Love you and leave you

Kathrin Hille:

Wang Tingting last saw her parents nearly two years ago, but now that they are reunited, no one knows what to say to one another. Finally, Su Taoying, Tingting's mother, clasps her 12-year-old daughter's hand and says, ruefully, "Next time I see you, you will be taller than me." As they smile, the family resemblance is striking. And yet for the past five years they have not really been a family.

Wang Tingting is one of tens of millions of ­children in rural China growing up without their parents - parents who have decamped to the cities in order to earn a better living. Some of these children are cared for by their grandparents, but others are handed over to foster centres. Three years ago, as she was about to enter junior high school, Tingting's parents moved her from her grandparents' home to a foster centre in Gufeng, their remote village in the eastern province of Anhui. Nobody here found that strange: fewer than half of the children in Gufeng live with their parents, a situation repeated across several provinces in the heavily populated southern half of China.

The Chinese government estimates that there are 58 million "left-behind children", which accounts for almost 20 per cent of all the children in China, and close to half of all children in the countryside. Their lives illustrate the price China is paying for president Hu Jintao's goal of building a "moderately well-off society".

Posted by Jim Zellmer at February 7, 2011 3:05 AM
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