An Investigation into the Phenomenon of Rural Children

While the image of ragged children selling flowers on city streets may seem to belong to a bygone era, this report on China's urban flower-selling children was completed in the 21st century. Despite rapid economic advancement in China, the phenomenon of child labour continues to worsen, and as investigation into the plight of urban flower-selling children provides insight into the problem of child labour as a whole, the purpose of this report is to examine the causes behind the growth of this trade. This study examines not merely obvious factors like poverty, but also less obvious (and in some cases, deeper) trends, such as an increasingly flawed educational system, the breakdown of traditional family structure, and administrative inaction on the part of government authorities. By taking into account all of these factors we get a clearer analysis of the world of the urban "flower child", in many ways a microcosm of the overall world of migrant child labour in China. We have, with the consent of the project sponsors and the authors, revised and edited the original text of this study (which consisted of over 35,000 Chinese characters) during the translation process. This is the report's first publication, and names of children cited have been changed to protect their anonymity.

In September 1999, cities throughout China were being spruced up to facilitate the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. It was during this time that one particular group of child flower sellers entered our field of vision, as they (along with beggars, street hawkers, and others thought to present the wrong image of the PRC on her 50th birthday) were being targeted by police for removal ahead of anniversary celebrations. A number of university volunteers and social service workers conducted a survey on this group of children, discovering that their numbers were larger than had initially been suspected, and that the lives of these children living on the urban fringe were perilous and filled with exploitation. In light of the fact that the vast majority of these Beijing-based "flower children" came from You County (pronounced "Yo") in the Zhuzhou Region of Hunan Province, we decided that performing an on-site investigation of this area would offer a better understanding of the root causes of the phenomenon and possibly even presenting potential solutions. In the course of our investigation, we interviewed both the families of the child flower sellers and various relevant local government authorities. The period of our investigation was January 18-29, 2000, and the survey area included more than ten townships in You County, as well as five natural villages. In total, we visited the homes of 32 migrant child flower sellers, also interviewing ten children employed in local toy factories, restaurants, and jewelry processing factories. In addition, we also visited the You County Civil Affairs, Public Security, Labor, and Education Bureaus, as well as the county's Women's Federation, Township Education Offices, and several schools.

You County belongs to the Zhuzhou Region of Hunan Province and is primarily an agricultural county. While self-supporting and self-sufficient in rice, vegetables, and other farm and sideline products, the County lacks a serious industrial base, though some of its townships along railway lines have smaller pockets of industry and some mining enterprises. This level of development and self-sufficiency places You county in the first group of comfortably well-off counties in Hunan. However, You County has quite a large gap between rich and poor in all localities, and far fewer jobs than available workers. Thus young and middle-aged workers from its mostly agricultural townships generally leave home to work as migrants in other places. You County's rural children have a serious school dropout problem, and many children leave home to sell flowers or do other types of work. According to locals, the children we'd observed selling flowers in Beijing represented merely the tip of the iceberg, and that many more You county children were in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Wuhan, as well as coastal cities in Zhejiang and Fujian provinces.

Our investigation showed that the child flower sellers are the weakest group among migrant children. Typical of child labourers, flower sellers are both unaware of the existence of laws protecting them and unable to seek help from organizations that might protect them. At the bottom rung of the labour market, they must endure economic exploitation, physical mistreatment and other cruelties at the hands of their employers, who place little if any priority on the rights and personal safety of the children in their employ. Working long hours, these children usually ply their trade at night, usually from around sundown until the hours before dawn. In northern cities, the child flower sellers often wear thin clothing and are forced to endure the cold winter weather. These children have very little adaptive capacity, lacking the ability to cope with dangerous circumstances; disappearances and traffic accidents are common among child flower sellers in large cities. Abused by customers, persecution from police, and even sexual assault are common. Far from being able to turn to authorities for help, these children must avoid at all cost city authorities, which can subject them to expulsion or detention. Their already meager earnings are often docked for petty infractions by their employers, and in some cases children can work the streets for two years and still have nothing to show for their troubles.

So why are so many You County parents willing to place their children in the hands of recruiters for urban flower vending companies despite the widespread knowledge that these "flower children" work under harsh, even dangerous working conditions? According to the statements made by nearly every parent we spoke to, poverty is the main driving force leading them to allow their children to work as migrants. But is poverty the only culprit? The exploration of this matter was the main objective of our survey.

Changing Family Structures and Social Concepts

While the parents of the child flower sellers attributed poverty as the primary reason behind sending their children off to work, it's important to understand that the rural areas in You County are not, when compared to many other rural areas throughout China, especially poverty-stricken; in fact, this county is comparatively well-off. While many rural You County families are relatively poor, only a small percentage of these families choose to subject their children to the flower selling industry. In the course of our survey, we noticed that a high percentage of the families of child flower sellers were single parent families.

