents. Research on the social
development of children in different parts of
Shandong province, eastern China, indicates that
the percentage of children with psychological
and behavioural problems in the city, county seat
and countryside are 8.11%, 7.18% and 19.18%
respectively (cited in Yang and Wang, 2004: 29).
In other words, rural children are more than
twice as likely to have psychological and behav-
ioural problems as their urban counterparts. The
rural–urban divide is thus far more significant
than the differences between the left-behind and
the accompanied.
The fact that rural children as a whole are left
behind again has roots in the institutional set-up,
and a key to it is the problematic relationship
between the individual, community (represented
by villagers’ committees) and state in the provi-
sion of basic education. As mentioned in the
earlier part of the paper, basic education in China
has been mainly the responsibility of the
government below the provincial level. In the
countryside, villagers’ committees, townships
and county governments are responsible for the
primary, junior-secondary (12–14) and senior-
secondary (15–18) education, respectively. The
township is the major investor in education, but
its very limited financial capacity has led to the
perennial under-funding of schools. The situa-
tion has become worse since 1994 when China
introduced a new taxation system with the objec-
tive of enlarging revenue at the central level. The
new financial framework is characterised by
upwards concentration of revenue, and places
the township at a level that has the least income.
Awidely cited figure is that by the end of the
1990s, about 80% of townships in China could
not pay the salaries of school teachers on time. In
some townships, the total government revenue
was less than a third of all the teachers’ salaries.
Recognising this reality, from June 2001 the
central government ordered the county govern-
ment to be responsible for guaranteeing the
funding of basic education. This partially solved
such problems as teachers’ back wages (in many
places even the county government cannot
Xiang Biao
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DOI: 10.1002/psp
guarantee the teachers’ salaries), but it has cer-
tainly not brought about substantial improve-
ment in rural education.
As a result of this institutional arrangement,
rural education is particularly vulnerable to the
negative consequences of migration. Firstly, at
the macro-level, since basic rural education is
financed by the rural community and local gov-
ernment, and educated farmers are more likely to
migrate to cities, rural investment in education
has become a subsidy to the urban sector. Sec-
ondly, the job insecurity and low pay of rural
school-teachers – an inevitable outcome of the
dependence on community funds – have in fact
turned many rural teachers into migrants, with
the latest wave in 2003. In order to relieve the
peasants’ financial burden, the central govern-
ment ordered a dramatic cut of peasants’ levies
in early 2003, including that originally intended
for basic education. Although the reduction of
levy is supposed to be compensated for by the
government budget, in reality it is often unmet,
and teachers’ salaries in some places were cut by
a third or half. In Jichun county of Hubei
province, for example, as many as 800 teachers
quit their jobs due to a reduction of pay in early
2003. Among them, 77 were from village primary
schools, nearly a third of the total (Jiang, 2003).
Finally, the out-migration of the most educated
and capable members of the rural community –
the ‘brain drain’ – has further weakened the
capacity of the villages to mobilise resources for
education.7In sum, the left-behind children are
left behind not only by parents, but also by teach-
ers, by other capable community members, and
ultimately by the basic policy design.
DISCUSSION AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Unlike what is usually assumed, being left
behind in China is not only a family matter of
practical consideration for the migrants and their
family members, but is also related to funda-
mental institutional arrangements and unequal
social relations. These institutional arrangements
also explain the problems faced by the left-
behind, and the marginal difference in welfare
status between them and those accompanied by
family members in rural communities. This
paper has demonstrated that, far more important
than being physically left behind by migrants,
rural communities as a whole have been left
behind economically and socially. Since migra-
tion is not the real cause of the problems faced by
the left-behind, discouraging migration would
not help. Indeed, less migration may only make
things worse, since for many rural residents,
migration is vital to sustaining basic needs in
education and medical care. As one left-behind
mother and wife (both her husband and son
migrated) in rural Shenyang commented, ‘It is
better to be apart to earn more money than to
stay together to be poor.’
What should and can we do? First of all, more
peasants and their families must be allowed to
settle in cities with equal entitlements as other
urban residents, if rural family members, partic-
ularly children, are not to be left behind on a
long-term basis. Despite gradual and partial
relaxation, the hukou system remains a formida-
ble obstacle for the overwhelming majority of
migrants who want to live with their families in
the city. Without urban hukou status, migrants are
denied access to government-subsidised housing
and public education for their children, and have
minimal living security. There are other obstacles
apart from the hukou system. For example,
although migrants can join the medical care
system, the medical fund is now coordinated
at the county level and a nationwide unified
risk-pooling system has not been established. A
migrant’s medical care account will have to be
cancelled in one county and reinstated in another
if he/she changes jobs across counties. This is
part of the reason why a very small proportion
of migrants have joined medical care, making
family migration more difficult (see Xiang, 2003).
The current place-based system for public
resource redistribution and administration may
also impede the local urban government from
providing migrants with full entitlements, even
when they have obtained their nominal urban
hukou status. Thus the entire administrative
paradigm must be modified (Xiang, 2005).
