The well-being of youth in China is a critical issue for the future of China and the world. Despite the miraculous rise of the Chinese economy, most children from rural backgrounds are still raised in a very challenging environment, and their human capital is not sufficiently developed. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of this issue and will likely have a huge impact for policy consideration.
James Jianzhang Liang, Co-founder and Chairman of Ctrip
Child and Youth Well-being in China
The true measure of any society is how it treats its children, who are in turn that societys future. Making use of data from the longitudinal Chinese Family Panel Studies survey, the authors of this timely study provide a multi-faceted description and analysis of Chinas younger generations. They assess the economic, physical, and social-emotional well-being as well as the cognitive performance and educational attainment of Chinas children and youth. They pay special attention to the significance of family and community contexts, including the impact of parental absence on millions of left-behind children.
Throughout the volume, the authors delineate various forms of disparities, especially the structural inequalities maintained by the Chinese Party-state and the vulnerabilities of children and youth in fragile families and communities. They also analyze the social attitudes and values of Chinese youth. Having grown up in a period of sustained prosperity and greater individual choice, the younger Chinese cohorts are more independent in spirit, more open-minded socially, and significantly less deferential to authority than older cohorts.
There is growing recognition in China of the importance of investing in childrens future and of helping the less advantaged. Substantial improvements in child and youth well-being have been achieved in a time of growing economic prosperity. Strong political commitment is needed to sustain existing efforts and to overcome the many obstacles that remain. This book will be of considerable interest to researchers of Chinese society and development.
Lijun Chen, Senior Researcher, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, USA.
Qiang Ren, Associate Professor of Sociology, Co-PI of CFPS, Peking University, China.
Dali L. Yang, William C. Reavis Professor of Political Science and the College, the University of Chicago, USA.
Di Zhou, Ph.D. student, Department of Sociology, New York University, USA.
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Edited by Debapriya Bhattacharya
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Edited by Brendan Howe
Child and Youth Well-being in China
Lijun Chen, Dali L. Yang, Di Zhou, and Qiang Ren
Child and Youth Well-being in China
Lijun Chen, Dali L. Yang, Di Zhou, and Qiang Ren
First published 2019
by Routledge
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2019 Lijun Chen, Dali L. Yang, Di Zhou, and Qiang Ren
The right of Lijun Chen, Dali L. Yang, Di Zhou, and Qiang Ren to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-08613-8 (hbk)
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Contents
In researching and writing this book, we have incurred many debts. The analysis is based on survey data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), a project that was launched in 2010 by the Institute of Social Science Survey (ISSS) of Peking University. We are thus deeply grateful to the CFPS leadership, led by Yu Xie, Xiaobo Zhang, Ping Tu, and Qiang Ren, and the hundreds of participants who carried out the survey.
This book draws on data from the 2010, 2012, and 2014 waves of the CFPS. It builds on a previous report by three of the authors (Chen, Yang, and Ren) on the state of the children in China (Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, 2015). That report, drawing on the CFPS baseline survey of 2010, was also published in Chinese by the Social Sciences Academic Press in China. We remain indebted to all who helped make that report possible. While retaining key themes from the 2015 report, we have in this book updated and significantly expanded the coverage as well as added chapters on the impact of parental absence and on youth values and attitudes. We were fortunate to have Di Zhou join the project for the 20172018 academic year. She worked with Chen and Yang to draft newer sections of the text and played an indispensable role in helping to coordinate the entire project. We very much appreciate her contributions and are pleased to have her join us as a co-author.
We are especially grateful to Fred Wulczyn, senior research fellow at Chapin Hall, for his guidance and advice throughout the project. Professor James Heckman and the Center for the Economics of Human Development he directs have been a source of intellectual inspiration and nurturance. We have also received helpful comments and encouragement from Zhixin Du, Danhua Lin, Xi Song, and Ming Wen, among others.
Several University of Chicago students provided able research assistance at different stages of this project and deserve a special note of thanks. Yinxian Zhang and Yuanqi Wang worked with us on the 2015 report. Zhenying Tian, Yanhan Fang, Steven Ren, and Zhichen Sha helped us wrestle with the CFPS datasets and the vast literature on child development and attended to various details. All but Yinxian were interns of the Jeff Metcalf Internship Program of the College of the University of Chicago. Dali Yang wishes to thank the Metcalf Program administrators and the College for their support. He also acknowledges support from the Social Sciences Divisional Research Fund.
The seeds for this project were planted when a series of workshops and symposia were convened on social survey collaboration at the University of Chicago Center in Beijing, where Yang was faculty director. He is grateful to the Ford Foundation for its grant to support the initial symposium and to the Center team, then led by Beth Bader and joined by Ji Yuan and later Xueming Liang, for their superb support for that and subsequent workshops. Lijun Chen and Dali Yang were then awarded a grant from the Joint Research Fund (Award No. 2014003 State of the Child in China), established by Chapin Hall and the University of Chicago to support collaborative research between the two institutions. We also gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the University of Chicago Center in Beijing for a seminar in June 2018 in which we presented our findings to and learned from a group of child development researchers and practitioners.
