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For two decades, Yuan Lihai, an illiterate woman in Lankao County, central China’s Henan Province, had been respected for her loving heart. In 1987, Yuan brought home an abandoned newborn with a cleft lip and took care of him as her own child. The charitable action fueled by motherly nature has never stopped.
Since then Yuan has fostered more than 100 abandoned children, many with congenital conditions such as infantile paralysis, albinism and mental disorders, and supported them by running vendor stalls beside a hospital gate. Some children she rescued over the years are now adults with families.
Yuan, who is also the biological mother to one daughter and two sons, has become a local celebrity for her acts of kindness. People even left unwanted infants at her doorstep. Although her home has been an unregistered and unlicensed foster home in violation of regulations, the local government had been acquiescent and sometimes even actively supportive until recently. Besides distributing food and cash irregularly to Yuan, the local government has also qualified her and 19 of her foster children for subsistence subsidies, 87 yuan ($14) per person per month.
That was until one of her wards, playing with fire, ignited a blaze engulfing the twostory house that sheltered 18 of Yuan’s foster children on the morning of January 4, 2013. The fire claimed the lives of six children under 5 years old who were abandoned for birth defects such as deafness and cerebral palsy, as well as Yuan’s 20-year-old foster son who suffered from congenital leg deformities. One 11-year-old was also injured. Yuan was walking her other foster children to school at the time of the fire.
Media inquiry into the disaster turned Yuan into a controversial figure. In defense of their actions, local civil affairs officials said that Yuan could not be persuaded to send her foster children to a government-run orphanage because of her reluctance to abandon deep bonds with the children.
People were also shocked to hear Yuan saying that at least 30 percent of the children she adopted died prematurely due to their poor health conditions and her inability to afford complicated medical treatment.
However, Yuan’s experience revealed more of the failure of China’s child welfare system and the badly needed support to non-governmental children’s facilities.
“If I didn’t take the babies home, they would be dying out there,” Yuan told Yangcheng Evening News, a newspaper published in Guangzhou, southern Guangdong Province, on January 5. An important reason behind the surge of Yuan’s foster children was that Lankao, one of the poorest counties in Henan with a population of around 800,000, doesn’t have a public orphanage. The plan to build one was only approved by the Ministry of Civil Affairs(MCA) in December 2012 and construction is scheduled to start this year. Not long ago, orphans and abandoned children from the area were rejected by the only government-run orphanage in Kaifeng, a city not far from Lankao, due to limited capacity, Feng Jie, a local civil affairs official told The Beijing News. It was not until September 2011 that the homeless shelter provided temporary care for deserted infants before sending them to the orphanage in Kaifeng.
The provincial picture is no more cheerful. The Civil Affairs Department of Henan estimates between 50,000 and 80,000 children are born with disabilities in the province every year, with thousands of disabled infants abandoned annually. However, only 1,000 of these abandoned children were sent to government-run orphanages.
According to official figures, there are more than 5,600 orphans and children with disabilities in the almost full government-run child welfare institutions in Henan.
“The Lankao fire is not an isolated incident. Without a functioning child welfare system, tragedies are likely to happen in other places too,” said Wang Zhenyao, a former civil affairs official who is now director of the One Foundation Philanthropic Research Institute at Beijing Normal University.
Child welfare laws and facilities, long established in other countries, are still lacking in China. They are a fundamental guarantee of child welfare and without them, child care is little more than a series of well-meant phrases, according to Wang.
A dearth of legislation is the main problem.“Only when enforceable laws are enacted will the authorities be able to help ‘kindness mothers’ such as Yuan,” said Wang.
Insufficient input
The MCA said on January 6, 2013 that a monthlong safety inspection of orphanages run by individuals and private operators will be carried out nationwide.
A ministry statement said that civil affairs authorities should mobilize local officials to collect information on the conditions of non-public adoption institutions, including unregistered ones.
If these facilities do not meet requirements, the children should be relocated to government-run child welfare institutions, said a ministry statement.
However, whether government-run institutions have the capacity to accommodate all children from unqualified facilities is still in doubt.
According to statistics provided by the MCA, China has some 615,000 orphans, a figure fluctuating year by year. Around 109,000 of these live in government-run child welfare institutions, with the rest being fostered by relatives or private orphanages. Only 64 government-run child welfare institutions exist at the county level, the ministry said.
According to Child Welfare in China 2010, a report compiled by the MCA, UN International Children’s Emergency Fund and the School of Social Development and Public Policy of Beijing Normal University, publicly funded child welfare facilities in China mainly accommodate orphans or deserted children found in cities, but orphans in the countryside have to rely on the support of relatives and rural collectives.
“The number of government-run orphanages is still far too small to meet the demand of able-bodied orphans, let alone those with congenital diseases, Wang said. “Non-public child welfare homes are a necessary support for adoption. However, without effective policies, sufficient investment and well-trained workers, it will be difficult to develop these institutions.”
In 2009, the MCA ruled that each orphan being raised by welfare agencies should be provided with a subsistence allowance of at least 1,000 yuan ($161) per month. Children housed by individuals should receive a minimum of 600 yuan ($97).
