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Existing scholarship on the lives and wellbeing of China’s left-behind children often frames the issues as a function of their parents’ migration, which leaves a significant gap in discussing the role of the state in shaping the institutional framework that these families operate within, cope or struggle with. Through critically interrogating public discourses based on articles from a mainstream newspaper and policy documents since the early 2000s, this article situates a sociological inquiry into the discursive and institutional framework addressing ‘the left-behind children problem’ in China within the problematic of the relationship between children, family, and the state. The analysis reveals seemingly ‘disingenuous’ articulations of left-behind children’s value in the mainstream media and official policies. On the one hand, there seems to be a prevailing concern over the welfare of left-behind children which has grave implications for the country’s future development. On the other hand, the dominant discourse attributes left-behind children’s ‘miserable’ plight to their ‘pathological’ family life, which translates into policy efforts to discipline rural migrant families according to a family ideology rooted in urban middle-class experiences. I argue that such inconsistencies should be contextualized in the state’s neoliberal-authoritarian governance of the migrant population in the post-reform era, which perpetuates a stereotype of ‘the pathological family’ to account for left-behind children’s disadvantages while evading, hence up until recent years avoiding to redress, the political-economic factors underlying their plight. I conclude the article by ruminating on the theoretical, social and policy implications of this study.

For four decades after China initiated economic reform, rural-urban migration has become a central experience for rural families. How do families negotiate economic production and social reproduction across geographic spaces and against institutional constraints? This article identifies the concept of intergenerational contract as an analytical tool to answer this question. Based on qualitative data gathered in Hunan and Shenzhen, I reveal that (a) children’s education is pursued as a family project, deeply rooted in families’ classed social mobility aspirations; (b) by spatializing the living and responsibilities of generations, rural migrant families selectively appropriate the hierarchical economic geography produced by state policies, to balance work and family arrangements; and (c) children engage in emotional labor guided by normative expectations and rules to reciprocate older generations’ care and support. The study uncovers coexisting resilience and vulnerabilities of migrant families and opens theoretical spaces to address the linkages between family, culture, and class in contemporary China.

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