Why so many young Chinese are depressed – and how Beijing can help
- The rise of youth depression owes much to China’s rigid education system, the loneliness of only children and tight rural-urban migration restrictions
- Centrally planned schooling, along with migration restrictions that mean millions of children are left behind in rural areas, should be done away with
Wealthy households in Shanghai and Beijing now pay US$120 to US$400 per hour for in-person tutoring, while the children of the non-wealthy must study even harder to make up for the tutoring that their parents can no longer afford. In the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese village and city streets were full of children. Today, one rarely sees any unless it is a holiday. Even on weekend afternoons, playgrounds are empty. The kids are all inside studying.
Parents are also under tremendous stress. In addition to taking care of their children, most middle-age urban couples also must care for four elderly parents. By contrast, in rural areas, where around 491 million Chinese live, the one-child policy was enforced less strictly, which means that adults often have siblings with whom to share the burden. But they face more stress when they have children.
Many must seek higher-paid work in cities, but the hukou restrictions prevent them from bringing their offspring with them. Around 11 per cent of Chinese today are rural-urban migrants, which translates into some 69 million children being left behind in rural areas.
Rural parents who might have been able to remain with their children have begun to face a different problem. Following the closure of around 300,000 rural schools between 2000 and 2015, 12 per cent of primary-school-age children, and 50 per cent of secondary schoolers, must attend often faraway boarding schools.
Many rural adults thus work long hours to educate children with whom they must part after the first few years of life. Ironically, their chances of being reunited are even lower if their child ultimately succeeds, because most university graduates settle permanently in cities.
The good news for China is that straightforward policy solutions are available. The first is to get rid of rigid, centrally planned schooling. Local governments ought to be able to decide how many schools to build and how many students to take, and each high school and university should decide who it wants to admit, including late bloomers who may have not been good test-takers as kids.
The government can still regulate schools, but it should delegate and decentralise most of the decision-making to increase the system’s flexibility. This alone would take a lot of pressure off young children and their parents.
A second step is to lift the rural-urban migration restrictions that are dividing families and condemning rural households to relative poverty. This solution has become especially important as aggregate growth has slowed.
These policies are not without costs. Efforts to change the school system would trigger resistance from current stakeholders, and allowing free migration would increase urban congestion. But such measures would also yield clear benefits by boosting economic growth and improving the mental health of China’s young people and their parents.