Current Sociology

Please welcome our Sociologist of the Month for April 2023, Xiaorong Gu (University of Suffolk, UK). Her article for Current Sociology Save the children!’: Governing left-behind children through family in China’s Great Migration was shortlisted for the first edition (2023) of the Annual SAGE Current Sociology Best Paper Prize, and is Open Access.

Xiaorong Gu

Could you please tell us about yourself? How did you come to your field of study?

X. Gu: I’m a literature scholar turned sociologist, working on a range of topics related to children and youths in contemporary China and Asia at large, including their migration and mobilities, education, socio-emotions, relations, transition to adulthood and their social positioning vis-à-vis family, educational institutions, and the nation-state. I have recently relocated to the UK after studying/working in Singapore for a decade, assuming the position of Lecturer in Childhood Studies at the University of Suffolk, which has a quite comprehensive teaching and research program on childhood studies.

In a sense, my academic trajectory is a quite unusual one. After obtaining a BA and an MA degree in English Literature (broadly covering Anglo-American literary traditions), I taught American Literature and translation studies for four years (2008-2012) at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong Province. During this period of time, China observers would remember the intense public reactions to a series of tragedies among the rural migrant population in Shenzhen, i.e. how, one after another, young migrant workers in Foxconn – a gigantic outsourcing manufacturer of electronic products for major international brands such as Apple – committed suicide. This shocked me to the core. For one thing, I grew up in rural China, and many of my childhood friends and cousins were working as migrant workers. There was this moral reckoning inside that prompted me to do something ‘for my people’. For another, when that happened, I was teaching a group of elite students in this famous institution about American transcendentalism, a literary school celebrating rugged individualism, self-reliance and spiritual immersion with the nature, which did not make sense to me at all. I then quit and joined the PhD program in the sociology department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2012, which has trained me from scratch to be a sociologist. In a nutshell, I am an accidental and yet simultaneously destined sociologist.

What prompted you to research the area of your article, “‘Save the children!’: Governing left-behind children through family in China’s Great Migration”?

X. Gu: The writing of ‘Save the children’ was really built on years of research since my PhD project, which focused on the educational experiences and outcomes of children in rural migrant families. In 2018-19, I had completed my PhD and was working as a postdoctoral fellow in Asia Research Institute (ARI, at National University of Singapore). ARI has a very good tradition of putting junior scholars in leadership positions of small-scale international projects, where we were given chances to organize conferences on thematically exploratory topics and lead them to journal publications. My mentor Professor Wei-jun Jean Yeung suggested a topic for my project – the value of children in Asia – which I took on and developed into a very successful conference attended by scholars affiliated in various institutions in Asia and beyond.

Leading this project pushed me to think hard about how children are positioned and valuated by multiple stakeholders in different societies. In the case of children from China’s rural migrant families, I had read too many research articles about how parental migration as a family structure issue might impact children’s wellbeing, many of which are empirically solid and valuable to the extent that they offer good insights into the disadvantages of these families in childrearing. I was not satisfied with the dominant framing however, which renders the role of the state merely as the research background. Well, a quite well-known fact about the political economy of post-reform China is that how the migrant population is marginally incorporated in urban society is part and parcel of state social engineering.

I then began to seriously gather and analyze policy and media discourse data, which led to the ‘Save the children’ paper in Current Sociology, part of a special monograph I guest-edited on a critical reflection on the valuation of children in the Global South. Writing this piece was also satisfying, since my literary criticism skills were put into good use to unpack and unveil the discursive and governance model towards the rural migrant population in contemporary China.

What do you see as the key findings of your article?

