The city already owes the countryside too much; the urban-rural gap urgently needs to be faced squarely

People condemn the parents, hoping to hold them accountable for failing to fulfil their responsibilities; people say that companionship is love, and that companionship matters more than earning money. In urban society, such criticism and reproach are unproblematic; but, face to face with rural migrant workers, I cannot bring myself to say it.

Migrant children, left-behind children, street children - an unspeakable pain - congealed heavily on the afternoon of 22 July in Dongfang Live Studio. Yet this seemed to be a misplaced intervention, a kind of care full of misreading.

I had originally thought it would be a discussion of the left-behind children issue centred on the suicide of the four siblings in Bijie, but it was not; it was a revelation of the hot news story about 12 rural kindergarten girls sexually assaulted in Lingwu City, Ningxia. What surprised me was that the parties involved in such a sensitive, privacy-related incident - two young fathers - were placed directly under the spotlight. They were brave: after discussion they decided to appear without masks, to warn others through their harrowing experience. Although the interview about the process of the sexual assault was abridged, the cruelty still trickled out bit by bit. The kindergarten was a preschool class left over from a public primary school, with only this one male teacher in his fifties, who had also been the parents' own teacher back then, and whom the villagers had always trusted considerably. Of the 13 girls, the only one not sexually assaulted had a father who was the village Party secretary. The two fathers' education levels were primary school and junior middle school respectively, and both their wives had only primary schooling. The guests' interrogation landed directly on the heads of the fathers - sturdy and inarticulate, at a loss as to what to do: Why had it gone undiscovered for so long? Why did it take two hours after discovering the case to report it? What the guests denounced was the parents' dereliction in raising without teaching - leaving the children to go out to work was itself a fault, and failing to discover the girls' victimisation in time was another layer of dereliction. The rest of the anger was directed at the school and the government. Why assign such a teacher, why was it not discovered? Why had no arrangements been made for compensation and resettlement of the victimised girls?

One preset discussion point was “whether to take the victimised girl away or leave her in her hometown” - far more real than the other preset question, “should parents leave their children to go out to work”. Anyone with even a little understanding of rural life knows how important it is for the girl to have a change of environment, both for healing and for her future growth, and the studio audience agreed with this choice too. Only the psychological expert thought otherwise: what she wanted was a “fundamental solution”, namely dissolving the shadow in the girl's heart through psychological counselling and parental love. Faced with such sentimentality, what I felt was more than dismay. They seemed utterly ignorant of farmers' livelihoods and of the gossip in rural society that can kill. I truly could not bear to look at the two young fathers' bewildered, helpless eyes, nor to listen to their stammering, evasive answers, nor to pursue responsibility in detail. What we face is not merely the tragedy of a few families, but a wholesale lack and disorder.

⟦NL> A yet more tragic party then came on stage. Pang Yuqiang, a farmer from Dapingshan Town, Xingye County, Guangxi, whose daughter Xiaoyu at the age of 11 was sexually assaulted by 16 elderly men in the village more than 50 times. The father took her to Guangzhou, where he worked; five years later, in March this year, Xiaoyu was lured away and lost in Guangzhou. Again they had to press him on unbearable memories of the past, again the stammering, muddled answers, again the unbearable sight of his helpless eyes; he said over and over that he had no education, that he still had a younger daughter and a son with epilepsy at home, and that he had come here wanting to use television as a missing-person advertisement and to raise money to treat his son. In the programme's design, Xiaoyu's later tragedy seemed intended to prove that an injured girl had not emerged from her psychological shadow. The expert repeatedly pressed the father on whether he had ever loudly said “Daughter, I love you”, and it turned out the old farmer had said it after all. This kind of interrogation, devoid of compassion and empathy, betrayed throughout the self-importance and condescending superiority of urban people. And the programme's “selling point” was perhaps precisely a kind of ... consumption of migrant workers' suffering?

Shi Qinghua, principal of Beijing Guang'ai School, who has taken in many street children, was a bright spot, positive energy. But the 15-year-old boy Chen Zequn, who came on stage with him, was again astonishing. He had been taken in after running away and becoming homeless because of his father's severe violence. Not only was no protection given to a minor in such a marginal social situation, but his whereabouts were discussed to his face. Principal Shi's dilemma was that it was hard to bear responsibilities beyond the law - for example, Zequn's father refused to meet and would not grant proxy guardianship authority, so that the school could not sign for the child's schooling or medical care; while the consequence of Zequn going home was to continue living on the streets. The issue returned to denouncing irresponsible parents. The topic was: if a student becomes homeless again and commits a crime, who bears greater responsibility, Principal Shi or the father? The standard answer was the father. There was also this question: if the school were not closed, would it attract even more street children? I felt deeply uneasy; this was truly a very cold-blooded discussion. Was this, in the end, understanding and help, or was it continuing ... to consume suffering?

The discussion turned to the tragedy of a 14-year-old boy in Nayong County, Bijie, beaten to death by 13 classmates. The victim was a migrant child who had long lived with his mother and younger brother in Jiangsu and, because he could not attend senior middle school where he had moved to, returned to his hometown to study and met his death. Thus this is first of all a tragedy of a migrant child, highlighting the predicament of migrant children in accessing senior middle school education in the place they have moved to. Of course, it is also a tragedy of left-behind children, because many of the beaters were left-behind children. Let us take seriously this figure: among the composition of juvenile delinquency, left-behind children account for about 70 per cent. Thus this is a serious social problem of a systemic nature. Precisely because of this, migrant children and left-behind children are a major issue that the whole of society must attend to, and one that should be discussed extensively in public space; whereas psychological counselling, consultation and help for the parties involved, the victims and minors should be carried out quietly in private space. Unfortunately, at this scene the two spaces were reversed: we talked at length about individual cases and “private matters” in full public view, lacking the protection due to the parties involved and to minors; at the same time, the truly important public topic lacked in-depth discussion.