Sociology and Criminology-Open Access
Open Access

Abstract

Governing Left-behind Children through Family in China's Great Migration

Jieyu Liu*

Existing scholarship on the lives and wellbeing of China’s left-behind children often frames the problems as a function of their parents’ migration, which leaves a big 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 supported articles from a mainstream newspaper and policy documents since the first 2000s, this text situates a sociological inquiry into the discursive and institutional framework addressing ‘the left-behind children problem’ in China within the problematic of the connection between children, family, and therefore the state. The analysis reveals seemingly ‘disingenuous’ articulations of left-behind children’s value within 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 opposite 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 consistent with a family ideology rooted in urban middle-class experiences.I argue that such inconsistencies should be contextualized within the state’s neoliberal-authoritarian governance of the migrant population within 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.

Published Date: 2021-05-26; Received Date: 2021-05-11