At the rural end, three aspects can be explored.
Firstly, community-based markets for services
driven by migrant remittances and the demands
of the left-behind can be further developed.
Apart from elderly care, it has also become
increasingly common for migrants to leave their
children with other community members, partic-
ularly school-teachers, on a commercial basis. For
example, in the Wenzhou area of southeastern
China, which is well-known for its out-migrant
The Left-Behind in Rural China
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DOI: 10.1002/psp
traders, the practice of teachers taking care of left-
behind children is well-established and is com-
monly referred to as ‘raising piggies’. Secondly,
‘social capital’ can be enriched among the left-
behind. For example, left-behind wives in some
communities have formed mutual-aid groups
during the agricultural high season. For the left-
behind elderly, socialising with peer groups is the
primary means to address emotional loneliness
(Zhang, 2003). As a socialist country, China has
done fairly well in establishing semi-official
organisations for women and the elderly (in
every village there is a female cadre in the vil-
lagers’ committee in charge of women’s affairs,
and an association of the elderly under the lead-
ership of the township Committee for the
Elderly), and they can provide support for the
left-behind groups.
Finally, we must recognise that the fundamen-
tal solution lies in the state finance system.
Migrants’ remittances have gained much promi-
nence in academic and policy-making circles
recently, but the experiences in most parts of
China show that remittances alone fall short in
terms of generating substantial development and
increasing the welfare of the left-behind. Most of
the value created by migrant labourers remains
in the urban sector. It is thus out of the question
to use migrants’ remittances to redress
urban–rural inequality. Furthermore, as this
paper illustrates, the lack of provision of rural
public goods constitutes the immediate cause of
the various problems of the left-behind and
others, and the funding system for national
welfare is responsible for this. Without substan-
tially reformulating the overall finance system,
the vicious cycle – whereby migration drains
resources away from the rural community and
the left-behind are left further behind – will not
be reversed. We want people to stay at home or
to migrate because they choose to, rather than
because they have to. We want a situation where
staying back and migrating are both conducive
to the development of the community of origin.
This can be achieved only when a rural-friendly
institutional setting attentive to the needs of the
poorest communities is put in place.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Ms Beatriz Lorente, formerly of
the National University of Singapore, and
particularly Dr Ali Rogers at Oxford University,
for their careful reading and detailed suggestions
for revision of an earlier version of this paper. I
am also grateful to Ms Emma Newcombe at the
University of Oxford for her help with editing,
and Ms Zhang Na at Shenyang Normal Univer-
sity, China, for her assistance with the references.
NOTES
(1) Interview took place in Shenyang, Liaoning
province, on 13 December 2004.
(2) The census reported 121.07 million internal
migrants as of the year 2000, and among them 88.4
million were rural–urban migrants. The census
defines ‘migrants’ as those who lived in a town-
ship or district (in big cities) different from where
they had registered their permanent residence for
more than half a year. Other surveys conducted in
Shanghai and Beijing found that about 20% of
migrants in cities stayed less than half a year. Our
estimate of 106 million rural–urban migrants was
reached on the basis of these figures.
(3) This was widely reported by the media in China;
for example, Anhui Daily, 21 April 2004.
(4) For literature on the hukou system, see Christiansen
(1990); Cheng and Selden (1994); Mallee (1995);
Chan and Zhang (1998).
(5) An exception to this is a pilot scheme that
grants no less than RMB 600 a month to an
elderly person who has only one child or two
daughters from the date when he/she reaches the
age of 60 from 2004. This is aimed at encouraging
low birth rates in rural communities. The fund
is shared by the central government and local
government.
(6) Another community-based elderly care practice is
the ‘five guarantees households’ (wubao hu)
scheme which guarantees a living with accommo-
dation, food, clothing, medical care and funeral or
education (for orphan minors) to rural elderly or
minors who have lost the ability to work and have
no other source of support. The scheme covers
only a very small part of the rural population. In
the survey conducted by Zhang, about 5% of the
migrants had cut their connections with the
parents both economically and socially, and some
of the elderly have applied to join the wubao hu
scheme (Zhang, 2003: 21).
(7) Out-migration has turned a great number of vil-
lages in China into ‘shell villages’ (kongke cun)
which now have little productive public assets and
few able labourers. For example, Jianli county of
Hubei province has more than 200,000 labourers
working elsewhere. As a result, more than 400,000
mu (65,880 acres) of land, or 24.2% of the total, are
Xiang Biao
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DOI: 10.1002/psp
left uncultivated. Due to low productivity, the
village could not pay the agricultural tax and other
levies and had to take out loans to fulfil duties.
Another village in Hubei province, where half of
its population work as migrants, was in debt to the
tune of more than RMB 2 million in the early 2000s,
for which the village had to pay RMB 180,000 as
interest every year. Without a proper institutional
set-up that is friendly to the overall development
of rural communities, migration will leave the
entire countryside further behind.
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