The following is part of Cornell Contemporary China Initiative Lecture
Series under the Cornell East Asia Program. The arguments and viewpoints
of this talk belong solely to the speaker.
We hope you enjoy.
>> So welcome to the new season of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative.
My name is Nick Admussen. I'm a professor in the Department of Asian Studies.
And I'm here representing the East Asia Program. The Contemporary China Initiative
is a function of the East Asia Program. So weekly lecture series that's for
the Cornell community and the larger community if you're seeing this
on the internet. Because this is the first lecture of the season I'd like to thank
the people who made it possible - Robin McNeal who founded the initiative,
who's not with us, he's on leave this semester; Josh Young, who's here;
Amala Lane; Nancy Liang - who make this reasonably complicated situation hopefully
very easy for the speakers and for me. I'm also really honored to introduce
our first speaker of the semester, Professor Kam Wing Chan
from the University of Washington. Professor Chan is the author of two books.
He's a professor of geography at the University of Washington. He's the author
of two books. The first one, and it's a long title so I'm gonna get it exactly right,
"Cities with Invisible Walls: Reinterpreting Urbanization in Post-1949 China."
And also the volume "Urbanization with Chinese Characteristics" which came out,
is now out, 2018. So it's brand new. He's written I think literally one million articles
I won't list for you, you can quote me he has a million articles in press,
and has also consulted for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the United
Nations. And I think his research has been used in policy in many different ways.
So I'm very excited to see what he has to tell us today.
And I hope that you can all join me in welcoming him to Cornell.
>> Good afternoon everybody. It's really a delight to come to visit this campus.
I have heard of Cornell since, what, 1980s. I was even thinking of coming here,
ended up somebody gave me some more money in Canada so I went to Toronto.
So I miss this place. But finally this is my first time to come to Cornell
so it's really a delight. And thanks to the East Asia Program, and Nick and Amala
both work really hard to make things look very easy, somewhat easy to me.
I woke up 4 o'clock this morning to catch the bus to come here. But I have a couple
cups of coffee, three cups, one on the bus, which is really nice - that you reminded me
I almost forgot about that - nice bus. I'm okay. I can debate with you all kinds
of stuff. But since the first part is being taped so I'll be a little bit cautious.
The real thing's at the end after it's not being taped.
But let me do my presentation today.
I think this is an issue, a very very large issue to me.
I might need to try not to argue. And as I look at this in the last several years more,
I mean, you will notice that urbanization is my baby for a long time.
So this is something I started doing in the 80s, and all along I'm a single-subject
professor, I just work on one thing. Urbanization. So I really, millions of things
as Nick said, but that's not quite true. But in any case the children issue started
to really appear on my radar screen more so. And I was just telling Nick
that as I done this more, increasingly there is actually some connection
even to my past history, to my history of my growing up. And so actually I wrote
a piece. I'll send you to see that piece if you're interested. It's more of my
personal journey, which has relevance to this, but today is not talking about
my personal journey. It's not the occasion to talk about this.
So today I will talk about more the larger picture of children in China.
So what I would like to begin here is to show you some picture
I went to in 2015. I'm going to visit this school again next month,
I'll be in Shanghai in a month. And this is really my school that I have
been going to a few times already. This is a migrant school in Pudong
in Shanghai, September 2015, around this time. Actually it was around
the Mid-Autumn Festival. Today is the Mid-Autumn Festival day. All Chinese
celebrate this. The school actually looks pretty nice. It has about 500 students
around that time, I think since then it has declined, from Grade 1 to 5.
In Shanghai the elementary school covers only 1 to 5. Grade 6 is middle school.
And that's very special. Actually elsewhere in China is 1 to 6, that's the elementary
school. But in Shanghai there's something special. The students here are all migrant
students. Around that time there's about 500 of them from Grade 1 to 5.
And the migrant children of course is a special category of children in China.
They come here with their parents from other provinces. In this particular case
most of them, as I talked with them, I think 70% came from Anhui,
which is the province not too far away from Shanghai.
They do not have Shanghai house of registration status. They do not have
Shanghai hukou. That's the most important distinction, that they come here without
Shanghai's hukou, or house of registration. It's a kind of residential permit or status,
and I'll explain this a little more. So I consider the migrant children,
in my bigger scheme of work, I think they are the luckier children of the children
of migrants. We'll talk about another category, which, not so lucky.
And in this particular school especially, even luckier I would say. This is political.
The school receives support from an NGO which I like a lot, it's called
Stepping Stones, you can Google Stepping Stones you can find out about their work,
which provides native English speaker volunteer to teach English in this school.
