| Popis: |
Being the world’s most populous country with growing geographic and social disparities, child begging and missing children has been reported in some Chinese cities and has become a major social issue with growing national attention. The booming of Internet use in general and location-based social media in particular have equipped Chinese citizens with the tools needed to voluntarily engage in several recent rescue efforts toward child beggars, as well as to help the missing children find their way back home. Although academic research on child beggars and missing children has gained increasing attentions in some parts of the world, limited number of studies have addressed the geographic patterns of these two unique population in China. In this article, we provided an overview of child beggars and missing children issue in China, based on the observations from two Chinese social media platforms. Using a representative sample of volunteered geographic information crawled from Sina Weibo and Baby Back Home, this paper examined the geographic distribution of child beggars and missing children in China respectively, and explored how social media platform via Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has empowered citizens to help rescue child beggars and missing children find their way back home. Our results showed that VGI can serve as a powerful data source for studying the complexity and diversity of child beggars and missing children issues in Chinese cities. As these bottom-up citizen efforts have become a new force of activism in China, a more comprehensive policy and effective legal environment to protect children’s right are sorely needed and China still lags behind compared to the West. |
