Imagine you are a young married man or woman in rural China. There are no jobs, so you find work in a big city, perhaps 1,000 miles away. But government restrictions mean that if you take your children with you they will almost certainly not be able to attend schools where you live, or visit a state doctor. And if your parents come to share the child care, their pension will be too small for them to live on. What do you do? For the parents of 61m Chinese children, the answer is to leave them behind in the villages where they were born, to be looked after by grandparents (often illiterate) or other relatives. Another 9m are left in one city by parents working in another. The 70m total is almost the number of all the children in the United States.
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