Not all work done by children should be classified as child labour that is to be targeted for elimination. Children’s or adolescents’ participation in work that does not affect their health and personal development or interfere with their schooling, is generally regarded as being something positive. This includes activities such as helping their parents around the home, assisting in a family business or earning pocket money outside school hours and during school holidays. These kinds of activities contribute to children’s development and to the welfare of their families; they provide them with skills and experience, and help to prepare them to be productive members of society during their adult life.

work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development

It refers to work that:
is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children; and
interferes with their schooling by:
depriving them of the opportunity to attend school;
obliging them to leave school prematurely; or
requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.

Pourcentage of children aged 5-17 years old by ILO GLOBAL ESTIMATE 2013

1.One of the prime reasons for the increasing numbers of children working instead of attending school is the falling standards in education and the lack of access to education for many of China’s children. As detailed above, for those lucky enough to have access to a school there is not enough incentive to attend and often not enough money for poor families to keep all their children in school.

2.However, the most common cause for child labour and non attendance of school is poverty. Although some children are tricked into work by relatives or by their families, the majority enter work with the pressure or approval of their parents for economic reasons. In the Jiangxi study mentioned earlier it was found that all the children found working were from families “experiencing economic difficulties”. Despite rising living standards for many Chinese people, there are large sections of the population who are slipping further into poverty and the gap between the rich and the poor is increasing steadily. The rising living costs, mass layoffs, unemployment and the dramatic reduction in social services, medical benefits, food subsidies and the decline in the “danwei” system of employment which guaranteed accommodation and other benefits, means that for many Chinese, the economic reforms are creating poverty not wealth and at the same time the safety net of social security is both inadequate and underdeveloped due to lack of investment and the financial crisis of many local governments, in part caused by corruption.

3.Another effect of privatization is industrialization and urbanization - rapid rural-to-urban migration has added to the increase of child labor in urban areas. Families leave behind the severity of agricultural working conditions for the cities in order to search for economic opportunities that do not exist in villages. In the last 20 years, this movement has been drastic. In 1980, only 17 percent of the Chinese population lived in urban areas while the number increased to 32 percent in 1998.(Note 2) Such increases, the lack of regular employment, education and accessible social security often forces children and their families into urban poverty and children are then required to work.