So I was visiting on that day, I think it was a Friday,
that these volunteer came to help. So what is happening,
there is each class, 1 through 5. Sometimes there are two classes
for each grade, sometimes three, depends. It's roughly two to three classes
for each grade. I went to each of them. You can see that it's well supported,
the volunteers are very energetic, very thoughtful, very careful.
And when I reflect, I was sitting in the class at the back, I was watching some,
I see that the English they are receiving around that time's definitely better
than the English teacher that I had around the same grade. I grew up in Hong Kong
I learned English in elementary school but I was only exposed
to native speaker when I was in high school. We only have some
Chinese English teacher that teach. I still actually connect with my
Grade 1 English teacher. He was the one who really opened the door for me
to all this whole new world. Without him probably today I was in China.
I was a kid, I move to China.
So this is what is happening. You can see that this is another volunteer teacher
using props and all kinds of things, get children interested. During recess time
you can see that these are the kids. They ran around in the hallway,
they scream, they even got little bit rowdy I would say. Just like many other kids,
normal kids would do. After sitting in the class for 40 minutes or so,
they came out and run around elsewhere. As the principal of the school later told me,
we had lunch together, talk about all the things that I saw and so on,
these are very rough kids, tough kids. Maybe tough kids, that's the right word,
not rough. Tough kids, from the countryside. From Shanghai, local kids. The examples
she gave me was that these countryside kids coming from the countryside
are more adventurous. They run, they do lots of things, they jump up and down more
than the local kids a lot more. And the Shanghai kids tend to sit more straight
and behave, so to speak. Sometimes they trip, they fall down, they get up immediately,
they seldom cry. Which is quite different than the local kids who cry once they
fell down. And even if they get hurt, have some scrapes, scratches, something,
she said they just wipe it off and say hey, it's nothing.
That's what most of the Anhui kids are doing.
And they're also very happy. You can see. I think they at least look happy to me.
When I try to take a picture of them they make all these things.
So I think these are the more, I'll argue that maybe even more normal
than the local kids in some way. Because the local kids sit straight
and the teacher was worried that they will get hurt,
and sometimes I heard that they were not even allowed
to get out of the classroom because they're gonna get themselves in trouble.
They don't want to, that teacher. These kids grew up in this case.
Not in Anhui back in the hometown there, in Shanghai in these nice schools
and being able to do all these things, and having really very good English lessons
which was much better than my English teacher. So you can imagine that one day
if they start from there and having something similar to mine, they have
a better foundation than my foundation, you can see that definitely. 'Cause they will
be able to hear English at a much earlier age. I still miss when there's a lot of words
even after being in North America for 30 years. Because if you don't learn something
when you're young, you're never going to learn unfortunately. So use your time
when you are young to learn is very very important.
Well on this I think I need to really also tell you the other picture. This is really
the unfortunate case, unfortunately, that I've been paying a lot of attention to.
And there are actually a very close connection with the other kids,
the other migrant kids. And we actually in the last several years we have read a lot
of stories. There are thousands of stories on this, and some of them are very tragic
that make them sell in the headlines, international headlines. CNN, BBC,
all these major news talk about this, report all this. But it may not have caught
your attention. And here are two of the most tragic ones. One was in 2015,
just three months before I visit that school out there. Four children were found dead
in their home in Guizhou Province. The one boy and his three sisters
were left behind in the poor village without a lot of proper care. They decided
that they're going to end their life. So the eldest, the boy, started the whole thing.
and they committed suicide together by drinking pesticide. So they killed
themselves. The oldest boy was only 13 years old and his youngest sister was 5.
So all these four kids belong to one family, decide to take their life by drinking pesticide.
Also equally tragedy, just not too long ago in 2012, almost in the same location,
same village. Another bunch of kids, five of them, five boys, was playing
in the wintertime. They got themselves in a dumpster. They found that the dumpster
was warmer. It was cold in winter. They got poisoned by the poisonous gas
in the dumpster and they all got killed. So we can see that these are some
very very tragic, the extreme side of all these. And these really draw the media
and actually there are a lot of outcry, lot of very angry after this happen in China.
in the last several years in some of these. So some of the things been doing
to deal with these, I will talk about some of these and talk about the causes
and talk about some of my research and so on. And maybe you will be interested
in doing something, learning more about this. So what I want to draw here
is talk about the China economic success story briefly. The China economic success
story in the last 40 years in the nutshell in a very simplified form is that it's really
China being able to become the world's factory. Made in China, you know,
becoming the world's factory like this. And one of the crucial elements
in making this work for all these is that, so these are migrants. This is a map
that I drew on the major flow of migrants coming from the inland provinces
to the coastal area here to work. During Chinese New Year they go back home
and the most powerful thing that get this is that we have 170 million cheap
and mobile labor in China that really make the China world's factory take. Of all these
I said the most powerful potent component of this is the China price. There's one thing
called the China price. If you cannot beat the China price there's no way that you
can survive. If you want to do anything you do with reference to the China price.
