Our left-behind children - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Millions of migrant workers left behind their children in their home villages, developing mostly unheard problems. Author Zhang Lijia, who earlier published Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China, is now working on a book on this hidden drama, including epidemic suicide, and she started publishing their stories in the South China Morning Post.

Zhang Lijia:

Yuzhong is part of China’s lost generation known as the left-behind children. Last year, according to government statistics, there were 9.02 million minors who matched the profile of Yuzhong: rural children both of whose parents were working away from home or where one parent was working and the other did not have guardianship of them. A much wider definition, which counts all children with at least one parent as working away from home, would put the figure at 61 million. 

Wang Fuman, last week

Their plight was once again thrust into the national spotlight last week when a photo of Wang Fuman, 8, with frost covering his hair and eyebrows, went viral. Fuman had walked 4.5km (2.8 miles) in freezing temperatures – minus nine degrees Celsius (15 degrees Fahrenheit) – to school, and his story raised more than US$300,000 for the poor in China. 

But more often, stories about the left-behind children, who number close to Britain’s total population, don’t have such a happy ending. They have become a massive social problem that has produced a raft of tragedies that have shocked the entire nation. 

In June last year, four left-behind children from the same family, ranging from ages five to 13, committed suicide together by swallowing pesticide in Bijie, in impoverished Guizhou province.   

In November 2012, five boys died from carbon monoxide poisoning after starting a charcoal fire trying to stay warm inside a dumpster. 

The problem of left-behind children is most severe in Anhui, Henan and Sichuan provinces, the key sources of migrant workers, where 44 per cent of rural children live without their mother or father. This is far higher than the national average of 35.6 per cent, the survey found. 

The loss of solid family structure at a young age can lead to severe mental health issues, according to a report by the civil society group Shang Xue Lu Shang and Beijing Normal University. 

“Companionship is an important element that contributes to a healthy psychological condition in a child, to which a family’s income or social class is not necessarily relevant,” the report said.

More in the South China Morning Post.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

Are you looking for more stories by Zhang Lijia? Do check out this list.

A visibly angry Zhang Lijia commented on the forceful eviction of migrant workers in Beijing at CNN in December 2017.
 

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NPR: The underbelly of contemporary China, review Lotus by Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

More reviews are coming in of author Zhang Lijia´s Lotus: A Novel, about prostitution in China, this time from the NPR. The reviewer is rightfully impressed. "We can count ourselves lucky to get this glimpse into the fascinating world of Lotus."

NPR:

The author has a light touch, even when delineating the underbelly of contemporary Chinese culture. She conducted research in the red light districts of Shenzhen, Dongguan, Beihai, Tianjin and Beijing, so there is a documentary verity to the telling, giving starch to fiction that might otherwise be flabby. Zhang also brings a personal stake to the book, dedicating it to her grandmother, who was sold to a brothel as a euphemistically-termed "flower girl," or courtesan. 

Some first novels, especially those birthed in creative writing classes (Zhang, a former rocket factory worker in China, studied at the University of Iowa), go heavy on self-consciously poetic language. The author tries too hard and the reader suffers. The images Zhang gives us, in contrast, are uncomplicated, concise and touching. Young Lotus's "pencil was homemade, simply the broken end of a pencil's lead discarded by her classmates, stabbed into a piece of soft wood." Concerning Bing's emotions, Zhang writes, "He had been like an ant on a hot pan ever since the girls' visit." 

Book groups be advised: Readers will learn quite specific tricks of the trade. Lotus is undeniably earthy but thankfully spare, letting its characters, and its proverbs, do the talking. When Bing wants to get serious with Lotus, we hear about the development a proverbial way: "What luck, this offer. A pancake fallen from the sky, as her grandma would say." We can count ourselves lucky to get this glimpse into the fascinating world of Lotus.

More at NPR. 

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

She will be at a book presentation in New York at February 1, Barnes & Noble on 82nd Street and Broadway, at 7 PM.

Are you looking for more experts on cultural change in China? Do check out this list.

A review of the Cultural Revolution - Ian Johnson

Ian Johnson

Many have been remembering in 2016 the anniversary of both start and finish of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and many scholars used the moment to publish their views on this ground-shattering event in the country´s recent history. Journalist Ian Johnson, author of the upcoming book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao reviews some of the milestones in the troublesome academic research for ChinaFile.

Ian Johnson:

Obtaining this sort of material can be a laborious process, as I found when I went with a Chinese scholar of the Cultural Revolution to explore the Panjiayuan antiques market on Beijing’s east side. Most of this vast market is given over to selling reproductions of Ming vases and Chairman Mao statues, but one row of 50 or so stalls has something more valuable: old books, magazines, newspapers, and handwritten material of all kinds—diaries, notebooks, and sometimes even just loose sheets of hastily scribbled notes. 

We spent a Saturday morning rummaging through notebooks filled with math and physics equations, as well as a draft of an unfinished novel from the 1950s. Four hours later, the researcher had spent $500 of his own money on hundreds of sheets of paper, diaries, and jottings from government officials. He would spend the week digesting them and then come back the next Saturday for more sinological scavenging. 

All this paper was the detritus disgorged by the dying and dead men and women who won China’s civil war, founded the People’s Republic, grew up as the flowers of the nation, were persecuted, and then regained power; their scribblings are now being thrown out by their children or grandchildren. Sold mostly as scrap paper, some of them have been identified by crafty garbagemen as valuable and offered to the Panjiayuan merchants. In the past, so many diaries and notebooks were thrown out that Western libraries built entire collections based on them. Now, as the older generations fade, the flood is slower but it still casts new light. 

Best of all, local historians continue to defy the government by plowing through this material. Many cannot get their work past the censors, so they self-publish online. Their work is sometimes censored, but an amazing amount still gets through. In May, on the first day of this year’s anniversaries for the Cultural Revolution, I opened my WeChat social media account and found half a dozen unofficial articles commemorating the dead and condemning the culpable. I also found a new edition of the biweekly underground journal Remembrance, with over 80 pages of articles on Mao, his security chief, the students, and the youth. With much still to be learned, the period of the Cultural Revolution continues to fascinate and reveal itself as a touchstone for understanding China’s past and its present.

Much more in ChinaFile.

Ian Johnson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

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