The Children of China's Great Migration

Abstract

In China in 2018 over 200 million rural migrants worked away from their home villages, fuelling the country's rapid economic boom. In the 2010s over sixty-one million rural children had at least one parent who had migrated without them, while nearly half had been left behind by both parents. Rachel Murphy draws on her longitudinal fieldwork in two landlocked provinces to explore the experiences of these left-behind children and to examine the impact of this great migration on childhood in China and on family relationships. Using children's voices, she provides a multi-faceted insight into experiences of parental migration, study pressures, poverty, institutional discrimination, patrilineal family culture, and reconfigured gendered and intergenerational relationships.

Childhood and rural to urban migration in China: A tale of three villages

“…Whilst the childhood experiences in each setting were distinctive and shaped by their embodied geographies, they shared common features reflecting multi-layered processes of inequalities including the rural-urban divide and patrilineal gender ideology. This finding is in line with exist ing scholarship on China (see Murphy, 2020;Xiang, 2007). The urban-rural divide has produced a series of discriminatory policies which disadvantage rural children.…”

“…Wang and Li (Village B) were both 'left behind' children but expressed contrasting feelings: the former longed for reunion with her parents, but the latter loathed it. This finding concords with existing research of transnational families (see Parreñas, 2005) and on China (Murphy, 2020), i.e. that children's relationships with their grandparents and parents vary with the children's age and care histories.…”

“…This interpretation may partly account for the emphasis on children's education, but more fundamentally rural families' efforts in pushing children to do well academically are driven by, or constitute a strategy to escape from, institutionalized urban-rural inequality in China. To fulfil this project, all family members make sacrifices: parents migrate to the cities for work to pay for the children's education, mothers and grandparents are carers and children themselves are expected to study hard (see also Murphy, 2020). This sacrificial discourse has become a dominant feature in justifying their suffering.…”

“…Only a very limited number of studies draw on children's own perspectives. An exception is Murphy (2020) which focuses on daily care routines in the family and school life, to reveal the impact of both parent-child separation and study pressures on children's emotions and aspirations. Whilst Murphy examines left-behind children's short-term visits and stays in cities (during summer holidays), her sample is sourced in two neighbouring provinces and predominantly formed of children whose parents either both migrated or one parent migrated.…”

Education and Repertoires of Care in Migrant Families in Rural China

“…This article draws on data that I collected for a wider project investigating rural Chinese children's experiences when at least one parent has migrated without them (see Murphy 2020). This project was based on my recorded interviews with 109 children conducted in schools, and my matched interviews with the children's caregivers carried out in their village homes in 2010 and 2011.…”