And baby came too: more Chinese migrants take children with them, says report
When migrants leave the countryside for the cities, many more are taking their children with them - but public services are feeling the strain
Couples who leave the countryside for a better life in the city are increasingly taking their children with them, a report has found.
The "Development Report on China's Migrant Population 2014", released yesterday, found 62.5 per cent of migrant couples took children aged six to 15 with them to the cities last year, 5.2 percentage points more than in 2011.
More women of child-bearing age also chose to have babies in cities, the report said. More than 57 per cent of women stayed in cities during pregnancy, while nearly 60 per cent gave birth in cities, 5.9 percentage points and 7 percentage points higher respectively than in 2011.
Last year 245 million people, or 18 per cent of the entire population, left their hometowns, and 80 per cent of them moved from rural to urban areas.
"The public services that migrant populations are entitled to are different from those who have urban household registrations," said Wang Qian, director of the migrant population division of the National Health and Family Planning Commission.
Wang said China had passed the phase of individual migration and was now experiencing entire families moving together.
"Their No 1 priority is employment, because it is a matter of survival. Then they care about housing, the education of their children, health care and social security," said Wang. "They bring children along with them not only to keep the family intact but also because of the better education standards in the cities."
The report recommends narrowing the differences in health care and education policies between rural and urban areas, including allowing the children of migrants to enter kindergartens and high schools in the cities.
While it was up to individual education authorities to come up with policies to cope with the change in demographics, the commission had been focusing on family planning and health services, Wang said. With more migrant children now in urban areas, services such as vaccinations had to be increased.
There has been progress in terms of public health services for migrant women, but they still fall short of the national average. Some 95 per cent of pregnant migrant women gave birth in hospital last year, but 40 per cent of pregnancies did not meet the basic requirement of having five checks before birth, and one fifth of newborns and mothers did not have post-natal checks.
About 10 per cent of migrant children received some vaccinations, although some had none.
The report concluded that funds for providing public health care to the migrant population were insufficient.
