Rural youth left behind when their parents move to the cities in search of employment as well as those who migrate to urban areas with their parents are primarily responsible for a significant increase in youth crime over the last seven years.

A study by the Supreme People's Court published on 20 September, showed that youth crime had increased on average by 13 percent each year since 2000, and that the majority of those crimes were committed by children from the countryside. Indeed, 70 percent of all juvenile crimes in Beijing were committed by rural migrants, the survey said.

This worrying increase in youth crime is directly related to the continuing rural-urban migration that has fuelled China's economic boom over the last two decades and the exploitation and discrimination migrant workers routinely suffer from in the cities.  Many migrant workers cannot afford to bring their children with them to the cities and these children are often left behind in the care of relatives who are unable or unwilling to provide them with adequate care.

The head of the Supreme People's Court research bureau, Shao Wenhong, estimated the number of children left behind in rural areas to be around 23 million. "Without normal family guardianship and education, some of these children quit school at an early age and commit crimes," she said. Moreover, the age of youth offenders was getting younger and crimes of violence were increasing, Shao added.

What Shao did not elaborate upon is that excessive rural school fees mean that many migrant workers simply cannot afford, or see no value in keeping their children in school.  As a result, many children are sent out to work, or increasingly in the case of those left behind, become the victims of crime.  Many children left behind by their parent run away from home and end up on the streets, eventually drifting into petty crime or being exploited by ruthless adults. According to Du Chengfei, the founder of the XinXing Aid Street Kids Project in Baoji, Shaanxi Province, there may be as many as 600,000 runaway children in China today.

The alarming increase in rural youth crime has however helped focus attention on the increasingly complex and serious social problems created by China's mass rural-urban migration and it is clearly in the government's interest to address those problems at source by providing adequate funding for the rural education system and by making it easier for rural families to settle in urban areas by providing them with the same access to welfare and medical benefits, and giving them to same educational opportunities as their urban neighbours.