X. Gu: I think this article has two key findings. First, I propose this concept of ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’ to characterize the governance model of the Chinese state in the reform era towards the rural migrant population, contributing to a well-established literature among China scholars on the mixed modes of governance in the country. I argue that there are two interlocking elements in how the Chinese state frames the ‘left-behind children problem’ and addresses the ‘problem’ per se. On the one hand, the political economy of reform allows urban local governments to strategically incorporate rural migrants as only cheap laborers deprived of full social rights (in particular their children’s access to public education), similar to the ‘guest worker’ regime in international migration, while it necessitates the trans-local and multi-local family arrangements in these families. Children are left behind in this sense not only by their parents, but by the national economic model. On the other hand, dominant media and policy discourses, often self-indulged as sympathetic ‘saviors’ of the left-behind children, tend to attribute these children’s ‘miserable’ plight to their ‘pathological’ family life, hence staging many social and political initiatives to ‘educate’ migrant families, especially mothers, about ‘scientific’ and ‘good’ family behaviors. To put it simply, the neoliberal discourse on family morality has translated a social problem, which is itself the product of state policies, into a personal moral issue for migrant parents to live up to their parental responsibilities.

While I am not the first one to talk about the mixedness of social governance in this context, I would argue this piece is probably pioneering in bringing the discourses of family into the analysis of social governance in China, including migration and the traumatization of childhood, ‘irresponsible’ migrant mothers, and ‘inadequate’ grandparenting. This I think constitutes the second key finding of the article. This is based on my content and discourse analyses of journalistic reports, opinion pieces and editorials in a mainstream newspaper China Youth Daily between 2005-2019. The narratives are in a striking resemblance to the culture of poverty thesis in the US context decades ago. Many of them are still influential in public discourses and some may find resonance in other migrant-sending contexts in Asia.

What are the wider social implications of your research in the current social climate? How do you think things will change in the future?

X. Gu: In the sense that this article is based on fairly recent data (from the early 2000s till now), I still think it is relevant to discussions of social governance in China today. For the rural migrant population, we see a growing trend of children relocating to urban areas, or a dwindling population of the ‘left-behinds’, due to policy relaxation in small- and medium-sized cities that opens more space for migrants’ children to receive public education. However, it is likely that with more rural children moving in, these small- and medium-sized cities would replicate the selective incorporation strategy used by first-tier cities to exclude these formerly left-behind children, for example, using a points system to select the ‘deserving’ children in school access, another form of neoliberalizing children’s education entitlement. This is the case in a county in Hunan which I have followed up closely since 2014. In other words, a systematic overhaul of the governance model to fully equalize educational opportunities remains to be seen. More recently, with the pressure of an economic downturn and rising unemployment of college graduates, we see a similar discursive strategy by the official media to stigmatize the educated unemployed, ridiculing them as the self-aggrandizing Confucian scholar Kong Yiji in a classic short novel by Lu Xun, which is consistent with this model of neoliberal-authoritarianism where social problems are conspicuously reframed as a personal and moral problem.

Do you have any links to images, documents or other pieces of research which build on or add to the article? Or a suggested reading list?

X. Gu: Since it is a core area of my research, I have been writing quite extensively on topics related to the experiences, aspirations and everyday lives of children in rural migrant families. As a multi-methods and mixed-methods scholar, I find it fulfilling to address the same topics from different angles and with different types of data. It allows me to paint a more complex, richer and more nuanced picture of the social group that I deeply care about. Here is a list of related articles that may add to this ‘Save the children’ article. Some have been published, and others hopefully will be able to meet the readers soon.

• Gu, X.R. & Yeung, W.J. (2020). “Hopes and Hurdles: Rural Migrant Children’s Education in Urban China”. Chinese Sociological Review 52(2):199237. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/21620555.2019.1680970.
• Gu, X.R. (2022) “Sacrifice and Indebtedness: The Intergenerational Contract in Chinese Rural Migrant Families”. Journal of Family Issues, 43(2), 509533. DOI:10.1177/0192513X21993890.
• Gu, X.R. (forthcoming) “Can Subaltern Children Speak?: What China’s Children of Migrants Say about Mobility, Inequality and Agency”. In Niederberger, D. B., Gu, X.R., Schwittek, J. & Kim, E. (Eds.). The Emerald Handbook of Childhood and Youth in Asian Societies. Emerald.
• Gu, X.R. (under review) “Of flexibility, futurality and fracture: A Temporal Perspective into Migrant Parenting in China.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.