The heartwrenching story of six million Chinese children left alone

Four children were found dead last week in Guizhou province in southern China. The police said the children had been living alone for six months and killed themselves by ingesting pesticides. Their tragic deaths lay bare the tough ordeal facing a third of kids in the Chinese countryside, forced to fend for themselves when their parents leave to work in the cities.

The four children – brothers and sisters between the ages of 5 to 13— had been fending for themselves for several years. Their mother had abandoned them and their father had left their home region of Bijie to work in a city 1,400 kilometers away. He had hoped to provide a better life for himself and his children. No one else in the family was able to look after them.

In a goodbye letter, the eldest sibling wrote that he could no longer stand the pressure of looking after his brothers and sisters while studying at the same time, as his dad had wanted. But it’s not the first time that children left behind by their parents have died in Bijie. In 2012, five children suffocated to death after inhaling toxic fumes from a fire they had started in a bin to keep warm.

Like 242 million other peasants, the father of these children ‘emigrated’ from the Chinese countryside in order to find work in the city. The phenomenon began sweeping Chinese society back in 1979 when the country first began opening up to the world. However, often, parents are unable to bring their children with them when they emigrate. One reason for this is that, since the 1950s, ‘Hukou’ – China’s registration system - has linked a person’s right to social security and education to an address registered at birth. Ironically, this measure was put in place in order to avoid such a rural exodus. That means that kids have no access to education if they go with their parents to the cities.

Currently, roughly six million children have thus been left to fend for themselves. That’s one third of China’s rural child population, according to a report by the All-China Women’s Federation. In the provinces hit hardest by the rural exodus, such as Henan, Sichuan or Guizhou, up to one in two children in the countryside has been ‘abandoned’ by his or her parents.

Making matters worse, Chinese law has no provisions set aside for looking after such children. Most of the time, the kids live with their grandparents, other members of the family, or family friends. Their parents, who are also forced to deal with a higher cost of living in the cities, send back whatever little money they put aside. The Chinese state also gives children a poverty allowance which can be up to 2000 yuans [300 Euros] a year for each household.

''It’s become almost normal for them to only see their parents once a year”

The Xiaoxing NGO visits a family. The mother (to the right), a former city migrant worker, decided to return home to oversee her daughters’ education. Photo posted on the NGO’s blog.

Twelve students, including me, went to Bijie to work with an association called Xiaoxing. It’s one of only a handful of grassroots initiatives that help the abandoned children in the region. Chinese NGOs don’t receive much in the way of money. Ours doesn’t receive any government funding at all, for example. The government also clamps down on foreign NGOs so it is hard for them to make a difference. We were the only organisation on the ground in Bijie, where we helped to support local schoolchildren.

The conditions in which they study are tough: there’s only one high school for 12 local villages. Some kids who live particularly far away have to walk for more than an hour to get here. There are only two classes, each made up of about 50 schoolchildren. There are also only two permanent teachers. Half of the children in the class in which I worked were kids whose parents had left them behind to go work in the city. Despite the constraints under which they live, the children are highly motivated and take school very seriously: they know that studying is their only way to leave the village.

In the Chinese countryside, no one bothers with the country’s one-child policy and there are many large families. Siblings help each other out in order to study. The eldest child often cooks for the younger ones. It also falls upon the eldest to teach them discipline, especially when their grand-parents are too old to look after them. The worst cases I’ve seen are those in which the children themselves are forced to quit school in order to look after their sick grandparents.

Often the children only see their parents once a year, during the Chinese New Year. It’s become almost normal for them. It’s generally the only moment when the parents can get time off, given that they often work very far away and, as a result, getting back home can involve days of travel.

Children from a school in Liangyan rehearse a theatre performance, overseen by volunteers from the Xiaoxing NGO. Photos posted on the blog of Xiaoxing.

"We wanted to bring them ‘human’ support”

At first, the Xiaoxing organisation tried to help the school out financially. We bought tables, opened a library and gave them more schoolbooks. But in the end we realised that giving money just wasn’t enough, so we launched a volunteer project last year in order to give them ‘human’ support. Last summer, we wrote a play with the kids and rehearsed it together. Some of the kids I worked with still write to me. One of the girls said that the play was her “best summer memory.”

What we’re doing today is very low-scale. We’d like to see other NGOs start working in the same area and we also need more financial support. Ideally, we need to get the parents to return to the Chinese countryside, as well as teachers. But as long as the difference in wage levels between rural and urban China stays so high, it’s difficult to imagine that ever happening.

This post was written with France 24 journalist Weiyu Tsien (@WeiyuQ).