The large-scale mobility of China's rural workforce in recent years has impacted the traditional family structure. In You County, we often saw families in which one or both parents had left home to work as migrants in other places. In one village we visited, we saw a striking dearth of young adults; indeed, the population of the village seemed to be made up almost entirely of elderly people and young children. Under these conditions, children are faced with de facto "single parent" or even "no parent" families, and their elderly grandparents must assume, in addition to child rearing, day to day responsibilities such as farming and housekeeping. In addition to the loss of parental care and supervision, these children are forced to assume many of the burdens of adulthood far sooner than they otherwise might.

Loss of one or both parents was a common factor observed in the familial structure of children working in the flower selling industry; our survey discovered that approximately 30 percent of these children either had divorced parents or had lived through the death or imprisonment of at least one parent. Even in families outside of this group, we found a high ratio of mothers who had left home to work as migrants. In some cases, we found families in which the mothers had left to work years ago, neither returning nor informing the families of their whereabouts. Some villages we visited had a prevalence of mothers who had left to work in the sex industry. In one such village we were told candidly by an official that most of the families that seemed outwardly prosperous were single-family households in which the women had left home to work as prostitutes, leaving the men stay at home. While such stay-at-home husbands are nominally present to tend to the children and farming, they tended to spend much of their time gambling and engaging in other activities not conducive to a healthy environment for children. Such conditions seriously undermine a family's emotional and moral underpinnings, creating a profound and potentially lifelong negative impact on the child.

As once-closed rural areas of China began to adapt to a market economy, many inhabitants of these areas migrated, found work in other areas, and returned home substantially wealthier than they'd left. The effect of this was to re-awaken the long suppressed concept of obtaining "face" through material wealth. Families who likely would have been content with a more simple existence in previous decades found themselves increasingly discontented with their lot in life. For many such impoverished families, the idea that their children could become a financial asset (as opposed to a burden) by being sent away to work as flower sellers superceded normal parental protective instincts. A similar change can be observed in the attitudes of rural people towards families with young girls (and even married women) who leave home to engage in the sex industry. In many parts of modern China, it seems, being poor brings more derision than being involved in prostitution. For a rural Chinese family, material considerations have overwhelming precedence over other considerations. Home ownership, for example, is a crucial status symbol for rural families, with a multi-storied house affording greater status. Many families of children working in the flower trade interviewed in this survey were heavily in debt, with some families owing as much as 40,000 Yuan (approximately USD $5000) due to homebuilding costs. We find this to be especially significant, as in most cases the debt incurred to build a new home would have easily covered the child's school costs.

Education Funding and Education System Problems

According to our survey, shortcomings within the educational system are one basic factor in the high dropout rate among children. An official report done by the You County educational community cites a local shortage of education funding, and roughly 50% of this shortfall needs to be raised by the schools themselves. These burdens are usually shifted onto the students in the form of higher tuition and other fees. Average annual school fees for students in You county are 700-800 Yuan for elementary school students and over 1000 Yuan for middle school students. In addition, farmers face a special burden of having to pay an annual "education surcharge" of 10-20 Yuan based on the number of people in their families, which, given their already tenuous economic state can prove especially burdensome. Thus, as the cost of education in rural China rises, the number of children forced to drop out due to financial circumstances also rises. One official working in a township educational office stated that local governments attach little importance to education, and that money collected as "education surcharges" are often spent by the township government in areas completely unrelated to education. Another education official painted a similarly grim picture, telling our surveyors that out of the approximately 700,000 Yuan collected by the township yearly in educational surcharges, only 25,000 Yuan is allocated to education. This funding shortfall is acutely felt by teachers, who often find their wages in arrears; furthermore, tuition payments for students are often deducted in advance from teacher's salaries, and deducted from their salaries in the case of defaulting students. This situation leaves many teachers in a state of poverty not unlike their poorest students, severely dampening their morale and overall enthusiasm for teaching.

Furthermore, some local natural villages have incomplete primary schools offering classes only until the fourth grade. For students in these villages, promotion into grades past the fourth means daily journeys into larger towns (often up to 15 KM away) just to complete their primary school education. One local school principal spoke of plans to merge certain village-level primary schools, a move quite likely to force some children to travel even further to attend school (thus encouraging even more students to drop out). It's worth noting that nearly all statistics issued by local education authorities cite primary school completion rates of over 95 percent, and that every education official interviewed for this study stated that the primary school dropout rate was very low; further, all education officials denied any knowledge of their district's special place in the ecology of the child flower seller industry. So either the enrollment levels are being fudged, or the numbers of children from You county leaving home to work as flower sellers is exaggerated. The former seems more likely, as one education official told us that enrollment and promotion data is filled in by the officials themselves, and that student dropouts are often minimized through bookkeeping, such as marking the students as having transferred to other schools.