China price sets the bottom out there and create the massive important thing.
So I think this is quite familiar to all of us in the United States.
So what I want to relate to this is that to talk about the China price we need to also
talk about the Chinese urbanization. The Chinese urbanization here is very
interesting because normally when we talk about urbanization, talk about urban
population growth, we only have one line, Just this line. And this is what is happening
in China. China's urban population used to be around 200 million, here, 180,
but it move up to about I think around 800 million at the end of last year.
So this is the typical story. But important thing is that the Chinese urbanization
is not just one line. Not the first line, the top line actually, there's also
the dotted line. The red line here also shows that, this line here, shows that
you also actually have two types of population. One is called the urban
population that people who live in the city, even the migrants. You also can
differentiate this, actually another class of population is called people who have
hukou. So you can see that the hukou population is actually much smaller.
It's only around 600 million around this time. And in between you have about 220 million,
the migrant population, people who do not have hukou. So this is what we're talking
about. And along with the Chinese economic success, you can see that
this part is really growing. This is what's happening along this line. So this is the time
when China start to open. You can see that this is opening, but at the same time
this is widening because you have all these cheap labor because the way it is done
through the hukou system. So what is the hukou system?
Here let me briefly go over this. So basically this is something that China
set up in 1958. It's something China modeled after the Soviet system.
And you created two systems, two societies, one is for the rural, one is for the urban.
The urban class has the basic social welfare, basic services, security,
while the other class will not have. So it created two populations and they are
treated differently. This hukou system is the one whose served mainly as a system
that prevent people from moving from the rural to urban. So hukou system
created this, and of course things got changed and complicated in between.
Finally, I think, it evolved into a system that is largely talking about whether you
have local hukou or not local hukou citizen. So the local hukou mostly are urban
population. The one that's hukou outside are non-local population or rural population.
So the major structure remain. This is still remaining. It's largely pretty much working
along this whole thing. So what does that mean really when we talk about having
a hukou without having a local hukou? So I think it lists all the main things here.
Legally, you don't have a local hukou, it means that you're not supposed to be
living here forever. You can come here to work, but you get old, you need to go home.
A lot of jobs actually are not open to you. Even though you're a Chinese citizen,
if you don't have local hukou you are not allowed to access a lot of social benefits,
unemployment insurance, retirement benefits. And then also very limited
education opportunity to children. We'll talk about this more. There is no
political rights, and other rights are limited. Political rights perhaps is not the most
important right in China at the moment. So this is not too important. So you can
come here to work, but I'm sorry you cannot use the social services.
So that's why the labor can be cheapened in this way, because you just pay them
the wages but not all the other things. They don't have access to them.
In the Shanghai propaganda brochure you see that they say that all children
are our children. They said it very upfront on the brochure.
In reality, that's not quite true. Migrant kids, you don't belong here.
That's what is really happening. And this is something that I want to delve into here
a little bit here. In the bigger picture, this is a little op-ed I wrote some years
ago, that's six or seven years ago now. It's called "In the City, but Not of the City."
I talk about this Chinese urbanization. When this came out later also
in the South China Morning Post, a major newspaper in Hong Kong,
English newspaper. I think they put a really nice, what it's called, art. You can see that
the one with hukou will be living here, the one without hukou will be in a basement,
dark, maybe even no windows, and so on. And literally this is what is happening,
like in Beijing even today. I think some estimate puts that there's about
still a million people who live mostly in very substandard basement. A lot of these
are air raid shelters. There are no windows, no facilities, and they live there.
There's about a million people. Most of them are migrant workers
in Beijing today. I get to know someone who's working on this subject.
So when it come to the policy on the migrant children, this is what is happening,
just a brief sum up here. The migrant children, as I've said, those who accompany
the parents to the city. There are about 170 millions workers in the city
according to I think a reasonable estimate they have done. And the 2000 census
shows that there were about 35 million migrant children and about same in 2015
bi-census or the mini-census. So they have not changed very much.
But you can see, for those of you who are a little more demographic, you can see
that the number here actually appears to be really small compared to 170 million
workers because most of them, like 80%, 70%, married, you expect that at least,
if they're just having one kid, you will be easily having at least 80 million kids.
Like a couple, you know, you divide this by two you have 85 million. So in fact
it worked out. You will see that, as I'll show you, we'll know that these 170 million
migrant workers have a total of about 100 million children. So the question is
that only about 35, or 1/3 of them, are able to come to the city. The other 2/3
are left behind the countryside not with their parents.
So this is what we have happening.
