Lonesome lives

Rural China continues to battle an emotional void even as a new government survey reassesses the number of children of migrant workers left behind

Spring Festival will be celebrated by Chinese at home and abroad in two weeks. A good number of the country's more than 200 million migrant workers will then return home to smaller cities and villages, bearing gifts for the children whom they have left behind in their pursuit of jobs in bigger cities.

A central government survey released in November suggests China now has 9 million children at or under the age of 16 whose parents work away from their domiciles. In 2013, the All China Women Federation, a government-backed agency had said the country had 60 million such children under the age of 18.