Abstract/Summary

During the past forty years since China's reform and opening up, the country's economy has grown rapidly, resulting in an increasingly improvement to people’s living standard. However, because of the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation process, the phenomenon of mass rural labour migration has ensued. A large number of young and middle-aged rural workers choose to migrate to urban areas for living. However, due to China’s local household registration system (Hukou system) and educational equalities, children of these migrant workers have dif iculty in accessing free, urban public schools with high quality education. As a result, millions of children in China are being left behind in their hometowns. This group of children left behind in their hometowns is also known as ‘left-behind children’. This research aims at investigating the current level of autonomy of a group of rural Chinese ‘left-behind children’, as well as discuss the gender dif erences in the experiences of autonomy. Moreover, it also explores the influence of experience at family and school on their autonomy. This researcher adopts an ethnographic technique as the basic research method to support this study to uncover the main factors that influence participants’ autonomy, and to discuss why these teenagers with the same experiences and social characteristics have dif erent levels of autonomy. Fieldwork method was conducted to observe and interview 18 ‘left-behind children’ who have lived and studied in a village in Si Chuan Province, China. The findings show that their level of autonomy is related to their disadvantaged social background they possessed, but more importantly their dif erent personal experiences and the emotional networks they construct can have a more significant impact on the autonomy of these ‘left-behind children’. In terms of gender dif erences, this study found that more left-behind girls than boys showed lower levels of self-esteem and self-confidence in this study, which was not only related to their disadvantaged family background but also to the fact that they did not receive enough support from their families, teachers and friends. This study not only expands the understanding of the education and life experience of Chinese ‘left-behind children’, but also proposes a new perspective on the autonomy level of Chinese ‘left-behind children’ by introducing Western theories into Oriental context, we can clearly see that the experience of poverty is universal – whilst cultural nuance exists, the impact of economic disadvantage transcends geographical boundaries.