Ahead of the weeklong Lunar New Year celebration, one Chinese city is offering to help ship home a precious cargo: children.
The eastern city of Qingdao is setting up a service to escort the children of migrant workers home for free as part of a “children mail” service, according to official Xinhua news agency.
The service targets families that want to send their children back to their hometowns before the parents head back. Many schools have already closed for the long holiday break, but most workers won’t get off until Jan. 31, the first day of the Lunar New Year and the start of the nationwide holiday. The service will transport the children by bus under the care of drivers with the help of video surveillance, Xinhua cited Jiang Shiqun, Communist Party secretary of the Qingdao long-distance bus station, as saying. Bus staff would exchange special codes with relatives who come to pick up the children.
Many of the country’s more than 260 million migrant workers choose to leave their children behind in their hometowns, in the care of grandparents or other relatives, because China’s strict household registration system ties access to subsidized social services to a person’s legal residence. That system often prevents migrant children from attending decent urban schools or getting health care in the cities where their parents are working.
Some cities have started experimenting with granting migrant workers and their children hukou, the household-registration document that entitles them to live there and grants access to subsidized social services.
In November, China’s Communist Party announced that smaller cities will relax residency requirements to allow children to settle with their migrant parents, confirming a change already under way in some cities for years. Officials also have set up more boarding facilities in rural schools. The moves likely will have little impact. Officials haven’t budged on rules that keep migrant workers from bringing children to China’s largest cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, where the better jobs are. Officials there are worried about the health and education costs of taking in so many kids.
About 61 million Chinese children—one of every five in the world’s most populous nation—haven’t seen one or both parents for at least three months, according to the All-China Women’s Federation, a Communist Party advocacy group. The total has grown so big that the children are widely known as left-behind kids.
fSome of the working parents in Qingdao said they see the “children mail” as a useful service. Tan Hongwei, a seafood shop assistant who applied to send his 12-year-old son to their hometown of Jinan, about 350 kilometers away, told Xinhua the lead-up to the Spring Festival is usually a busy time for the workers.
“In the past, my son had to stay home and had nobody cooking for him or taking care of him,” Mr. Tan said.
Qingdao’s “children mail” service covers 14 long-distance bus routes in Shandong province. It isn’t the first city to offer the service. It’s previously been used in Wuhan, Hangzhou and a handful of other cities.
Every year, hundreds of millions of Chinese travel back to their hometowns to celebrate the traditional Lunar New Year, China’s most significant holiday. Government officials earlier estimated that this year people will take to the air, roads and railways 3.62 billion times over a 40-day period around the holiday, about 200 million more than last year, in what is known as the world’s largest human migration.
Some Web users were skeptical of the service, noting that it would be too risky to send their children with strangers.
“Qingdao station once sent three pieces of my luggage to a wrong address,” one user of China’s Sina Weibo microblogging platform wrote. “Be careful this time.”
Others were hopeful the country could expand on the program to help the migrant workers themselves make it home for the holidays.
“It will be even better if adults can be mailed too,” another user wrote. “Many migrant workers are too poor to go home.”
–Brittany Hite, with contributions from Liu Jing
