China has over nine million left behind children

China has over nine million left- behind children, mostly the wards of migrant labour, who live either with grand parents or guardians in the rural areas and suffer physical and mental abuse.
The 9.02 million figure was arrived at after following a census carried out this year, Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA) said in statement today.
The census was jointly conducted by the MCA, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Public Security and began in March.
'Left-behind children' is the term used to refer to rural children under 16 whose parents are migrant workers or who have one migrant-worker parent and the other incapable of guardianship.

Over 90 per cent of the left-behind children live in China's central and western regions, which are less developed than China's eastern regions, thus, have more people leaving to seek work elsewhere, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Among all the left-behind children, 8.05 million, or 89.3 per cent, are in the care of their grandparents and 3.3 per cent are looked after by other relatives, while four per cent have no guardian at all.

"The flow of migrant workers driven by urbanisation has affected the family unit andmany parents lack a real awareness of their responsibilities," said Tong Lihua, director of a Beijing-based legal aid organisation for teenagers.

The statement included an announcement about a guardianship programme, proposing that when left-behind children are found to be living alone their parents must return to care for them or find alternate, reliable guardians for them.
It aims to ensure that all left-behind children are under proper care by the end of 2017.
However the numbers projected by the ministry fall far short of the numbers projected by social activists.
A study report this year said China has over 100 million "left-behindchildren," about one-third of the country's total underage population who are growing up without care and companionship of their parents as they migrated to cities.

Some 100 million "left-behindchildren" now exist in China, "posing a great challenge to social management," Song Yinghui, a professor at Beijing Normal University was quoted as saying by state-run Global Times in March this year.
According to National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) figures, China has 254 million migrant labour and their numbers were expected to cross 310 million by 2030.
The migrant labour were widely credited to be the powerbehindChina's massive economy growth in the last three decades as they served as cheap labourers for the country to emerge as world's manufacturing hub and second largest economy.