How Far are the Left-Behind Left Behind? A Preliminary Study in Rural China Xiang Biao* ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford, 58 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6QS, UK Keywords: left-behind; migration and development; China INTRODUCTION T hirty-six-year-old Zheng Xihua was on the verge of tears when our conversation turned to her three children: a 15-year-old daughter and 11-year-old twin sons. Hailing from the countryside of the northern part of Liaoning province, northeast China, she works in a car park during the day and in a beauty salon at night in Shenyang, the capital city of Liaoning. Her husband started migrating to cities to work more than ten years ago. The further away he went, the less often he visited home, and the less money he sent back. Zheng said ‘he is not her man anymore’; however, divorce is not an option for either of them. To meet the ever-increasing family expenditure with the growth of their chil- dren, Zheng went to south China to work three years ago. When she returned home for Chinese New Year after being away for one and a half years, she was dismayed to find that her daugh- ter refused to call her ‘mother’ and insisted on dropping out from high school to go to work in the city. Her two sons were rude to their elderly neighbour, and one had a long knife scar on his face, ‘turning his movie-star looks to those of a gangster’. She did not have the time to check her sons’ examination scores (when she asked for the annual reports from the school, the sons answered that they had thrown them away), but her father-in-law told her that the teacher had visited to say that one of her sons would be expelled if he continued to fight with his school- mates and failed to turn up for classes. Since early 2004, she had decided to work in Shenyang POPULATION, SPACE AND PLACE Popul. Space Place (in press) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/psp.437 Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. ABSTRACT While the linkage between migration and development has attracted much academic and policy attention, a key aspect of the linkage, namely those left behind in the community of origin, remains under-researched. As one of the first academic attempts to provide a systematic overview of this group in China, this paper describes the basic problems faced by it, discusses the institutional causes of the problems, and explores long-term and short- term solutions. The paper first establishes the fact that, while it seems that individuals decide who migrates and who stays back, there are fundamental institutional constraints on such decisions. The paper then shows that the three main left-behind groups, namely wives, the elderly and children, encounter various problems, but in general their situation is not much worse than that of those living with all family members. Their problems cannot just be attributed to being left-behind individuals; instead, the fundamental cause is that many rural communities as a whole have been left behind economically and socially. Although migration exacerbates the hardship, preventing migration is certainly not a solution. The paper instead calls for measures to redress the urban–rural divide and to improve the provision of public goods in rural communities. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. * Correspondence to: Xiang Biao, ESRC Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford, 58 Banbury Road, Oxford, OX2 6QS, UK. E-mail: biao.xiang@compas.ox.ac.uk