Boy’s death a reminder of China’s neglect of ‘left-behind children’

Detention of three teens over the death of a third – all ‘left-behind children’ – should prompt national reflection on their neglect, first by the parents, then by the state

Phoebe Zhang

Published: 9:30am, 21 Mar 2024

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On March 10, a 13-year-old from a junior high school in Handan city, in China’s northern Hebei province, went missing. A day later, his body was found in an abandoned vegetable shed with injuries to his head and back. The police acted quickly. On the same day, they detained three of the victim’s classmates on suspicion of murder.

The case has shocked the public. The three students, aged between 12 and 14, may be the youngest murder suspects China has seen in a long time. A police investigation is ongoing, and no formal arrest has been made. But there has been abundant discussion over whether the children need to be punished if found guilty.

In the past, only those 14 and older could be held responsible under criminal law. But in 2020, a new amendment lowered the age to 12 on a case-by-case basis, depending on whether “cruel” methods were used to injure or kill.

Many in the public have called for a severe punishment. But there has been little discussion of the core of the issue: what changed the children?

The suspects and victim had one thing in common – they are part of a large demographic known as the “left-behind children”. Their parents are migrant workers, part of the hordes who left for the big cities for work and who helped built the wonder of China’s rapid urbanisation.

But they couldn’t always take their children. Some were too busy, had no stable housing or faced restrictions in enrolling their children in city schools, so many left them at home in the care of elderly grandparents.

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According to Beijing Sanzhi Shelter for Children in Distress, an NGO for migrant workers’ children, in 2020, 108 million children in China were unable to live with both parents, a figure that had increased by over 30 million since 2010. Among them, nearly 67 million were left-behind children.

These children don’t always receive the care they need. Often, the elderly are barely able to keep them safe and well-fed, let alone educate them or care about their mental health. In 2012, five boys, the children of busy farmers and migrant workers, ran away from their village in Guizhou and were found dead in a rubbish bin in Bijie city. In 2014, a Guizhou village teacher was arrested after at least 12 schoolgirls reported rape, 11 of whom were reportedly left-behind children.

Left-behind children typically suffer parental neglect and this has psychological consequences. They may grow to resent their parents, become rebellious, seek suicide, drop out of school or become troublemakers.

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When the notorious Hunan gangster Liu Junyong was sentenced to death in 2006 at the age of 35 for his deadly crime spree, his background sparked a conversation about left-behind children. His father left to find work soon after he was born and his mother joined his father once Liu was in middle school, leaving him in the care of his grandmother. The boy who did so well in school started to neglect his homework and his grades began to slip; he eventually dropped out and began his descent into crime.

Social workers generally advocate that children live with their parents, one worker told me. They send people to check on left-behind children from time to time in the villages and also help those who move to the city adapt to urban life. But there is only so much grass-roots organisations can do, as the biggest obstacle is government policy.

When rural children move to a city, their hukou or household registration makes it very difficult for them to enrol in school there. A city hukou is usually attained by being born in the city, working there for years or through a talent programme.

Over the years, the government has tried to fix the issue, asking for more kindergartens to be built in cities and making it less difficult for migrant workers’ children to attend schools. A new points system takes into account how many years parents have worked in their adopted city, whether they have bought a house or own a small business, and allocates slots in school to their children based on these scores.

But the changes are too small and slow in the face of such a deep-rooted issue, the social worker told me. He called for more radical hukou reforms or for the system to scrapped. But this is unlikely. “In the end, it’s the children who are sacrificed,” he said.

Phoebe Zhang is a society reporter with the Post