His rise youth depression it has been decades in the making and owes much to China’s rigid education system, past fertility policies and strict immigration restrictions. Chinese youth are exhausted from spending their childhood and adolescence in non-stop, intense study. Attending a good university is considered essential to securing a good job and for country kids, a university degree is the only way to legal residency in cities hukou registration system. In a city, the average household per year Disposable income it’s $6,446, which allows for a middle-class lifestyle. By contrast, in rural areas, an average income of only $2,533 means living in relative poverty.
As if the pressure to get into a university wasn’t bad enough, the rigid structure of the school system makes matters worse. After nine years of compulsory education, children must pass exams to enter an academic high school and only 50 percent of these they are allowed to pass. Teenagers who don’t make the cut attend vocational high school and are destined for low-paying jobs.
Therefore, Chinese children begin to study seriously very early in life. Not only do they go to school but they also earn dearly outside of tutoring and take extracurriculars like music or chess – which are rewarded in an opaque way. In an effort to alleviate some of these pressures, the Govt forbidden for-profit tutoring schools and blocked public school teachers from offering such services on the side. But that only added more pressure because the price of teachers increased as their supply decreased.
Wealthy households in Shanghai and Beijing are now paying $120 to $400 per hour for in-person tuition, while the children of the non-wealthy must study even harder to make up for the tuition their parents can no longer afford. In the 1980s and 1990s, the streets of Chinese villages and cities were full of children. Nowadays, it is rarely seen unless it is a holiday. Even on weekend afternoons, the playgrounds are empty. The kids are all in and studying.
Another cause of youth depression is loneliness. Due to the one-child policy, which lasted from 1979 to 2016, children in urban areas lack of siblings. And unlike the first generation of single children after the policy was introduced, later generations don’t even have cousins to play with (since their parents don’t have siblings either). A overview of Chinese college students finds that the typical only child is much more likely to experience anxiety and depression than her classmates with siblings. Suicide rates for children between the ages of five and 14 have Increased more than quintupled since 2010.
Parents are also under tremendous stress. In addition to caring for their children, most middle-aged urban couples also have to care for four elderly parents. Conversely, in rural areas, where around 491 million The Chinese live, the one-child policy was less strictly enforced, meaning adults often have siblings to share the burden with. But they face more stress when they have children. Many must seek higher-paying work in the cities, but hukou restrictions prevent them from bringing their offspring with them. About 11 percent of Chinese today are migrants from rural cities, which translates into about 69 million children left behind in rural areas.
Rural parents who could stay with their children are starting to face a different problem. After closing about 300,000 rural schools between 2000 and 2015, 12 per cent of primary school children and 50 per cent of secondary school students must often attend distant boarding schools. Many rural adults thus work long hours to educate children with whom they must part after their first years of life. Ironically, their chances of reuniting are even slimmer if their child eventually succeeds because most university graduates settle permanently in the cities.
In 2018, 35 percent of Chinese adults reported depression on average. The rate was 50 percent higher in rural areas and among women. For obvious reasons, widespread depression is dangerous for any society, portending future economic stagnation, low fertility and other problems reminiscent of Japan since the 1990s.
The good news for China is that there are simple policy solutions. The first is to get rid of rigid, centrally planned schooling. Local governments should be able to decide how many schools to build and how many students to attend, and each high school and university should decide who they want to admit, including retards who may not have tested well as children. The government can still regulate schools, but it should delegate and decentralize most decision-making to increase the flexibility of the system. This in itself would take a lot of pressure off young children and their parents.
A second step is to remove restrictions on rural-to-urban migration that tear families apart and condemn rural households to relative poverty. This solution has become particularly important as overall growth slowed. Rural areas cannot simply wait their turn for the next growth spurt. They need access to the same opportunities as urban households. In addition, agricultural labor can boost productivity by filling low-skilled jobs factory jobs. While university graduates struggle to find high-profile jobs, they do exist 30 million vacancies in manufacturing and assembly.
These policies are not without cost. Efforts to change the school system would be resisted by current stakeholders, and free immigration would increase urban congestion. But such measures would also have clear benefits by boosting economic growth and improving the mental health of China’s youth and their parents.
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This article originally appeared on Project Syndicate.