So the Chinese education policy. '85, the mandatory nine-year, Grade 1 to 9 for all,
that's in the Constitution. Education Law, 1995, says that everybody should have
equal opportunity, that's also in the Education Law. 2001, they also here,
migrant children cannot go to public school in the city. They can only go to makeshift
migrant school. So what does a makeshift migrant school look like?
I think this is a real picture in Beijing. So migrants in the 1990s in Beijing
went to construction site and have a little stool as the desk. That's the way how they
operate education in 1990s. This is a real picture of Beijing on this. Very very bad
obviously, we can see that. So starting from 2001, a new policy now came out.
The government mandated that from the Grade 1 to 9, these kids, migrant kids,
should be educated in the place where their parents work. And this was not
immediately implemented. It took a few years for the local government to implement
some of it, not even not all of it. So this is gradually done. And it's very interesting.
And if you look at Beijing, I noticed that while this was gradually implemented,
partly because the great Beijing populace itself was aging rapidly, they will have
not enough kids to go to public school. So on the one hand they're closing
the public schools because there's not enough kids, but on the other hand
the migrant kids was doing their school on the construction site. So you can see
how ironic this happen. So there were teachers who were very angry, and partly
because they want to protect their job too. There is a fight fought for the migrants.
And so finally they were able to get into some of the schools. Open up a little bit
public school or allow some migrant school to survive. So in the place
where I have done more research in Shanghai, I estimated about 70 to 80%
of existing migrant children actually was able to go to public schools,
including some migrant school, Grade 1 to 9, and still have lot of problem.
It's still even if they go to school, there's still lots of problems. For example,
there were separate school for locals and migrants, like the school that I show you
is totally, if you'd like to use the U.S. term, this is called segregation.
Totally just migrants. Migrants go to one school, locals go to another school.
So in that school, even though that I think it's good school, I think in my opinion
it's good school. But even some of them work in the same school they also have
lot of problems. For example, Professor Lan in Taiwan has done some really interesting
work on this subject. This is based on her paper in The China Quarterly looking at
this subject. In the school is very much still, in the same they actually were divided.
So the migrants' children go to this section. The local go to this section.
And they have no playground on this side. And there's actually a wall or fence
that separate them. This is where you can see that. So this is what Professor Lan
said, apartheid model of migrant schools, its integration.
So you can see that this reminds us here, for people who understand U.S. history,
will be the Jim Crow kind of thing that's going on here.
And this is still very much, in fact I just read a news two weeks ago on this,
this is happening in Jiangsu, in Suzhou exactly. There's big news on this subject
about migrants being integrated in some of this form. And then the local parents
rebel against this. They didn't like this and so on. So you can see they still face
a lot of problems. But this is not the end of this. This is only one part of this.
Actually one of the more important parts, and sometimes this is overlooked,
is that even though they provide some limited opening for them to go to 1 to 9,
they are totally off limits when they go to beyond 9. So beyond 9 you have to go
back home. So this is really where the tricks and the impact really start to come out.
So to continue they have to go back home. And also, in order to study in their home,
like Anhui's exam. Anhui's exams for high school, because if you want to test into
high school you have to go through an exam called Zhongkao. The curriculum,
going into the high school, called Zhongkao, and also college, in different provinces
are different. So there's no way that you finish your Grade 9 in Shanghai,
lucky if you can finish all that because it's not easy even to get into Grade 6 through 9,
is very hard actually in Shanghai for migrant, increasingly very very hard.
So even if you can do that you cannot really finish Grade 9 and jump back to go
to Grade 10 in Anhui. Because you had to go through that test. The test has different
things, the curriculum, Anhui's different, Guangxi has a different curriculum
every province is a different thing. So you don't do that. You actually have to leave
much earlier. You have to maybe start Grade 10 at least out there. And then grades
through Grade 11, and then you can do your test Grade 12. So you can see
there are all kinds of odd complications out there, even though on paper you can
go through 1 through 9, reality you cannot. And there's a really interesting Malala
in China that was not drawing the same kind of attention of Malala elsewhere.
This girl Zhan Haite, that's her name here, was actually born in Shenzhen when their
parents was a migrant in Shenzhen. I think she originally was from Jiangxi.
And they moved to Shanghai, she was able to actually finish Grade 1 through 9.
And then suddenly, you know, she said that she could not continue.
So she came out and wrote a long article. And it's interesting this got published
in the People's Daily on this subject. So it generate tons of attention.
And during this time, this is 2012, on this side of fighting. And you can see
that she was featured in an international newspaper on this fighting, right here
I think this is her, about education justice and about this right here equal testing
on this and draw on and really pick a fight. I think she finally could not really go on
even though despite all these attention, people supported her, of course the local
was very much against her. The locals said you don't belong here. You belong
somewhere else, go back home, that sort of thing. There was a lot of things
being said. So this drawn a lot of attention. And if I'm not mistaken, I think the latest
news I heard last year that she was finally admitted to a top college,
because by the time she's now in college, into the United States. Last year, I think.
