Associate Professor Bingquin Li, is a social policy and governance expert
who has helped introduce social policy research to China.
She joined the Social Policy Research Centre in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in 2016
as one of the first academics hired under the UNSW 2025
strategic hires and retention pathways process.
Speaking on how does the development agenda ignore the emotional needs of families
please welcome Binquin Li.
Hello everybody.
What keeps me up at night?
The social and economic development agenda ignores the emotional needs of families.
I left China 20 years ago.
I was very excited to leave my family to explore the rest of the world.
I remember telling my friends, it was great to ignore my family responsibilities such as
staying at home and visit all my relatives during the Chinese new year.
Until one day, I read a post on the internet, a Chinese woman wrote an article about her life.
Her father was about to die and she wanted to go back to China, but found her visa expired.
She rushed to the airport out of desperation without a visa.
The officer told her just get on a plane
and try your luck at the Chinese border.
In the end she succeeded and saw her father before he died.
At this point, I realised there are all these migrants somewhere in the world sharing the same fear
that their parents might die when they are far away.
We as develoment researchers have been diligently looking for ways to enhance the
well-being of individuals.
Social development has the same individual focus, the dream is to help individuals
to achieve whatever they want to achieve in their life.
Recently, the United Nations published their sustainable development goals
addressing all sorts of problems in our society.
Poverty, inequality, vulnerability of women and children
climate change, environmental degradation.
As I read these goals, I wonder where is the family in these goals?
I searched on the internet and found that it's not only me, many people ask the same question.
Unfortunately there's no meaningful reference to family and the family development
in any of these goals.
Family researchers didn't give up.
They searched for hints between the lines, for hints that can help with family developments.
They found terms like "woman and man", "old and young", and people with disabilities.
They found that when these people benefit, they are family members, when they benefit,
their families can also benefit.
The problem with this approach is that people are not referred to as parents and children,
husband and wife, brothers and sisters, nor mention cousins.
People are not referred to as in a family relationship
where the emotional needs are taken care of.
In the West, welfare states offers protection and social services to individuals needs
so that they do not need to be dependent on the time, the money and the efforts
of their family members.
The welfare state deliberately ignored the emotional perspective
leaving it to families.
This is to assume that the expression of the emotion can be separated
from actions of care.
In China, such a separation is very difficult.
The expression of emotion is associated with the devotion of time and effort.
Parents praise their children in terms of whether they have visited their parents in person
whether they have brought their parents out, whether they have given money to the parents.
This expectation is not one sided.
The children have corresponding needs.
They feel guilty when they cannot contribute significantly to their parent’s care.
On the internet, there are endless pages supporting children who suffer,
who couldn't get over the guilt when their parents pass away.
They wish they had done more when their parents were alive.
People think differently as they grow older.
When they were young, they wanted to leave home.
When they become older, they set up their own families.
They started to appreciate what their parents have done for them.
However, in our decision making when we do not take into account
the life cycle facts, we may regret in the future.
Confucius offered some practical suggestions to this.
He said, when parents are alive, children should not travel afar.
In ancient China, when a person died, the son should return to home
and mourn for three years no matter how successful he is in his career.
The children were made to sacrifice according to these customs.
But these are attempts to guarantee parents are not uncared for and children are not trapped
in guilt psychologically.
In modern China, families do not follow these rituals.
Social and economic development agenda that tries to facilitate modernisation and globalisation
rips families apart, leaving parents and children separated.
When in the media there are more and more sensational and sad stories about families
being left behind, leading miserable lives
we know that the society's conscience is challenged.
The ancient solutions are suitable in agriculture society
where returning to home village was a realistic option.
However this is not the case in modern society.
The Chinese government tried to reintroduce the traditional moral values
by publishing a law to protect the older people's rights.
According to this law, children should visit their parents often.
But the law was criticised to the fact of public mockery.
How on earth are you going to implement this policy?
What if the children cannot fulfil such responsibilities?
Are you going to lock them up in prison cells so that they will not be able to see their parents again?
In real life, people do make efforts to reunite with their families.
Rural to urban migrants travel through cold winter days across the country
to meet their families during the Chinese new year.
This is not only in China and about Chinese.
When I travelled to Turkey, to India, to Europe
the flights were packed with migrants returning home.
What made these long and strenuous journeys particularly moving
is the time, the effort and the warmth
that people brought back to their families.
Researchers complain about the cost of modernisation on family relationships.
However we also see interesting technical developments
which helps to reinforce family connections.
In China, some real estate developers came up with the design so that parents and children
can live next door to each other, going through separate entrances.
For children staying far away, there are also technical solutions.
When the internet calling software was invented, such as Skype
my life was transformed.
I could show my parents around my house
hearing my mother making uninvited comments on my cooking
through the internet.
When I have internet shopping I could buy goods and services
and deliver them to my parents' home as if I just live next door.
When there are high speed trains, migrants journey back home were made so much easier.
When we have ticket apps on the mobile phone, migrant workers do not have queue for days
to get tickets.
A friend's mother lives in a care home in China.
She sleeps on a "smart" mattress with sensors.
The carer uses a mobile phone app to sync information about her mother's health status.
My friend decided to download the software herself so that she can monitor
her mother's health status when she's in Sydney.
The inventor told me that she originally designed this software for social work professionals.
But it was also downloaded by children living far away.
Seeing these changes, I couldn't help thinking
do we need the traditional solutions such as rules and laws to fix the rituals
for our family relationships.
When emotional needs are strong, innovations may help as much.
Having said this, technical changes can be random.
We cannot expect them to fix everything.
It is time for policy makers and researchers, including scientists and social scientists
to think about, to figure out how to integrate family needs into the development agenda.
Not only take account of individuals but also families
so that when we pursue the development
we do not need to rip the most basic unit of our society apart.
This is a grand challenge.