However, in reality, a large number of orphans are neither recognized on government records nor receiving state allowances due to their failure to present parents’ death certificates or presumption of death required for registration. Xu Jianzhong, an official with the MCA, said at a recent symposium that in the remote countryside, relatives fostering orphans with one parent dead and the other missing often find it difficult to obtain documents showing presumption of death.
The strict identity confirmation requirements for orphans have also made it difficult for abandoned children to apply for state allowances, Wang said.
Meanwhile, the lack of an inclusive child welfare system has made the lives of other groups of disadvantaged children more difficult. For example, none of the abandoned infants adopted by Yuan had received state allowances as her facility was unregistered.
Desperate for support
In China, non-public children foster facilities have long complained about the daunting procedures to register as a non-profit organization.
Zhang Shuqin founded a child foster institution in 1996, focusing on helping those with parents serving terms in jail. The institution now has six branches across China and has helped more than 4,000 children.
Zhang said that her institution failed to register as a non-profit organization mainly because no government department wanted to supervise it as required by law. “As the supervising department would also be held accountable if the operation of the supervised organization went wrong, few government departments are willing to take the responsibility,” Zhang told The Economic Observer, a Beijing business weekly. Eventually Zhang’s institution had to register as an enterprise, which forbids it from fundraising, and has to run its own farms and orchards to support the children it fostered.
According to Child Welfare in China 2011, China had over 5 million people with disabilities aged below 17; the number of children whose lives are affected by HIV/ AIDS was between 496,000 and 894,000; 58 million children in rural areas were left behind to live with relatives by their parents who seek employment in cities.
The country is still reeling from the shocking deaths of five street children poisoned by carbon monoxide inhalation after lighting a fire to fend off the cold, on November 16, 2012, in Bijie, southwestern Guizhou Province. They were the sons of three brothers, two of whom had left Bijie to scrape a living collecting rubbish in Guangdong. Bodies of the boys were found the next morning in a trash bin where they burned charcoal to stay warm.
Hou Yuangao is secretary general of a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping women and children with difficulties caused by poverty or drug addiction in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, one of China’s poorest regions. Hou told The Economic Observer that his organization helped more than 2,000 children over the past four years.
Hou said that in the prefecture, the number of children whose parents could not support them due to extreme poverty, drug addiction or HIV/AIDS is about thrice the number of orphans. However, these children only receive a 135-yuan ($22) monthly allowance each from the local government.
“It is proven internationally that foster care in institutions is not the best way to raise children. In recent years, the model of foster families explored by welfare institutions around China proves effective in creating a better environment for orphans to grow up,” said an MCA press release.
The ministry also said that it will continue to purchase services from qualified non-public foster facilities and improve their conditions by supporting them.
Since then Yuan has fostered more than 100 abandoned children, many with congenital conditions such as infantile paralysis, albinism and mental disorders, and supported them by running vendor stalls beside a hospital gate. Some children she rescued over the years are now adults with families.
Yuan, who is also the biological mother to one daughter and two sons, has become a local celebrity for her acts of kindness. People even left unwanted infants at her doorstep. Although her home has been an unregistered and unlicensed foster home in violation of regulations, the local government had been acquiescent and sometimes even actively supportive until recently. Besides distributing food and cash irregularly to Yuan, the local government has also qualified her and 19 of her foster children for subsistence subsidies, 87 yuan ($14) per person per month.
That was until one of her wards, playing with fire, ignited a blaze engulfing the twostory house that sheltered 18 of Yuan’s foster children on the morning of January 4, 2013. The fire claimed the lives of six children under 5 years old who were abandoned for birth defects such as deafness and cerebral palsy, as well as Yuan’s 20-year-old foster son who suffered from congenital leg deformities. One 11-year-old was also injured. Yuan was walking her other foster children to school at the time of the fire.
Media inquiry into the disaster turned Yuan into a controversial figure. In defense of their actions, local civil affairs officials said that Yuan could not be persuaded to send her foster children to a government-run orphanage because of her reluctance to abandon deep bonds with the children.
People were also shocked to hear Yuan saying that at least 30 percent of the children she adopted died prematurely due to their poor health conditions and her inability to afford complicated medical treatment.
However, Yuan’s experience revealed more of the failure of China’s child welfare system and the badly needed support to non-governmental children’s facilities.
“If I didn’t take the babies home, they would be dying out there,” Yuan told Yangcheng Evening News, a newspaper published in Guangzhou, southern Guangdong Province, on January 5. An important reason behind the surge of Yuan’s foster children was that Lankao, one of the poorest counties in Henan with a population of around 800,000, doesn’t have a public orphanage. The plan to build one was only approved by the Ministry of Civil Affairs(MCA) in December 2012 and construction is scheduled to start this year. Not long ago, orphans and abandoned children from the area were rejected by the only government-run orphanage in Kaifeng, a city not far from Lankao, due to limited capacity, Feng Jie, a local civil affairs official told The Beijing News. It was not until September 2011 that the homeless shelter provided temporary care for deserted infants before sending them to the orphanage in Kaifeng.
