The Children of China's Great Migration

Rachel Murphy explores Chinese children's experience of having migrant parents and the impact this has on family relationships in China.

Rachel Murphy (Author)

9781108834858, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 August 2020

300 pages
24 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.6 kg

'The book is engrossing, with a lot of vivid, subtle, and emotionally moving narratives on the children left behind in rural China and their families. While the text incorporates numerous references to the literature, one always strongly feels that it is about real lives and real issues and Chinese realities.' Jingzhong Ye, China Journal

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.

1. Understanding the lives of left-behind children in rural China
2. Migration, education and family striving in four counties of Anhui and Jiangxi
3. Sacrifice and study
4. Boys' and girls' experiences of distribution in striving families
5. Children in 'mother at-home, father out' families
6. Children of lone-migrant mothers and at-home fathers
7. Children in skipped generation families
8. Left-behind children in striving teams
Appendix: field research on left-behind children in China.

Subject Areas: Sociology: customs & traditions [JHBT], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL], Sociology: family & relationships [JHBK], Social & cultural history [HBTB], 21st century history: from c 2000 - [HBLX], Asian history [HBJF]