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On sprawling cities and left-behind kids
By Ni Tao |
November 13, 2009, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
AT last 9-year-old Yang Xuemei, an ethnic Miao girl in Guizhou Province, will have someone to confide in about her growing pains.
She is one of the 220,000 children and young people in her hometown whose parents have left them behind back home while they seek work in China's prosperous coastal regions, Xinhua reported on November 9.
Yang is fortunate to be getting a "temporary father" or guardian to take custody and see to her physical and emotional needs. These guardians are assigned by the local government, in this case in the remote Miao-Dong Autonomous Prefecture in Guizhou in the southwest.
Similar cases abound nationwide. China has around 40 million children under 14 years of age who are living without parental supervision, according to the All-China Women's Federation.
These children are frequently referred to as liu shou er tong, or "left-behind kids." Nearly 57 percent of them have mental health problems due to lack of parenting, the federation says.
The problem is rooted in the country's urban-rural dichotomy in which migrants' children do not get access to formal schooling in an area outside of their registered hukou residence.
Instead, they are educated locally while their parents venture out in search of jobs, swelling the ranks of the "6199 army" - referring to young children and the elderly left behind in China's interior. June 1 is Children's Day (6/1); September 9 is Double 9th Day(9/9). Nine signifies longevity because it is pronounced like the word for long life - jiu.
In a larger sense, the left-behind-kids phenomenon affords us a glimpse into what's gone awry in China's massive urbanization. We can sum it up thus: rural migrants are expected to take up jobs in cities but not to take root there.
This is the observation made by Chen Xiwen, deputy director of the Office of the Central Financial Work Leading Group, in a seminar on October 31.
China has an urbanization rate of 45.7 percent, meaning about 600 million of its 1.3 billion people are city dwellers. Clearly, a sizable proportion of the urban population are rural migrants, making the actual level of urbanization much lower, said Chen.
China's actual urbanization rate hovers around 28 percent, according to an estimate by Wen James Guanzhong, professor emeritus of economics at Trinity College in the US state of Connecticut.
At the seminar, Chen also said that the current trends in mass migrations to overdeveloped mega-cities such as Shanghai and Beijing will increasingly put severe strain on public services.
One-way street
Another downside of China's skewed urbanization is it's largely a "one-way street," with migration flowing disproportionately from the rural hinterland to coastal areas, not the other way around.
While urbanization by textbook definition does encompass the movement of people from rural to urban areas, in some developed countries the flow is reversed, away from cities.
In these countries the rural-to-urban influx had climaxed decades ago. Today city dwellers flock in droves to more rural areas for work and leisure, and in the meantime, city boundaries keep expanding.
In China, the stumbling block impeding this reverse flow is the hukou system, which excludes residents with rural hukou from access to most public services that city dwellers enjoy - notably medical care and education of their children.
There are a few bright spots, however. Suzhou City in Jiangsu Province has been at the forefront in promoting integration of rural and urban areas. Since July 2008, the city has implemented a pilot scheme to incorporate country folks above 60 years old into a single pension fund network.
A good step forward, but as one swallow doesn't make a summer, it remains to be seen whether it's the first ripple of a positive and far-reaching wave.
That is not to say China's urbanization is without merits. A landmark fiat that lifted restrictions on internal mobility in mid-1980s helped bring abundant produce onto urban tables that had long been starved of choices.
Moreover, the redundant labor freed from farm work later formed the backbone of a manufacturing powerhouse.
But in recent years, urbanization run amok has shown its ugliest face - unrestrained encroachment on farm land. Compensation payout to farmers uprooted from their land is often far from enough to buy them a decent life in cities.
Without anticipating this turn of affairs, those who have been behind the ever-expanding urban sprawl are now bearing the brunt of its fallout.
Property developers and some local officials consumed by the desire to raise GDP growth have conspired to maximize profit from land use.
But as Professor Wen noted, the prohibitively high cost attached to urbanization has considerably retarded its pace and may even jeopardize its momentum.
Urbanization is not a linear process, and when stretched beyond limits, it will certainly lose dynamism and become a self-defeating prophecy - the more one hypes to make it look good, the more flimsy it appears.
On November 20, children worldwide will celebrate Universal Children's Day.
