China's village children lured out of school to work underage in city jobs
For some families living in poor villages, sending a child to work in a factory makes more sense than a few more years of education
For teenagers in many poor areas on the mainland, dropping out of school to take up work in the city remains a tempting option, researchers say.
Why continue to trudge through mountainous areas for hours a day to get to classes, when there is money to make in exciting, fast-paced cities? And for their parents, a high-paying job with a university degree can be a difficult future to imagine.
The central government does not make public statistics on the scale of child labour on the mainland. According to Dr Liu Kaiming, director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation, a civil-society group in Shenzhen, the child labour situation has improved in the past decade, but young people in rural areas continued to drop out of school and take up jobs in cities.
In central and western provinces, the drop-out rate among junior middle school pupils can be as high as 10 per cent, Xinhua has reported.
"Pupils will pay illegal agents to get fake identity cards when they hunt for jobs," Liu said.
Under mainland law, businesses are not allowed to hire workers younger than 16 and offending companies face punishments ranging from fines to loss of their business licences.