China's Migrant Workers Want Their Children

Yang Wei, 26, and his wife share a small apartment in the gritty manufacturing hub of Dongguan, in the Pearl River Delta. Every morning they bicycle a few kilometers to their jobs at two electronics components plants. To see their 6-year-old daughter they take a 17-hour train ride, followed by six more hours on three buses. She lives in mountainous Fenghuang County, Hunan, more than 600 kilometers (373 miles) to the northwest, with Yang’s 53-year-old mother. He and his wife see their daughter once every 12 months for 10 days during the Chinese New Year. “Every time we are together, our first feeling is great happiness that we can once again play with our daughter,” says Yang. “But then as the days pass and we know we will have to leave, we feel sadness and a great guilt. We have given her so little time as she grows up, and we know she again will be without parents.”

For China’s 262 million migrant workers who toil long hours there is another, less recognized hardship: Parents rarely are able to take children to live in the coastal zones where they find work. According to a survey released on Jan. 9 by the Beijing-based Centre for Child-Rights and Corporate Social Responsibility (CCR CSR), a business consultancy, four-fifths of China’s migrant worker parents, about 157 million mothers and fathers, are separated from their children.