Guo, Kaidong; (2025) In the Silences of Separation: Slow Violence, Stigma, and the Lived Realities of Chinese liushou Families. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This ethnographic study uses the lens of slow violence to explore the lived experiences of liushou (left-behind) children in rural China, challenging dominant portrayals of them as passive victims of parental migration. Based on nine months of fieldwork in Yunye Town with a total of 56 participants, including children, migrant parents, grandparents and teachers, the study also incorporates reflexive insights from my own liushou and migration history. It situates these children’s lives within China’s entrenched structural inequalities, particularly the hukou system and the rural–urban divides intensified by neoliberal reforms. The analysis unfolds through three interrelated processes that reveal how structural harm is embodied over time. First, state and media discourses pathologise liushou children by linking parental absence to trauma and deviance. School programmes intended to ‘rescue’ these children often reinforce marginalisation by imposing stigmatising labels, which families may internalise, thereby perpetuating cycles of guilt and emotional fragmentation. Second, the study traces how care circulates across generations. Separation is not a singular event but a prolonged process, shaped by eroded caregiving networks, increasing pressures of daily life, and illness and death among elders, all of which are influenced by neoliberal precarity. Here, slow violence emerges through the temporal layering of vulnerability across lives. Third, the research unsettles the binary between liushou and migrant children by tracing fragmented and fluid patterns of mobility. These patterns are shaped not only by hukou-based exclusions but also by demolition, caregiver illness, and transitions in schooling. In rural areas, some children circulate between schools, extended kin, and households straddling the urban–rural divide. In cities, migrant children live in a state of spatial liminality, excluded from urban entitlements yet disconnected from their rural roots. As care circulates across generations and spaces, children’s lives become sites where structural harm is absorbed, negotiated, and, at times, resisted. This connects mobility and separation to the thesis’s central concern: how violence materialises in everyday familial practices. This thesis contributes to critical childhood studies, migration research, and family sociology by (1) theorising slow violence through children’s emotional and temporal experiences, (2) foregrounding the relational agency of marginalised families, and (3) resisting tragic or romanticised portrayals by analysing how constraint and negotiation coexist in contexts of dispossession. It ultimately challenges pathologising narratives in policy and research, while advancing debates on care, inequality, and violence in childhood studies and beyond.

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