I'm not 100% sure but I think that's something that, because of that fight,
she was able to go to some school and finally got into the top college.
So what is happening here. If we can go down to the little numbers I can show you
because I love numbers, I love the population number. You can see that here
I show you, using the census data of 2010, this is Chinese Sixth Census, 2010,
and show you the age structure, or what it collected is shown in the census data.
So what is happening. You can see that here the darker color here shows
the people without hukou, and the lighter color here shows those kids with the local
hukou. You can see that if you look at it, the eighth year, this is eight, baby here,
all the way through 17, lot of kids. You can see that here is more or less
a more stable kind of style, which shows there's some little ups and down affecting
each year a little variation in policy of the one-child policy, sometimes a little more
stringent. Sometimes I think maybe there is a good year, this is maybe
the Year of the Dragon. The parents want them born Dragon. So it will show up
a little bit more. But this you can see went up by a large amount,
fluctuating around 80,000 a year, around there something. But if you look at the
migrant children the picture is quite different. You can see that they came here
a lot more earlier. Like when they're young they'll go with their parents, usually
they're in Shanghai. But they started to be dropping. And of course then you get into,
more drop, this is halfway, into the middle school year, is dropping even more
and more. And then suddenly when you come to age 14 there are really very few.
So you can see that then this suddenly go up again because some of them,
they are now coming here to work. They become workers. So suddenly then
they come back here. You can see that this is what is happening. You can see
this is quite true. So this is also correlate very well with the enrollment data.
This is enrollment of migrant. Here around the same time you see that in Grade 1
they have a lot of them. And then they started dropping, and here after
Grade 6, Grade 7 drops very rapidly. So you can do some numbers,
you can calculate some numbers. I did some of this in some of my articles.
But the big picture I want to show you then. The result of all these is create
a very very extraordinary model, in my view. Because when you are seeing a very large
population like Shanghai, Shanghai is around 24 million people, this is like
whole California almost, you never see a structure that look like this.
How will you describe this shape? Anyone?
Yes?
Anyone want, is there anyone?
>> It looks like an upside down top.
>> Ok that's good. I want something a little more elegant.
>> A spade. >> Is it a spade?
>> Spade, yeah. That's good. Anyone?
>> Upside down pyramid. >> A tree.
>> Yeah, that's true. That is right. This is pyramid, this is a bit typical.
But what is this?
>> A Christmas tree.
>> Christmas tree. Did you heard me before? No?
>> I just don't know how no one said that.
>> Okay, yeah. This is a Christmas tree. Yeah exactly. This is a Christmas tree.
In fact my colleague who specialized in demography was stunned. She said
this is a Christmas tree. And you have never seen that large population
at this level, like more than ten million, will show up as a Christmas tree.
So you can see that this is amazing because you can see that it's all the adults
here. When it come to the kid it's really very little, very few. And this comes up
from two reasons. One, of course, the local, in fact I have some data
that breaks down the data, but we're not getting too complicated.
Actually the local kids also are shrinking because of one-child policy of all the law.
So they are shrinking. The nonlocal, the migrants, are not allowed or barred
indirectly from coming. So the quantities very weird, I think in a way, and very
unsustainable, you can see. This is not going to be sustainable. You can see
that this is Beijing, the same. This is Shanghai, this is Beijing.
It shows the same. I wrote a piece on this in the South China Morning Post called
"China's Missing Children." So you ask, where do they go, the missing children.
And you can see that you can also put a comparison. I think I put a comparison
here. You can see this is Shanghai. This is Hong Kong. So Hong Kong is aging
even more rapidly. This is Japan, which is also aging rapidly. But you will never see
something like this at this end. In fact I calculated that if you look at what
happened in Shanghai, the percentage of children, meaning people who are
below age 18, like 0 to 17, is only about 10% of population. Hong Kong still has 16%.
Japan has 17%. So you can see that this is a far more precarious, far more aging
in the situation. So you obviously want to ask where do these kids go.
Like they should be there with the parents but then they're not. Obviously the answer
is pretty simple because they are left behind. They are left behind.
And you can see this is actually a more refined picture of them. You see the locals.
This is local population, those who have hukou, they are shrinking too.
But the migrants is predominantly just young adults here in their 20s, 30s, 40s,
and then very few, very few. So these are the left-behind children.
