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     

From left-behind children to young migrants: the intergenerational social reproduction of rural migrant labor in China

ABSTRACT

Growing in number in the last two decades, rural migrant workers in China have completed intergenerational replacement, and young migrants have become a principal part of the migrant population. However, the process of such intergenerational reproduction has not been thoroughly examined. Based on field studies in the Chinese countryside, this paper analyzes the mechanisms of intergenerational reproduction of rural migrants from the perspective of rural communities, families, and school education. “Left-behind” rural communities, their migration-oriented social culture, and the cognition of rural–urban differences as constructed through migrant parents facilitated a subjective willingness for migration among left-behind children. Exclusion from urban-biased rural education is often the final external thrust for their migration. Having finished the transition, the households of a new young generation of rural migrants are experiencing a different crisis of reproduction. This paper argues that there is a systematic rupture between labor, households, and rural society and that this presents a critical development trap for China.     

国际移民体系中的中国大陆移民--也谈新移民问题

改革开放以来,中国大陆出现的新移民问题引起了广泛关注,但已有的研究并不能使人们清晰地认识和了解这一问题.本文试图将这一问题置于国际移民的背景下加以探讨,就新移民的概念界定、出现这一现象的主要背景、新移民的人数和类型等问题进行分析.从而说明,中国大陆的新移民现象,是20世纪移民时代国际移民大潮中的一个极小的部分,对此应有客观公正的认识.     

The working and living conditions of college-educated rural migrants in China

In the past one and a half decades, Chinese cities have witnessed an influx of college-educated rural migrants. Until now, there has been little systematic research on the working and living conditions of this growing population. The objective of this paper is to empirically examine similarities and differences in living conditions between college-educated rural migrants, non-college-educated rural migrants, and local urban workers. The data are from the 2010 National Health and Family Planning Commission Survey of China’s migrant population. Our study has produced several findings. First, the monthly income of college-educated rural migrants is significantly higher than that of non-college-educated rural migrants and is similar to that of college-educated local urban workers. However, less-educated rural migrants earn more than local urban workers with similar levels of education. Second, while college-educated rural migrants work fewer hours than non-college-educated rural migrants, they work longer hours than their local urban counterparts. Third, local urban workers receive greater social benefits than college-educated rural migrants, whose benefits are better than those of non-college-educated rural migrants. Overall, while college-educated rural migrants enjoy more favourable working and living conditions than non-college-educated rural migrants, they remain disadvantaged when compared to urban workers with a similar level of education. These findings highlight the insurmountable institutionalised exclusion and discrimination that imposes significant barriers on rural-origin people to reap the benefits of higher education.     

Parental Migration,Intergenerational Obligations and the Paradox for Left-Behind Boys in Rural China

Drawing on in-depth interviews with caregivers of left-behind children (LBC) in rural China, this article seeks to explore their understanding of migration motives and the social process of taking on care-giving roles for LBC. The authors argue that there are underlying socio-cultural explanations pertaining to economic motives for migration; such as, making contributions to social events (weddings and funerals) in village life, and fulfilling social obligations for left-behind sons’ futures. Parents migrate to save for sons’, but not daughters’, adult lives. Grandparents, particularly on the paternal side, are expected to fulfil social obligations to care for left-behind grandchildren, even without immediate financial returns. These suggest that left-behind boys, and in particular boys cared for by paternal grandparents, may be at greater risk than other LBC, as they may receive even fewer resources in the form of remittances from migrant parents in their early childhood.     

Family education support to rural migrant children in China: evidence from Shenzhen

Rural migrant children have become a fast-growing population in China as a consequence of the large-scale population flow from rural to urban areas. Besides the dual-structure hukou system, which restrains rural migrants from upward mobility, family capital also plays an important role in providing family educational support to rural migrant children. Using the data from P District and N District of Shenzhen in 2013, this paper explores the present status of three dimensions of family capital and five aspects of family educational support to Chinese rural migrant children, as well as the correlation between family capital and family educational support from perspectives of migration status (hukou), life course (children’s age), and school type. Constrained by inadequate family capital in multiple dimensions manifested by less education, lower income, and limited social networks, etc., parents of rural migrant children provide less family educational support in nearly every aspect compared with parents of urban local children. Among rural migrant children, those in private migrant schools receive the least support from their parents.     

Migration and left-behind parents and children of migrants in Cambodia: a look at household composition and the economic situation

ABSTRACT

This paper examines composition of households formed after the outmigration of a household member in rural Cambodian and correlates household types with indicators of economic condition. The paper focuses on households containing left-behind parents and the children of migrants. Excess mortality in the 1970s due to war suggests the association between migration and economic condition may be gendered. This could be exacerbated when migration leads to a skip-generation household containing a left-behind parent and a child of migrant without an own parent of the child present. Data come from the Cambodian Rural-Urban Migration Project (CRUMP), a project designed to study migration in rural Cambodia. Most households formed after a migration contain a left-behind parent of migrant. While about 22 per cent of these households contain a left-behind child of migrant, the per cent is over 60 per cent when the migrant is themselves a parent. The economic situation tends to be worst for left behind solo mothers (mothers of migrants who do not live with a spouse) and best for left-behind coupled parents of migrants. There is evidence that the combination of left-behind solo mothers living with children of migrants in a skip-generation situation is the most disadvantaged.     

