Sort of related topics: every few days one of the local papers will carry a story about a child drowning to death or being hit by a car while crossing the street. Each time, the article will say “the child’s parents were working nearby…” Even this NYT article profiling child abduction in Shenzhen carries the same line:

Peng Gaofeng was busy with customers when a man snatched his 4-year-old son from the plaza in front of his shop as throngs of factory workers enjoyed a spring evening. “I turned away for a minute, and when I called out for him he was gone,” Mr. Peng said.

Evidence from interviews conducted here suggests that these cases are almost always migrant children – primarily because their parents are too busy working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week; and they have not been [brainwashed] with basic safety knowledge. Thinking back to how many times my parents drilled “look both ways, memorize your phone number, you will begin practicing swimming when you are six months old” I begin to see how ubiquitous this is in Western culture. Urban Chinese are not dissimilar, though probably take more risks with their children than would your average American.

It’s not that migrants don’t care about their children – they certainly do – but rural lifestyle perhaps doesn’t inculcate these same values. As one person explained: “In the countryside, we know everyone. They watch out for our kids. There’s no traffic there. There’s nowhere to swim. A lot of people just don’t think it’s going to be different in the city.”

Another interesting phenomenon relating to youth culture is the extent to which concerns about internet addiction are present in common discourse. Tricia Wang, a PhD student at UCSD, hypothesizes that internet cafes can serve as a form of child care for the aforementioned migrant parents with too little free time:

I suspect that internet cafes are a form of an after-school program for the kids – the parents feel comfortable knowing that they are in one place. I also suspect that the youth do not know how to use the internet for educational purposes – or more so are their educational resources in China for students? Must find that out.

This makes sense. So why are the other half of urban parents deathly afraid of internet addiction that they will send their children to ‘recovery camps’ that utilize electro-therapy? (“I just want to check my email *buzz* no wait I need to level a little in WoW *buzz* please I just want to update my status!” *buzz buzz buzz* – actually the electrotherapy was recently banned. Still. Seriously.) So why don’t people in the U.S. talk about internet addiction? I’m pretty sure that if you took away the laptop, in about six hours flat, I’d be writhing on the floor clutching at phantom keys in a desperate attempt to imagine my way back into connectivity. If that doesn’t count as addiction, not sure what does.

Jin Ge, a videographer from Shanghai who profiled WoW goldfarming explained to me that: “For parents with the time and money, they are worried about every sort of behavioral ‘defect’ their child might have. The common conception here is that these things can be ‘cured’ with things like electrotherapy. There might be internet addiction in the U.S., but parents think differently about it / deal with it differently.”

Additionally, many Chinese internet users will spent a lot of time in public internet cafes, whereas the majority of Americans, I would assume, are comfortably “addicted” on a personal computer in their parent’s basement. University students will often just sleep in the internet cafe, since most dormitories have curfews of around 11:00 / 12:00. As a result, a lot of these behaviors are more observable, especially the all-nighters and subsequent zombie flash mob-esque walks of shame back into campus.

There also seems to be some credibility to the notion that escapism is more attractive here due to greater amounts of alienation. Again, to use a tired U.S. / China comparison, I found myself being beginning to live independent of my parents at 17/18, whereas your average Chinese student will be wholly dependent until they are 22/23 – this seemed fine until a classmate (this guy is 21 years old) said that he still “sleeps with his parents when I go home on vacation because it makes me feel safe.” Your average upwardly mobile Chinese youngster also goes from being an only child, and then thrust into a university setting where s/he has 7 roommates. The feeling of being alone – even surrounded by others in an internet cafe – is probably a very powerful draw for these students.

Regardless, these issues warrant more exploration and attention – especially the promotion of basic safety knowledge among migrant children (that seems like a very low cost high return type activity), and providing constructive (or at least non-destructive?) extra-curricular activities for migrant children.