Suchergebnisse

Abstract
About 60 million children under the age of 18 are left behind by their parents in rural China. This paper studies the effect of migrant parents on the educational attainment of their left-behind children in rural China. A theoretical model of optimal schooling in the context of parental migration is proposed. Then, reduced-form equations are estimated using probit model, instrumental variables probit model, and linear instrumental variables model. Results show that parental migration has a negative effect on children's school enrollment. This negative effect is significant and sizable on the school enrollment of boys, but insignificant on the school enrollment of girls. The most important source of this robust negative effect on boys is the absence of fathers. Results suggest that left-behind mothers or relatives cannot fulfill fathers' role successfully in disciplining boys and help with their educational needs.

This article examines issues of migrancy and socioeconomic disadvantage in present-day China with references to two cases involving the celebritization of migrant beggars and buskers. The first concerns Cheng Guorong, a 34-year-old vagrant beggar with mental health issues who became an international fashion icon known as "Brother Sharp" in 2010 after an amateur photographer posted candid photographs of him walking down a street on an internet forum. The second case involves two migrant buskers in Beijing who performed to an audience of around 1 billion viewers worldwide on China Central Television Station's annual Spring Festival Gala in 2011, after a friend posted a mobile phone video clip of them singing on his microblog. These cases show how the mediated contexts provided by the World Wide Web, combined with the corollary growth of a young digital-technology-savvy population, are generating new entertainment-orientated communities and celeb-rity-making practices in China. It also shows how these seemingly apolitical entertainment practices are refashioning public debates about the politics of prosperity and equality. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)