留守儿童 双语阅读

They are left behind in grim villages all over China by parents who have joined the biggest voluntary worker migration in human history. Some are left at home with one parent, others stay back with an illiterate grandmother or exhausted grandfather. An estimated 2m are left to fend for themselves.

他们的父母加入了人类历史上最大规模的自发的劳动力迁徙大潮，而他们却被留在中国各地荒凉的村庄中。他们中有的跟着一方父母留守家中，有的跟着目不识丁的奶奶或者年老体弱的爷爷一起生活。估计有200万儿童需要自己照顾自己。

China has 61m so-called “left behind children”, all but orphaned by the mainland economic miracle. Interviews with social workers, non-governmental organisations, economists and parents say migrants do it for the sake of the very children they leave behind: to pay for their education, to build them a house to give them a future living among skyscrapers and not pig pens. Economists say this is the price of China‟s modernisation, just as surely as the poisoned water and choking smog that is the legacy of its industrial development.

中国有6100万“留守儿童”(left behind children)，中国大陆经济奇迹把他们变得几乎和孤儿一样。从对社会工作者、非政府组织、经济学家以及留守儿童父母的采访中可以了解到，父母之所以外出打工，正是为了自己留在老家的孩子：为了供他们上学，为了给他们盖房子，为了给他们一个生活在摩天大楼之间、而非猪圈之间的未来。经济学家们称，这是中国现代化的代价，正如水污染和雾霾是中国工业发展的后遗症一样。

“We think of them as economic orphans,” says Jenny Bowen, head of the US charity OneSky, which has recently begun pilot programmes to help rural children being raised without parents. “Villages are unravelling because so many young parents go away to work. Generations of people who were always together are no longer together any more”.

我们称他们为…经济孤儿‟，”美国慈善机构“同一片天空”(OneSky)负责人博珍妮(Jenny Bowen)说，“大批的年轻父母外出打工，以至于农村正在解体。过去都是几代人生活在一起，如今一家人不能朝夕相处。”同一片天空最近开展了一些试点项目来帮助那些没有父母陪伴的农村儿童。

These days the juggernaut of Chinese labour migration is slowing as the work force shrinks. This year, the Financial Times has published a series of articles about the end of this migrant miracle, and about how that is affecting the migrants who drove the transformation from agrarian backwater to digital society, in just three decades.

由于劳动力萎缩，中国劳动力迁徙大潮正在趋缓。2015年，英国《金融时报》发表了一系列文章，探讨这场“劳动力迁徙奇迹”的终结及其对外出务工者的影响，这些劳动者在短短30年内推动了中国从落后农业国家向数字社会的转型。

Some are moving closer to home as the economy slows and Beijing tries to create more jobs in the inland economy. That means they can see their children as often as every few weeks, rather than only once a year or less. And

technology can put parents in touch with their offspring relatively inexpensively.

随着中国经济增速放缓以及政府设法在内陆地区创造更多的就业机会，一些外出务工者回到了离家更近的地方打工。这意味着他们可以每隔几周就回家看望自己的孩子，而不再是一年一次或者更少。而且，科技发展也让父母能够以相对较低的成本与自己的子女保持沟通。

Yet for every migrant who moves closer to home, there is one that leaves the village for work for the first time, maybe because the construction of a new highway has opened up areas previously inaccessible to the outside world. So tens of millions of children are likely to continue living primarily without their parents for years to come.

然而，有些人到了离家更近的地方打工，也有些人第一次离开村子外出打工，或许是因为新修的公路使得此前相对封闭的地方与外部世界连接起来。因此未来许多年内，数千万儿童可能继续在没有父母陪伴的情况下生活。

This could jeopardise the next generation of Chinese growth, economists say. Children educated in poor rural schools, without literate parents to help them, may be unable to fuel the new innovation-led growth that Beijing is aiming for.经济学家称，这种现象或将危及中国未来二三十年的经济增长。在贫困乡村学校接受教育的儿童（没有受过教育的父母的辅导）可能无法帮助推动中国政府所追求的“创新型”增长。

And the damage to Chinese society, to the family system and even to the psyche of the children involved could be even more severe, according to economists, government researchers and others who have studied the left behind child phenomenon.

在经济学家、政府研究人员以及其他研究留守儿童现象的人士看来，这种现象对中国社会、家庭结构甚至留守儿童心理造成的危害可能更为严重。

Beijing has been aware of the problem for years. But high profile cases of children who were left behind, like the four siblings who took pesticide, or the five cousins who died in a rubbish skip — along with other children murdered when home alone, or sexually abused — have put the issue high on the national agenda for the first time. Every new case of a left behind child tragedy triggers another wave of soul-searching about the social price that China has paid for the past 30 years of capitalist reform.

北京方面多年来已经意识到了这一问题。但发生在留守儿童身上的轰动性事件——如喝农药自杀的四兄妹，死在垃圾箱中的五个堂兄弟，以及其他留守儿童遭到杀害或性侵的事件——首次使这一问题成为国家高度重视的议题。每一起发生在留守儿童身上的悲剧，都会引发一场对中国为过去30年资本主义改革所付出社会代价的反思。

A social stigma

坏名声