Thai migrants in Singapore: state,intimacy and desire

In this article, I analyse Thai migration to Singapore, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2004–06) to discuss the experiences of male construction workers and female sex workers in negotiating heterosexuality during their temporary residence. I argue that these Thai migrants engage in transient heterosexual encounters as one of many calculated, strategic ways of negotiating their intimate identity and subjectivity in the survival circuits of this global city. Their transient sexual acts are intimate products of negotiated moves, which form a major part of their semi-anonymous, temporary life in a foreign land. The sexual practices of Thai migrant workers in Singapore, I argue, are best understood by taking the following factors into account: the host government's regulation and control of its migrant population; the foreign workers' economic and social situations of mobility as inscribed in their highly dynamic traveling biographies; and their rationalized willingness and desire to embrace transient sexual intimacies as part of their employment and/or struggling lives in the global city's survival circuits.     

新空间 新网络 新角色——博客对海外新移民与中国互动的影响

以新兴的网络传播手段——博客作为切入点,分析了海外华人新移民博客社区的种类和组织形态;阐述了海外华人新移民通过博客与中国社会互动的意义、方式及影响。通过博客这一新的互动工具和平台,海外新移民可更加直接而生动地了解中国变化,了解中国人的最新思维、心态和社会变迁;拓宽自身更大的社会交往空间、话语渠道、传播途径和社会影响;与中国原住地的原有关系保持思想上的无边界的联系,甚至参与中国的改变进程。     

Global Governmentality and graduated sovereignty: National belonging among poor migrants in ecuador

Questions about the transformation of governance and national identity are being re‐examined in the context of contemporary economic globalisation. Scholars are debating the ways in which globalisation is reworking national identities through the shifting of economic governance away from ‘... the territorially defined boundaries of the nation‐state ... [and into] “unbundled” space for which there is not yet a name’ (Gupta, 1998: 321). Much of the work that has examined these questions of national identity and belonging under globalisation have emphasised questions of mobility, memory and identity in diasporic communities. In this paper, by contrast, I work with economic migrants within Ecuador to emphasise how contemporary globalisation processes reach inside national territories and work to reconstitute and reinvigorate pre‐existing social hierarchies and spatial identities. I develop these arguments in the context of Ecuador's economic crisis of the last two decades, drawing on in‐depth interviews with migrants to Quito.     

The migrancy of racial and settler imaginaries: British migrants in Auckland,Aotearoa New Zealand

The position of migrants within Eurocolonial settler cities has received growing interdisciplinary attention. Within the field of geography there have been calls for new avenues of research into the encounters of bodies with different histories of arrival and experiences of racialization in such contexts. However, there remains little research on the position of British migrants, despite their ethno-historical links, and the ongoing popularity of such destinations among British emigrants. The analysis draws on 12 months of qualitative research with first-generation British migrants to examine their reflections on the bicultural and multicultural landscapes of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. This paper makes a number of contributions. First, it documents both the racial and settler imaginaries of British migrants. Second, it highlights the ways normative temporal and spatial assumptions shape encounters with difference in urban settler environments. Finally, through an examination of the heterogeneity of perspectives, histories and investments at work among British migrants, this paper seeks to complicate monolithic ideas of belonging, otherness and identity in racialized settler societies.     

跨国主义的移民研究——欧美学者的观点和贡献

在已有研究的基础上,从跨国移民的政治选择、跨国移民的经济贡献、跨国移民的文化再造、跨国移民的活动领域、回归移民的再适应、跨国主义移民研究等多方面介绍和评述了欧美学界跨国主义移民研究的主要观点、基本内容和特征以及学术贡献,并对跨国移民研究中需要进一步探讨的问题进行了梳理.     

Borders and bureaucracies of EU mobile citizenship: Polish migrants and the personal identification number in Sweden

This article advances research into the workings and ‘workarounds’ of internal border technologies in migrants' lives. Through a focus on the specific example of tensions between EU mobile citizenship and the Swedish personal identification number, or personnummer, we enhance understandings of the bureaucratisation of state power and the enduring importance of discretion in computerised bureaucratic encounters. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Polish migrants living in Sweden, we analyse the centrality of this personnummer to our participants' working lives and general access to daily amenities and services. We reveal how and why it is so difficult to get this registration, even as EU citizens; explore how this relates to exploitative work practices; consider what happens, or cannot happen, when people are unable to obtain their personnummer and are effectively rendered undocumented; and focus on how these bureaucratic exclusions can nevertheless be managed and mediated. Ultimately we find that while this one example presents significant insights into the specificities of Swedish bordering practices – which go well beyond prevailing interests in welfare bordering – it also offers new insights into how contemporary digitised personal identification bureaucracies work in practice, and how fragile mobile EU citizenship has become.     