And the left-behind children, that I already alluded to earlier on, is now running
somewhere around about 2/3 of 100 million. Because all the migrant workers
is about 170 million, we're talking about workers. All of them you can expect
that there are about 100 million children. 1/3 of them ended up in a city with their
parents. 2/3 of them end up in the countryside. So this is what is happening,
some of the figures. In the most extreme case about two million, for example,
using the 2010 census, show that two million of them live alone with no parents
at all, no relatives at all. Most of them live with relatives, with their grandparents.
There's some figure that shows that they don't see their parents very much,
only once a year, so on so forth. I did some calculation, it shows that Shanghai
alone itself created roughly about two to three million left-behind children.
So depending also on assumption that you use, but I can really pin this down
to be quite accurate to be around two to three million here. So this is another picture
of the snapshot of this is coming up on CNN.
Using the 2010 census can give you an idea about what this is all about.
About half the children live with one parent. Mostly the man, the father.
There are also some mothers too who have left. But there's a one-parent family,
about half of them. And then another 1/3 of them live with grandparents.
And then another 10% live with relatives. And then a small percentage that basically
just alone. Usually these are a little bit older, these are usually teenager, here.
Some even are very early teenager, like 10, 12 years. And there are some
of the numbers there, obviously have all kinds of issues.
The 2015 mini-census, China carry out a national 1% survey on this,
and this is a report that's published last year based on the same kind of criteria.
This give you some sense of what is happening. So you can see that
this is 2015. What was happening, as I've shown, these are the left-behind children.
And these are migrant children on the right side.
So this is migrant children. This is the left-behind children. You can see that
it has not changed very much over there. This is what is happening.
If you're interested we can come back and look at this.
This is something just freshly done just about two weeks ago
to give you some sense of what is happening in terms of bigger picture.
You can see that we can look at more modern kind. You can see that
this start to grow along with the large increasing migrant population.
Look at them all because here you can see that in 2000 you have only about
100 million but now it's gone to about 170 million. Of course their children that are
going with them are rising. But most of time actually you can see that the left-behind
children is doubled right here from 30 million to about 70 million so altogether
they make up about 100 million children of migrant and this is about 1/3 of all
the children in China. So 1/3 of children in China is in that category. As a percentage
of all children you can see that it's 40%, 38%. Look at this, if you can count this.
So you can look at the various indicator, it will give you the major trend.
So what is going on here. You can see they're increasing, but the increasing
are mostly happen in the left-behind children. So increasingly there are more
left behind. Even though they're doing this.
The left behind children, as you can expect, face a lot of issues. The more extreme
case, there are many many, there's scores of all these. This is a newspaper that I
happened to be reading on the day that I arrived in Beijing in the 1930s.
This is on the China Daily on the front page. They talk about, as you can expect,
sex offenders that prey on the children left behind. And sometimes most scary
some of these actually are teachers. So in some province, if I remember
correctly, in one province, likely Henan, they even now have taken a very draconian
measure that in the girls' dormitory, because a lot of girls now actually are
going in the boarding school. This is another interesting part of the left-behind children
that because of the consolidation of the schools. Rural schools are being closed
down because depopulation. So they consolidate the school into towns,
or into some small major centers. And this will create a really long distance
they cannot do the daily commute back home, so they have to go boarding school.
Boarding school create all kinds of issues, including issue of sex abuse.
Because when they stay overnight, there will be times that people can take them
out of there. And some of these unfortunately, it's upsetting, are teachers.
So now in one place, they even make a very draconian measure that the girls'
dormitory, no matter what reason, no matter what time of day, the male person,
either a boy or teacher whatever cannot go into the dormitory, to prevent this from
happening. No any excuse. So you can see the seriousness of this. So there will be
things like this that's more on the more serious side. There are things that are
less serious but still very troublesome, of very great concern. There are all kinds
of accidents that happen to them when the parents are not around.
Like the kids I talk about that got themselves into a dumpster got killed by accident.
So there are, as I said, there are tons of these all the time, anytime. If you
followed it closely you'll see that that's all kinds of stuff like this all the time.
Some that's very very heartbreaking to hear some of these. And even those
who don't seem to get into accidents and things, but they also suffer more.
There are study of study that shows that they suffer from psychological
separation stress. They have all kinds of issues. Maybe sometimes they have
a little more money compared to the children with parents around.
The migrant parent tend to have a little bit money because they are working outside,
they send money. They have a little more pocket money to use. But they suffer
from a lot of things. They miss their parents, they function do not social very
well, they are all kinds of do this. There is actually a very good video
on The Wall Street Journal website, if you like you can go on and watch this.
It's talking about some unordinary kid. How she, being a six or seven year old,
do the daily chore as an adult, cooking, everything, and becoming more or less
an adult. This is actually a very good girl. She did well in school. That was featured
in The Wall Street Journal on the video on this. So what I want to then do,
this is some of my latest research on this subject there. Recently, this is the last few
months, I examine the Chinese census and also the mini-census data that are
following, 2015 mini-census. So there are a lot of samples that you can play with.
