Building: Main Venue Building
Room: foyer
Date: 2017-02-08 03:30 PM – 04:30 PM
Last modified: 2017-01-23
Abstract
Since the famous opening up and reform strategy of China, lots of migrants have flowed from rural areas to urban areas. In this paper I investigate the rural elderly left behind, which are defined aged people left alone at home while their adult children have to migrant outside. This phenomenon is a quite general and serious social problem that cannot be ignored, accompanied by the process of urbanization and regional transferring of rural labor. The Chinese internal migration not only exerts great influence to China’s economy and urbanization development, but also obviously reduce the labor and care to rural aged people. Contrary to assumptions in some migration and aging studies, which show the inevitable negative effects of migration upon the old age care, the author highlights unique features in their daily strategies of house holding to integrate into society with the analysis of the conception of social inclusion. Through life history interviews with elderly left behind in one rural village, this article sheds light on three different factors of social inclusion, namely, economic inclusion, social identity and political inclusion and shows its necessaries to fully understand the status of the social wellbeing of rural elderly left behind.