Parental migration and the educational enrolment of left-behind children: evidence from rural Ponorogo,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the effects of parental migration on children’s educational enrolment following the recent reforms in Indonesian educational policy. We find that, in general, parental migration has a positive impact on school enrolment, although this varies by the child’s age and the gender of the migrant parent. Parental migration has an adverse impact on the school enrolment of younger children who are eligible for free education, but a positive impact on older children who are no longer able to access state educational support. The gender of the migrant parent matters, as paternal migration appears to have a more positive impact on children’s educational enrolment than maternal migration. Maternal migration is associated with a reduction of younger children’s likelihood of a being in school, while paternal migration makes no difference to their school enrolment. For older children, maternal migration has a lower positive impact compared to paternal migration. Our qualitative interviews also show mixed findings: some children appreciate their migrant mothers’ migration efforts and are motivated to persevere in continuing education, while others are weighed down by their migrant mothers’ sacrifice and develop a sense of obligation to reduce their financial burdens by leaving education early to enter paid employment.     

Time protagonists: student migrants,practices of time and cultural construction of the Singapore-educated person

This paper analyses the cultural production of the ‘educated person’ through student migrants' engagement with ideas and practices of time. In particular, it pays attention to how these young people negotiate identities and develop unique strategies to achieve personal goals of education. Drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Flaherty, I conceptualise time as both a discursive structure and cultural resource to forward two interrelated arguments. First, I argue that time is an important discourse in the ways that ideas about education and becoming educated are imagined, performed and negotiated. Second, I suggest more attention needs to be placed on time as a central facet of cultural (re)production. This study focuses on one particular student flow from Southeast Asia to Singapore as a case to illuminate the role of time in cultural production, based on research with thirty students conducted between 2010 and 2011 primarily through biographical interviews.     

Environment and Cultural Heritage in China: Introduction

The transformation of the natural and built environment over the past three decades has left China with a legacy of environmental degradation and loss of biodiversity. The loss of cultural heritage, including cultural forms associated with the natural ecology, has been just as dramatic. The three studies in this special focus section of Asian Studies Review explore significant issues in environmental conservation, cultural heritage, and grassroots activism in urban and rural China, with an emphasis on the relationship between the natural environment, the transmission of traditional cultural forms, and localised forms of agency or activism. As discussed here, while China's discourse on these issues is strongly influenced by global norms, different regions of China are developing their own individual responses to environmental conservation, the protection of biodiversity, and the ongoing transmission of endangered cultural forms.     

Transient dwelling: trains as places of identification for the floating population of China

China has experienced massive rural–urban migration, producing the huge so-called ‘floating population’ (liudong renkou). This article attends to what it means to be thus between places by focusing on the embodied and emotional experience of migrant travel. Each year sees the Spring Festival rush (Chun Yun) with the largest annual movement of people as millions of these rural migrant laborers (nongmingong) return to their homes for the holidays. The Spring Festival rush is marked by huge crowds queuing overnight for train tickets, with throngs of migrants carrying woven bags of belongings and gifts on their shoulders, who end up standing in the overcrowded ‘hard-seat’ carriages of trains. By closely reading some of the poems from the emerging genre of ‘Hired laborers literature,’ this article explores migrants' affective and emotional journeys. It argues that this transit experience is one of the key shared sites of common identification for a migrant population whose mode of inhabitation is through circulation and mobility. It also argues that mobility creates shared experiences characterized by specific corporealities, material cultures, and senses of social stratification.     

Home and beyond in Aotearoa: the affective dimensions of migration for South African migrants

The integration of immigrants into local labour markets is a key focus of contemporary migration scholarship in Aotearoa New Zealand. While acknowledging the importance of these economic aspects of migrant settlement, in this article we examine instead how new arrivals from South Africa actively reconstitute a feeling of home and belonging post-migration. Drawing on the concept of affect, we illustrate the ways in which the experience of migration and settlement is embodied, situated and relational. We do this by examining the affective dimensions of home-making, both within and beyond the physical boundaries of a chosen dwelling and its location. Memory bridges all these experiences of transition, suffusing migrants' lives as they understand, frame and negotiate their affective present within the context of their affective past. Our focus renders visible important aspects of the migrant experience, and contributes to a more holistic understanding of why migrants come, how they settle and what encourages them to remain.     

The morality of transnationalism: children of Ukrainian labor migrants write about migration,homeland and abroad

Ukraine has experienced a wave of labor migration after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A large number of Ukrainian children have been directly affected as they grow up in transnational households with one or both parents working abroad. In this article, I aim to describe how Ukrainian children and youth conceptualize migration, homeland and abroad in a context of societal, economic and political change. The analysis is mainly based on a qualitative reading of 143 texts written by Ukrainian children. I argue that Ukrainian children and youth place homeland and abroad on a moral map of belonging, and that migration is conceptualized within such a framework as a morally ambiguous movement.