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This article draws on data from research that includes 400 children who lived separately from their migrant parents in 10 rural communities in China, to explore the deep impacts of rural parents' migration on the care-giving and nurturing of children left behind. It shows that parent migration has brought about multiple impacts, mostly negative, on the lives of children, such as increased workloads, little study tutoring and supervision, and above all the unmet needs of parental affection. Children's basic daily care and personal safety could become problematic since surrogate caregivers, mostly elderly, are usually exhausted with livelihood maintenance. With illumination on the family dysfunction in children's development due to migration-induced family separation, this article highlights the social cost to rural families of parental migration. Urbanization in developing countries is obtained at the expense of rural migrants and their families, especially children left behind. Further attention is required to improve left-behind children's well being within split family structures and interregional migration.

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Drawing on the data from the research that samples 400 elderly who lived separately from their migrant children in 10 rural communities in China, this paper examines how the outmigration of rural youth shapes the situation of their older kin and analyses the consequences of the rural–urban migration for the old‐age support system. The research finds that a large scale of rural labour force has been drained off from rural societies and placed in a ‘semi‐proletarianized’ situation during the recent three decades of rapid social transformations. The rules and resources of traditional care system have been changed and family is no longer a ‘network of safety’ or reliable source of obtaining support for the elderly. Although some elastics and adaptabilities can be found in rural families, the family cannot soften and deal with all the risks popped up in the transformation independently. It can be said that the migration of the rural workforce to urban centres has degraded the welfare of the left‐behind elderly. Institutional interventions should no longer mystify and romanticise the role of the family, rather, it should look beyond the family level, caring more about ‘human beings’ instead of economy and efficiency. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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China has been undergoing a rapid industrialisation and urbanisation process with an ongoing transfer of people and economic resources from rural to urban areas. Labour migration from rural to urban areas has been massive and become a "rite of passage" for rural young people. There is a widespread view that modernisation and the subsequent transformation of peasants, agriculture, and the countryside have undermined agriculture and hollowed out rural communities. However, due to the peculiarity of the hukou system and the circularity of rural urban migration, the large rural population can all be institutionally regarded as de jure rural stayers. The de facto rural stayers consist of the left-behind ones and the non-left-behind ones. Yet these categories are quite fluid links with migration as people make different decisions at different stage in their life cycle.Motivations for migrating and staying in the countryside are highly complex. Those who migrate often do so because of economic pushes resulting from the commodification of subsistence. Many women who stay behind do so because of structural forces, such as the traditional culture of gender division and economic coercion. The non-left-behind people who are not stuck in the countryside are often able to actively pursue alternative rural livelihoods. These rural stayers develop diversified livelihood strategies that involve multiple job holding and make significant contributions to their household livelihoods and to driving rural development. The paper concludes that rural villages are not, as is often supposed, hollowed out, and many rural stayers do so voluntarily.

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