As we examine the educational system in You county, the picture becomes clearer of why this county might be a breeding ground for child labourers; with a large population of children marginalized and unable to achieve more than a rudimentary education, often presenting a financial burden to their families, leaving home to work often presents a logical choice for the families of such children. Another factor to consider, one spoke of by figures in the education community interviewed, is the examination-oriented education practiced throughout China's nine-year compulsory education system. This system places great emphasis on assuring that as large as possible a percentage of any given class is promoted at the end of any cycle, rewarding schools with high promotion rate and punishing those with lower rates. Students with higher grades are thus focused on, while students with poorer grades are often persuaded to leave school so as not to drag down the overall rate of promoted students at years-end. In one case, we interviewed a flower-selling girl who told us that she'd been asked by her school to postpone her education for two years on the grounds of "mental retardation." The principal of the girl's school confirmed the request, telling us that the girl's low grades classified her as being "mentally retarded." Many schools also deal with poorly performing students by encouraging them to drop out while at the same time issuing letters authorizing their transfers to other schools. This is most often done prior to inspections by higher authorities, allowing these schools to maintain a veneer of having high performance and low dropout levels. Since many schools commit and cooperate in this kind of fraudulent bookkeeping, individual cases are nearly impossible to investigate.

The examination-oriented education system leaves those students who perform poorly on standardized tests with little or no hope of advanced study, encouraging parents and students alike that the best course of action for the child is to join the labour market. Of course, for such child dropouts (as well as children who have returned from a tour of duty selling flowers in far off cities) other types of work are readily available. Our investigation revealed that many children from You county had also gone to work in certain local jewelry processing factories also active in recruiting primarily child labour for their work force. Furthermore, work for children is readily available in toy factories, as well as in other light industries such as sewing, tailoring, and the weaving of straw hats. Some children even reported being hired to work as nannies for smaller children in large cities. The Responsibilities of the Government Departments Concerned

During the course of our survey in You County we visited the Civil Affairs, Labour and Public Security Bureaus. A director in the Civil Affairs Bureau pointed out that the child dropout problem fell under the jurisdiction of the education authorities while that of child labor falls under that of the Labour Bureau. The Civil Affairs Bureau, meanwhile, is tasked only with bringing child flower sellers back home in the event of their detention by authorities in the cities to which they've migrated, and to notify the village officials of their return. When asked whether the local government had considered a fundamental solution to the problem, the bureau director admitted that this social phenomenon was nearly impossible to eliminate, and that the best hope was that it could be reduced. The director at Civil Affairs was quite clear that the overriding concern for his department is to "consider at all times the overall situation, and to remain focused on economic development and the building of the party organization."

The Labour Bureau official we spoke to admitted that many of China's urban child flower sellers were being recruited locally, yet stated that it was impossible for local authorities to punish those employing child flower sellers as the employment happens elsewhere. (As the children are not selling flowers in You County, neither the activities of the employers of the children themselves fall under local labour jurisdiction.) According to this official, in cases in which migration of the child flower sellers is involved, the local labour authorities have authority to ask that public security authorities in the cities to which the children have migrated to enforce anti-child labor laws, but they themselves cannot take the initiative to search for the children themselves.

The Public Security Bureau official we spoke to expressed similar powerlessness in dealing with the problem, stating that police law enforcement could be conducted only with the authorization of the labor and education authorities. While the Labor Bureau said that the employment of local (rural) children in urban municipalities does not constitute an employer-employee relationship in their locality, the education authorities have certainly not authorized public security authorities to hold the parents of such child flower sellers responsible for allowing their children to go to the cities to find work. Thus, public security authorities likewise can take no action. Furthermore, according to this official, action against flower seller employers on grounds of "abducting and trafficking in human beings," specifically illegal under Chinese labour law, cannot be taken, precisely because both children and parents have consented to the child's migration. It is difficult in these cases, in which so many factors are involved, to determine whether the children or their families can be said to have been coerced into migrating, a determination necessary to bring charges of abduction and trafficking." Further, as is commonly seen in other irregular occupations, flower seller employers use a variety of means to obtain "legitimate and lawful management rights" of the children in their charge.

Conclusion

Despite repeated prohibitions, the phenomenon of urban flower sellers has been growing steadily since the early 1990s; despite laws designed to prevent child labour, employers of child flower sellers grow more brazen in their attempts to open up new markets in which to take groups of school-age children to turn them into child labor. In the final analysis, what are the factors that continue to promote the migration of children into urban areas to become flower sellers? While the most simplistic argument is that this phenomenon can be attributed to poverty, our survey reveals that poverty is neither the sole nor most important factor driving the rise in child flower sellers or even child labor as a whole. Diverse factors, such as the changing attitudes towards parental responsibility, a deteriorating social atmosphere, a deeply flawed education system and decreasing educational funding, government indifference to social justice and administrative inaction by the government authorities all play a role in the spread of both the phenomenon of child flower sellers and of child labor in China as a whole.