So we can do some geography, look at some geography of all these different
type of children. So here I show you one picture. You can see that if we look at
the percentage term about each province, Beijing being a province in the Chinese
administrative classification, you can see that this give you some sense of,
the color here shows the children of non-migrants. So these are the children
of non-migrants. But these are children of migrants. So you can see that these
provinces here, like Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, Sichuan, are the heaviest.
You can see that more than half the children that were surveyed in the 2015
mini-census are actually children of migrants. So you can see that this is
very very prominent. So half of the kids in these provinces are actually the children
of migrant. And then even in the very extreme here there are very few of them,
they still have like 25%. So this is almost universal, point I'm trying to make.
And obviously this is also somewhat expected because this is the parent's
pattern that I show you. This is coming up on the 2015 mini-census. So they move
from the inland to the coastal areas. As we all know, these are the major
migratory flow. And here I do some mapping of where they are in terms of the numbers.
So the major concentration here is in Guangdong, as you can expect,
migrant children. Fujian, Jiangsu, Shanghai, and then here Shandong
and Beijing. And then the left-behind children actually are obviously in the inland.
Sichuan, here Anhui, and so on, Jiangxi. These are the major ones
that has color. So you can see that this pattern here of course is very much
resembling the parents' geography while the other one is showing where
they come from.
And then I also did another exercise here trying to do a little bit of measuring
how many migrant children, or trying to generate how many left-behind children
each province created by comparing some of the figures. So what I try to do
is that I take the migrant adult population here in each province and then multiply
with a national percentage, roughly about 0.45 ratio, 45%, meaning that each migrant
should create about 0.45 kid. So I can generate how many kids this migrant era
will have. And then compare how many actually with them in the destination.
So from here then you can generate finally the migrant children that are left behind,
the number of migrant children that are left behind that's created,
and then you can work out the percentage. So this is doing a little math, playing
with this. And then we can then generate some result and look at which province
is doing bad, which province is nastier to migrant children so that they have to
keep the kids. Because either through the school system or through the household
registration system, the local has a lot of latitude and they implement it differently
in different provinces. So what I'm trying to do here is try to look at the degree
of deterrence in each province by measuring the percentage of their kids
that weren't able to make it to the destination. So this is the math.
And then we can create a chart of this. So this is creating a chart of the left-behind
children generated by each province. So you can see that on the top year
all of the migrants that end up in Tianjin, about 85% of them actually are left behind.
So only 15% of the children of migrants was able to make it to Tianjin with their
parents. The other 85% were left behind elsewhere, for migrants whose destination
was Tianjin. And this is not surprising. You can see Beijing is at the top here.
Beijing is about 80%, Shanghai is about 80%, only 20% was able with them.
And you can do this and then you can do all the provinces. Guizhou, Henan, Hebei
actually turn out to be the more friendlier. They have a high percentage of about
half of them being able to go with them, still half of them were left behind
in the countryside. But even Guizhou here, considered to be actually more lenient,
you can see that still half of them, but elsewhere you can see that there are
a lot of them, about easily on average about 2/3 of them, are left behind.
But in a more extreme case, Tianjin, you have about 85% those that are left behind.
So these are the places, here, here, these six or seven places here are really
the most deterrent, most unfriendly to migrant children. So that's why
they have to end up having their kids in the countryside. Because things are making
very hard for them right there.
It's also very interesting, I also want to make a note here that while I was doing this
I was looking at also some other research that was evaluating the provincial policy
friendliness to children. It was very interesting. The Beijing Normal University,
they published a report, in fact they've been doing this for many years,
they published the report. I looked at their 2017 report on this and they identified
five provinces, five or six provinces that are considered the best, top provinces,
to children in China. They have a rating on this. Guess what? Those five provinces
are the top right here. This is so amazing. So it must be either their data is wrong,
because on mine the way that I've been doing the data works.
But on their chart they came up to be the best in terms of children-friendly policy
in those provinces. But I also think that their data are probably right. It's a step.
The way that, however, they look at it is that they are looking at only the local
children. They are not concerned about migrant children at all. Migrant children
is not really in their purview. Not at all. So we can see that in fact this speak to
a very different two worlds. The places here that are considered the best
for all the children are in fact the worst places for migrant children.
This is really very two different worlds that we're looking at. I was quite amazed.
Later when I find out this, this is later when I look at comparative study,
I thought they will be somewhat similar, but it was not it was really totally opposite.
So I did something similar but I'm not gonna get into, I think we don't have time
to really get into this table, which it just shows similar result.