Nevertheless, for their less-blessed peers in rural China - those left-behind kids - it will be yet another lonely day. Such gut-wrenching separations of parents and children need to be brought to an end.
She is one of the 220,000 children and young people in her hometown whose parents have left them behind back home while they seek work in China's prosperous coastal regions, Xinhua reported on November 9.
Yang is fortunate to be getting a "temporary father" or guardian to take custody and see to her physical and emotional needs. These guardians are assigned by the local government, in this case in the remote Miao-Dong Autonomous Prefecture in Guizhou in the southwest.
Similar cases abound nationwide. China has around 40 million children under 14 years of age who are living without parental supervision, according to the All-China Women's Federation.
These children are frequently referred to as liu shou er tong, or "left-behind kids." Nearly 57 percent of them have mental health problems due to lack of parenting, the federation says.
The problem is rooted in the country's urban-rural dichotomy in which migrants' children do not get access to formal schooling in an area outside of their registered hukou residence.
Instead, they are educated locally while their parents venture out in search of jobs, swelling the ranks of the "6199 army" - referring to young children and the elderly left behind in China's interior. June 1 is Children's Day (6/1); September 9 is Double 9th Day(9/9). Nine signifies longevity because it is pronounced like the word for long life - jiu.
In a larger sense, the left-behind-kids phenomenon affords us a glimpse into what's gone awry in China's massive urbanization. We can sum it up thus: rural migrants are expected to take up jobs in cities but not to take root there.
This is the observation made by Chen Xiwen, deputy director of the Office of the Central Financial Work Leading Group, in a seminar on October 31.
China has an urbanization rate of 45.7 percent, meaning about 600 million of its 1.3 billion people are city dwellers. Clearly, a sizable proportion of the urban population are rural migrants, making the actual level of urbanization much lower, said Chen.
China's actual urbanization rate hovers around 28 percent, according to an estimate by Wen James Guanzhong, professor emeritus of economics at Trinity College in the US state of Connecticut.
At the seminar, Chen also said that the current trends in mass migrations to overdeveloped mega-cities such as Shanghai and Beijing will increasingly put severe strain on public services.
One-way street
Another downside of China's skewed urbanization is it's largely a "one-way street," with migration flowing disproportionately from the rural hinterland to coastal areas, not the other way around.
While urbanization by textbook definition does encompass the movement of people from rural to urban areas, in some developed countries the flow is reversed, away from cities.
In these countries the rural-to-urban influx had climaxed decades ago. Today city dwellers flock in droves to more rural areas for work and leisure, and in the meantime, city boundaries keep expanding.
In China, the stumbling block impeding this reverse flow is the hukou system, which excludes residents with rural hukou from access to most public services that city dwellers enjoy - notably medical care and education of their children.
There are a few bright spots, however. Suzhou City in Jiangsu Province has been at the forefront in promoting integration of rural and urban areas. Since July 2008, the city has implemented a pilot scheme to incorporate country folks above 60 years old into a single pension fund network.
A good step forward, but as one swallow doesn't make a summer, it remains to be seen whether it's the first ripple of a positive and far-reaching wave.
That is not to say China's urbanization is without merits. A landmark fiat that lifted restrictions on internal mobility in mid-1980s helped bring abundant produce onto urban tables that had long been starved of choices.
Moreover, the redundant labor freed from farm work later formed the backbone of a manufacturing powerhouse.
But in recent years, urbanization run amok has shown its ugliest face - unrestrained encroachment on farm land. Compensation payout to farmers uprooted from their land is often far from enough to buy them a decent life in cities.
Without anticipating this turn of affairs, those who have been behind the ever-expanding urban sprawl are now bearing the brunt of its fallout.
Property developers and some local officials consumed by the desire to raise GDP growth have conspired to maximize profit from land use.
But as Professor Wen noted, the prohibitively high cost attached to urbanization has considerably retarded its pace and may even jeopardize its momentum.
Urbanization is not a linear process, and when stretched beyond limits, it will certainly lose dynamism and become a self-defeating prophecy - the more one hypes to make it look good, the more flimsy it appears.
On November 20, children worldwide will celebrate Universal Children's Day.
Nevertheless, for their less-blessed peers in rural China - those left-behind kids - it will be yet another lonely day. Such gut-wrenching separations of parents and children need to be brought to an end.
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