Abstract
Family separation in rural China has led to a considerably large number of left-behind women who have to deal with livelihood fragility. The Department for International Development (DFID) framework focusing on households provides a base to understand the livelihood fragility of these women. Based on this framework and the existing field research, this study identifies that the national macro-strategy of unsynchronized development of industrialization, informatization, urbanization, and agricultural modernization leads to a separated migration model for rural families. Furthermore, the process of social modernization increases the fragility risk of how the left-behind family functions. The traditional gender culture expectations also directly affect rural families to make the livelihood strategy choice of, “male working outside, female taking care of home”. Based on the above theoretical research, this study extracts the concept of “ritualized law” to shed light on gender differentiation and family separation. A number of formal social security institutions have been established to promote the development of farmers, however, the ingrained culture gender differentiation encourages men to work in the profitable urban industry while women work in the field of unpaid agriculture and shoulder the responsibility of housework. This makes the formal institution a symbolic ornament for left-behind women, while they are forced to stay in rural areas and suffer from the fragility of livelihood.
Highlights
Industrialization, urbanization, and the relaxation of migration bans between urban and rural areas have collectively triggered the large-scale flow of migrant workers in China [1]
The separation phenomenon of rural left-behind families leads to some constraints in family structure and function, which makes left-behind women face the plight of livelihood fragility, which is manifested in the following five types of livelihood fragility
26.4% of the left-behind women were the subject of gossip while their husbands were away (Appendix A)
Summary
Industrialization, urbanization, and the relaxation of migration bans between urban and rural areas have collectively triggered the large-scale flow of migrant workers in China [1]. The number of migrant workers has been growing rapidly at a pace of 6–8 million each year. China had more than 100 million migrant workers in 2003. There has been a steady growth in the number of migrant workers since 2003 and in 2011 it exceeded. In 2019, the total number was over 290 million. This movement of rural labor manifests a growing situation of gender differentiation and family separation. While the male labor accounted for 64.9%, the percentage of female labor was only 35.1. The movement of female rural labor is obviously less than that of male rural labor.
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