The ‘invisible wall’ amplifying China’s population doom loop

A two-tier system that has long made workers leave children behind in villages is cutting into birthrates with the left behind, now grown, rejecting the idea of having offspring.

Thousands of Chinese children grow up separated from their parents. Picture: Getty Images.

Even as China’s leaders have looked for ways to lift sagging birthrates, Beijing thought there was one group who would always want to have many children: rural couples.

They were wrong. Research suggests that rural migrant workers have severe reservations about starting a family. And a big reason appears to be China’s household-registration system, which since the 1950s has divided the population into rural or urban and makes it hard for rural workers to take their children with them.

Described as an invisible wall, the hukou system was set up to prevent cities from becoming overrun. It limits migrant workers’ ability to put down roots in China’s biggest cities by restricting access to local services such as healthcare and education, or the right to buy an apartment.

When China started its economic reforms in the 1980s, most Chinese lived in villages and rural towns. The new economic opportunities sent millions to work in factories or construction sites in cities. Partly because of the residency restrictions, children typically stayed behind in the care of grandparents or other family members.

Many so-called left-behind children have grown up to become migrant workers themselves. And many reject the tough prospect of having children only to live apart from them.

One 27-year-old woman who grew up with her grandparents while her parents hopped from city to city for jobs said she wouldn’t rush to get married or have children.

“I deeply understand the low self-esteem and timidity as a left-behind child,” said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her family name, Zhao. Her grandparents were illiterate and had to work the land in their village in Guizhou province. With little oversight and care, Zhao and her sister barely managed to finish vocational school.

“I don’t want the next generation to be like me,” Zhao said. Even though two-thirds of Chinese now live in cities, only 48 per cent have urban residency rights, suggesting that roughly a quarter of a billion people are shut out of many benefits in the cities where they work.

School girls sit in front of the entrance to their school classroom in the village of Huang Gang in Guizhou.

According to data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, in 2017 only about 22 per cent of migrant workers were part of pension plans in their city jobs or had medical insurance. The ministry hasn’t disclosed more recent data.

Some demographers argue that eliminating the household-registration system could be one of the few moves Beijing could take that might dramatically lift births, a priority as the population declines and ages.

“The primary force that has been driving down China’s fertility rate is the migrant workers who still don’t have equal access to resources in the large cities,” said Martin Whyte, a sociology professor emeritus at Harvard University who has long argued for improving conditions for China’s rural population.

Migrant workers in cities with harsher restrictions tend to put off having children by at least one year compared with those in cities with looser rules, according to researchers at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Residency restrictions also significantly lower the willingness to have a second child among migrant women compared with urban women, according to a 2021 research paper written by Min Zhou, a sociologist at Canada’s University of Victoria, and based on official surveys of migrants.

For many rural workers, life in the city means a bunk in a factory-run dorm or in an apartment shared with other workers, with little money to rent – much less buy – an apartment for their families.

Many migrants who can afford it do bring their families to cities and some manage to get their children into local public schools. Others send children to privately run schools for migrant-worker children. The quality of such schools varies; many are unregulated and overcrowded, China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based non-profit, said in a 2023 report.

Beijing authorities a few years ago embarked on what was in essence a mass eviction of rural workers by closing wholesale markets and other informal businesses where many of them worked. The campaign to knock down “illegal structures” came as the capital was trying to reduce its population by 15 per cent.

Shezhen was originally built for remote workers. Picture: Getty Images.

Shenzhen, a city essentially built by rural workers, long made it easier than other big cities for migrants to establish an urban foothold. But even as other cities ease residency restrictions, Shenzhen is now looking to tighten migrants’ access to education for their children or paths to get a residence permit through marriage.

Rural households have less than half the disposable income of their urban peers, about $3,000 on average compared with more than $7,000 in cities, 2023 official data shows.

“Only in China is the urban-rural divide entrenched by official policy and codified by law,” Stanford University researchers Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell wrote in their 2020 book “Invisible China.” China still has more left-behind children than any country in the world, 67 million in 2020, according to official data. The challenges and tragedies of such children are well documented.

In March, the killing of a 13-year-old boy by classmates in a village in north China drew renewed attention to the problem. Both the victim and his killers had parents who worked elsewhere.

The killing upset Wang Yahui, a waitress in her mid-30s. Wang and her husband are both working in Beijing, leaving their two sons with her parents in Inner Mongolia. They try to go back to see them twice a year. Still, Wang found it impossible to properly oversee their education. Her older son is now a teenager. “He is reluctant to talk with me,” Wang said.

The Beijing non-profit On the Way to School, which surveyed 3,501 left-behind children in 2020, found that more than one-tenth of children said they hadn’t seen their parents at all over the previous year. About a quarter of the children said they received a parental call only once a quarter, the survey found.

In November, China executed a man who had raped a left-behind girl for years, starting when she was 11. The girl, who was living alone, died by suicide when she was 16. “For lack of guardians’ protection, left-behind children have become easy targets,” the high court said in announcing the execution.

Zhou Shen, 32, a well-known Chinese singer, recently described the trauma of growing up without parents in an interview with the official Xinhua News Agency. “My dream was going to school with shoes and clothes and without an empty stomach,” Zhou said.

One consideration that stopped the Communist Party leadership from lifting all birth restrictions, even after China’s demographic challenges became clear, was leaders’ suspicion that, without limits, rural families would have too many children and never make it out of poverty.

Singer Zhou Shen has talked about his early life without parents. Picture: Getty Images.

But the old norms about rural families’ needing more hands for farming are changing around the world, said Jack Goldstone, a sociologist at George Mason University.

In China, the number of newborns this year is expected to show a continued decline. The total of marriage registrations was 4.7 million over the first three quarters of the year, representing a 17 per cent decline from a year earlier, the latest official data showed.

Chinese health authorities in October launched a nationwide survey, with special focus on rural communities and smaller towns, to better understand reasons people don’t want to have children. The same month, the State Council, China’s cabinet, announced a series of measures to lift birthrates, including asking cities to expand birth insurance to migrant workers.

Qin Zhou, one of tens of thousands of yellow-uniformed food-delivery drivers in Beijing, said he and his wife plan to save more and move back to their home province of Shanxi before they have children. “Probably one is enough,” said Qin, who is in his early 30s.

Chen Pan, a delivery man in his 20s from Hunan province, said outside a Beijing shopping mall that he has no plan to get married before he turns 30. He wants to focus on making more money in Beijing first.

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