The provincial picture is no more cheerful. The Civil Affairs Department of Henan estimates between 50,000 and 80,000 children are born with disabilities in the province every year, with thousands of disabled infants abandoned annually. However, only 1,000 of these abandoned children were sent to government-run orphanages.
According to official figures, there are more than 5,600 orphans and children with disabilities in the almost full government-run child welfare institutions in Henan.
“The Lankao fire is not an isolated incident. Without a functioning child welfare system, tragedies are likely to happen in other places too,” said Wang Zhenyao, a former civil affairs official who is now director of the One Foundation Philanthropic Research Institute at Beijing Normal University.
Child welfare laws and facilities, long established in other countries, are still lacking in China. They are a fundamental guarantee of child welfare and without them, child care is little more than a series of well-meant phrases, according to Wang.
A dearth of legislation is the main problem.“Only when enforceable laws are enacted will the authorities be able to help ‘kindness mothers’ such as Yuan,” said Wang.
Insufficient input
The MCA said on January 6, 2013 that a monthlong safety inspection of orphanages run by individuals and private operators will be carried out nationwide.
A ministry statement said that civil affairs authorities should mobilize local officials to collect information on the conditions of non-public adoption institutions, including unregistered ones.
If these facilities do not meet requirements, the children should be relocated to government-run child welfare institutions, said a ministry statement.
However, whether government-run institutions have the capacity to accommodate all children from unqualified facilities is still in doubt.
According to statistics provided by the MCA, China has some 615,000 orphans, a figure fluctuating year by year. Around 109,000 of these live in government-run child welfare institutions, with the rest being fostered by relatives or private orphanages. Only 64 government-run child welfare institutions exist at the county level, the ministry said.
According to Child Welfare in China 2010, a report compiled by the MCA, UN International Children’s Emergency Fund and the School of Social Development and Public Policy of Beijing Normal University, publicly funded child welfare facilities in China mainly accommodate orphans or deserted children found in cities, but orphans in the countryside have to rely on the support of relatives and rural collectives.
“The number of government-run orphanages is still far too small to meet the demand of able-bodied orphans, let alone those with congenital diseases, Wang said. “Non-public child welfare homes are a necessary support for adoption. However, without effective policies, sufficient investment and well-trained workers, it will be difficult to develop these institutions.”
In 2009, the MCA ruled that each orphan being raised by welfare agencies should be provided with a subsistence allowance of at least 1,000 yuan ($161) per month. Children housed by individuals should receive a minimum of 600 yuan ($97).
However, in reality, a large number of orphans are neither recognized on government records nor receiving state allowances due to their failure to present parents’ death certificates or presumption of death required for registration. Xu Jianzhong, an official with the MCA, said at a recent symposium that in the remote countryside, relatives fostering orphans with one parent dead and the other missing often find it difficult to obtain documents showing presumption of death.
The strict identity confirmation requirements for orphans have also made it difficult for abandoned children to apply for state allowances, Wang said.
Meanwhile, the lack of an inclusive child welfare system has made the lives of other groups of disadvantaged children more difficult. For example, none of the abandoned infants adopted by Yuan had received state allowances as her facility was unregistered.
Desperate for support
In China, non-public children foster facilities have long complained about the daunting procedures to register as a non-profit organization.
Zhang Shuqin founded a child foster institution in 1996, focusing on helping those with parents serving terms in jail. The institution now has six branches across China and has helped more than 4,000 children.
Zhang said that her institution failed to register as a non-profit organization mainly because no government department wanted to supervise it as required by law. “As the supervising department would also be held accountable if the operation of the supervised organization went wrong, few government departments are willing to take the responsibility,” Zhang told The Economic Observer, a Beijing business weekly. Eventually Zhang’s institution had to register as an enterprise, which forbids it from fundraising, and has to run its own farms and orchards to support the children it fostered.
According to Child Welfare in China 2011, China had over 5 million people with disabilities aged below 17; the number of children whose lives are affected by HIV/ AIDS was between 496,000 and 894,000; 58 million children in rural areas were left behind to live with relatives by their parents who seek employment in cities.
The country is still reeling from the shocking deaths of five street children poisoned by carbon monoxide inhalation after lighting a fire to fend off the cold, on November 16, 2012, in Bijie, southwestern Guizhou Province. They were the sons of three brothers, two of whom had left Bijie to scrape a living collecting rubbish in Guangdong. Bodies of the boys were found the next morning in a trash bin where they burned charcoal to stay warm.
Hou Yuangao is secretary general of a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping women and children with difficulties caused by poverty or drug addiction in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, one of China’s poorest regions. Hou told The Economic Observer that his organization helped more than 2,000 children over the past four years.
Hou said that in the prefecture, the number of children whose parents could not support them due to extreme poverty, drug addiction or HIV/AIDS is about thrice the number of orphans. However, these children only receive a 135-yuan ($22) monthly allowance each from the local government.
“It is proven internationally that foster care in institutions is not the best way to raise children. In recent years, the model of foster families explored by welfare institutions around China proves effective in creating a better environment for orphans to grow up,” said an MCA press release.
The ministry also said that it will continue to purchase services from qualified non-public foster facilities and improve their conditions by supporting them.