Children of Migrants in China

Kam Wing Chan, Yuan Ren, Kam Wing Chan, Yuan Ren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367462277
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000078206
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Children are precious in China especially as its population ages rapidly. The unprecedented fast urbanization and massive internal migration have profoundly changed almost every aspect of society. They have impacted the livelihood of children of migrants most. Because of the hukou system and related policies, China's internal migrants face major obstacles to assimilate into cities. But more than that, as this book shows, these policies have also torn families apart on a scale unseen heretofore. More than 100 million children grow up in unstable families and the great majority have suffered from prolonged separation from their parents in the migratory upheaval.

This book provides an updated analysis of this mega and painful process unfolding at various geographical scales. The chapters revolve around the central notion of family togetherness, or the lack thereof. The book measures, dissects, and analyses the impacts of migration on children and recommends policies to address major problems from a variety of disciplinary perspectives employing different methodologies. The problems faced by the children of migrants remain enormous, and it is a looming huge crisis in the making. If unaddressed, those problems can damage a whole generation with serious consequences.

The chapters in this book were first published in Eurasian Geography and Economics.

China's precious children

Kam Wing Chan

Introduction

China’s population has been in the international spotlight for decades not only because it is the world’s largest, but also because the “one-child” family planning policy, introduced in 1980, was the world’s biggest, and probably also one of the harshest, social engineering projects implemented by a state.¹ The policy, which restricted Chinese new couples to stringent birth limits for 35 years,² touched almost every family. Facing a looming crisis of the aging population, the government finally relented in late 2015. While some scholars have argued that the policy was necessary for economic growth by generating large “demographic dividend” for the country, others have long anticipated the forthcoming crisis, and deplored the wrong-headed policy, including its associated excesses and human rights abuses, such as forced abortion and sterilization (Wang, Gu and Cai 2016; FT 2018; SCMP Editorial 2018). The policy also contributed to China’s skewed gender imbalance and rapid aging, among many others (Ebenstein 2010; Cai and Wang 2009). China officially became an aging nation³ in 2000 at a much early stage of economic development mainly due to this policy and became the first country to “get old before it gets rich” (Wang 2015; The Economist 2019). China’s laborforce has also steadily shrunk since 2014 (Taplin 2019). The one-child policy, replaced by a two-child policy to begin in January 2016, was aimed at raising fertility so as to slow down the aging of the population. This article extends and updates our recent research (Chan and Ren 2018; Chan and Wei 2019) and more importantly brings the issues of children of migrants and recent hukou (household registration) reforms into the conversation of China’s now much-discussed aging population issue and places these interrelated questions in a broader context.

China is graying fast and the baby count is falling

It has become quite clear, especially after the 2018 birth figure was released, that ending birth controls will not lead to a baby boom. As Table 1 shows, the

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Table 1. China’s major population indicators, 2010–2018.

Indicators	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018
Total population (millions)	1340.9	1347.4	1354.0	1360.7	1367.8	1374.6	1382.7	1390.1	1395.4
Age 0-14	222.6	221.6	222.9	223.3	225.6	227.2	230.1	233.5	235.2
Age 15-64	999.4	1002.8	1004.0	1005.8	1004.7	1003.6	1002.6	998.3	993.6
Age 65 and above	118.9	122.9	127.1	131.6	137.6	143.9	150.0	158.3	166.6
% Age 0-14	16.60	16.45	16.46	16.41	16.49	16.52	16.64	16.80	16.86
% Age 65+	8.87	9.12	9.39	9.67	10.06	10.47	10.85	11.39	11.94
Total dependency ratio	34.2	34.4	34.9	35.3	36.1	37.0	37.9	39.2	40.4
Youth dependency ratio	22.3	22.1	22.2	22,2	22.5	22.6	22.9	23.4	23.7
Elderly dependency ratio	11.9	12.3	12.7	13.1	13.7	14.3	15.0	15.9	16.8
Crude birth rate (%o)	11.90	11.93	12.1	12.08	12.37	12.07	12.95	12.43	10.94
Crude death rate (%o)	7.11	7.14	7.15	7.16	7.16	7.11	7.09	7.11	7.13
Natural increase rate (%o)	4.79	4.79	4.95	4.92	5.21	4.96	5.86	5.32	3.81
Total number of births (millions)	15.96	16.07	16.38	16.44	16.92	16.59	17.91	17.28	15.27

Source: NBS (2019).

annual population growth rate in 2018 dropped to only 3.8 per 1000, the lowest in the entire post-1949 era except for the famine years in the early 1960s (NBS 2019). The relaxation of the one-child family planning policy in 2016 did result in a small, temporary bump in births in that year, but the number quickly fell in 2017 and plummeted precipitously in 2018 to an alarming level of only 15.3 million, yielding a birth rate even lower than in 2010 when the stringent family planning policy was still in place.

At the same time, the size of the elderly population, those aged 65 and above, grew rapidly, from 119 million in 2010 to 167 million in 2018, an increase of 40% in 8 years! The share of the elderly population similarly jumped from 8.9% of the population to 11.9% in the same period. Many experts expect the birth levels to stay low in the coming decades, following the world trends, and will not help counter the aging problem much (Qi and Wang 2018). This is also aggravated by the recent drop in the marriage rate.⁴ In other words, China is locked into an aging trajectory that family planning policy can do little about (Cui 2018). Indeed, based on the most probable trends, a recent (2017) UN model projects that the elderly population of China will double in size to 340 million and in percentage to 24% in 2040, raising the total dependency ratio to close 60%, up from today’s 40% (Cui 2018; Zhang 2018)! Such a shift in the elderly proportion took USA nearly a century and Europe more than 60 years (The Economist 2019). China’s rapidly rising crop of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Children of Migrants and China's Future
• 1 China's precious children
• 2 Children of migrants in China in the twenty-first century: trends, living arrangements, age-gender structure, and geography
• 3 Leaving children behind: a win-win household strategy or a path to pauperization?
• 4 From left-behind children to young migrants: the intergenerational social reproduction of rural migrant labor in China
• 5 Demolition of Chengzhongcun and social mobility of migrant youth: a case study in Beijing
• 6 Rural-urban divide and identity conflicts of migrant Muslim students in Northwest China
• 7 Rural-to-urban migration and adolescent delinquent behaviors: evidence from Hunan and Guangdong in China
• 8 The impacts of parental migration on children's subjective well-being in rural China: a double-edged sword
• Index