FRACTURED FAIRYTALES:

In the Chinese countryside, fractured families (Jim Yardley, December 21, 2004, The New York Times)

Yang Shan is in fourth grade and spends a few hours every day practicing her Chinese characters. Her script is neat and precise, and one day, instead of drills, she wrote letters to her parents and put them in the mail.

"How is your health?" she asked.

Shan, who is 10, then added a more pointed question: "What is happening with our family?"

Her parents had left in March. Their absence was not new in Shan's short life. Her father, Yang Heqing, has left four times for work. He is now in Beijing on a construction site. Her mother, Ran Heping, has left three times.

She is in a different city as a factory worker.

Over the years, Shan's parents have returned to this remote village to bring money and reunite the family. They leave when the money is gone, as it was in March. Her father had medical debts and needed cash to see another doctor. Shan's school fees were due and her grandparents also needed help.

"I think they are suffering in order to make my life better," Shan said of her parents. She added a familiar Chinese expression: "They are eating bitterness."

For the Yang family and millions of others in the Chinese countryside, the only way to survive as a family is to not live as one. Migrant workers like Shan's parents are the mules driving the country's stunning economic growth.

And the money they send home has become essential for jobless rural China.

Yet even that money is no longer enough for families. Migrant wages have stagnated, education and health costs are rising and the rural social safety net has collapsed - a crushing combination and a major reason that the income divide is widening so rapidly in China at the expense of the rural poor.

China is a pile of social pathologies held together only by an authoritarian government.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 21, 2004 8:01 AM