So what is happening here? Let me conclude here briefly.
Well China actually has started doing something on the migrant children.
In fact Li Keqiang said that the government is going to do the utmost to protect
all the migrant children, left-behind children. They are our children too.
Talk about some of these here. In reality, particularly when the policy
that was being implemented at the local level, they are not actually not very friendly,
particularly in the very large city like Shanghai, Beijing. In Beijing, in I think
2015-2016, there was all the children that was demonstrating in the Bureau
of Education in Beijing, just right in front of the bureau for a month protesting.
And you can see there they have something very simple. They want to go to school.
But they were not. So the migrant kids were there for almost a month with their
parents. They were protesting. And this went on. This is not just happening
in Beijing, elsewhere too. In some of the provinces you can see that this is all
happening. This is in Zhejiang, the same thing that's happening. In one very
extreme case, this father, after numerous attempt, the family stay in Beijing
for many many year but they miss one period of one of the documents.
So on the final day, I think this is late May, when the result of whether his daughter
was able to get into school or not, public school, after numerous attempt,
numerous months, weeks of running around different bureaucracy, he was told
that his daughter cannot go to school. In that rage he poured kerosene on himself
and lit a fire and burned himself in a serious injury. He did not die in that.
So you can see that things occurring were that extreme, into that sort of thing, 2016.
This is even reported in the Chinese newspaper. He was seriously burned.
At the end of the Chinese New Year you also started to see some of these,
and this was captured by some of the most sympathetic reporters.
This is at the end of Chinese New Year when the parents are returning to their work,
and the kid would not want the parent to go. And this boy screamed loudly
"你们不能这样对我," you cannot do this to me. I want my mother to be with me.
You cannot just go. And this will be captured in this picture. I think we are
also something like this here when we talk about the separation of the parents
from the illegal immigrants, so-called, here not too long ago.
One other point that I want to make here is that of course we know that now China
really allow children and China ended the one-child policy two years ago.
They want a lot of children.
When you think about this, isn't it ironic that if you want more children, they are now
trying to increase the fertility rate. They want Shanghai women to have three
kids even, not just two. They want more kids because they need these kids.
But isn't it ironic that there are always about 100 million kids out there
that should be taken better care of. Why don't they divert the resources,
these are the immediate future of China.
Really raise the children. But they're not doing it.
There are actually many things I think it may actually works for them.
Isn't it really quite ironic that on one hand we want more children
want to have this, which of course is very important, China is aging rapidly,
but at the same time is doing this.
So if we still have five minutes we can run through a video of this.
And before I end this, I will play the video, but also I want to show you this is my
website, I encourage you to see that. And on the top here I put an article.
This is talking about my own experience of being, I almost became a left-behind
child. But my mother did some great thing in that process. There was a migration
that's going on as I reflect on this. So this came out on Mother's Day this year.
For those of you who can read Chinese you may be interested. When I was doing
this I suddenly realized that it was that connection to that 跑民 [migrants]
that is why I got on to all this.
So I'll play the video.
In China not that long ago most people lived in the countryside
looking after their animals and growing their own food.
Life was hard and people were poor.
And then everything started to change.
Factories sprang up to make things that people all over the world wanted to buy,
and suddenly millions of people were on the move from the countryside
to huge new cities where they could get money by working in the factories.
But when the adults moved away they were not allowed to take
their children with them.
Millions of them were left behind in the countryside.
They are now known as the left-behind children.
This is the story of one of them.
My name is Tang Yuwen and I'm 11 years old. I live here with my grandmother,
my brother, and two cousins. My parents don't live here. They work in another city
called Chengdu. They both work in factories making clothes.
My parents don't earn much and they don't get to spend much time with us.
But thanks to their hard work, we are not down and out.
When mom and dad come back to visit, I run to meet them. I run a very long way
because I can't wait to be close to them.
What I love most is to go fishing with them. On my own I can only catch one or two fish,
three at most. But when mom and dad are here, we catch lots of fish.
During Chinese New Year mom and dad visits for longer. We set off fireworks
to celebrate. They start out small with not much light, but then they fly high
into the sky and explode suddenly. They are bright and colorful and very beautiful.
It's not easy for mom and dad to come back to visit us.
They can only stay for a few days before they have to leave again.
I wish they could take me with them. I don't want to be separated from them.
I know it's hard for mom and dad to earn money. I don't want to cause trouble
for them, but I miss them so much. It's very painful. But I can't do anything
about it because I don't want to bother them. If I call them I will disturb them.
I can't do anything but wait. I really want them to come back.
When I grow up I won't leave here. This is my home. I want to do something big.
I'd like to be a boss, run the factory, and I'll take my kids to my workplace
so we can stay together.