[...]These tragedies have nothing to do with the system, there are evil people in the world, that’s all. Sooner or later, you’re bound to come into contact with the evil of humanity. My grandfather told me, before he passed, that not all people you see walking along the streets are human: some are demons wearing human clothes.

[...]I truly don’t think it has anything to do with the system. Although China has always had this or that problem with protecting women and children, this is the result of the level of development in the economy and society. I have also done some research and found that in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, a woman who was only 20 years old put her newborn infant in the refrigerator, where the baby died. The autopsy showed that the poor child was still alive when she was put in the fridge.

[...]It’s clear that such cruel murders of infants occur in China and abroad. They just do not believe in hell. The act of killing a baby is not related to the system or education. The “human evil” of the individual is the source of violent acts.[...]

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The baby’s unintended abduction captivated China and led to one of the largest manhunts in recent memory. By 7:30 Monday morning, provincial radio had broadcast a notice asking listeners to watch out for the family’s gray Toyota RAV4 and the infant. The search lasted into the next day, with taxi drivers joining a police search that stretched into neighboring provinces.

“We night drivers have all come out, we’re calling each other, we were out with the day shift,” a taxi driver was quoted telling the provincial television station Monday night.

Other media outlets described citizens driving around Changchun with their breastfeeding wives to provide for the infant in case he was found.

On Tuesday morning, police reported, inspectors identified the stolen car in a residential parking lot 20 miles outside the city. The infant’s clothing was found nearby.

Soon the thief turned himself into police and admitted strangling Haobo. Chinese netizens have compared the case to a similar case in New York, in which the thief left the child unharmed and called the police to report his whereabouts. From the NPR blog:

In two different countries, two grey SUVs were stolen with babies still inside, while the parents popped into supermarkets. There’s an uncanny similarity between the two cases, even though one happened in Changchun in northeastern China, the other in the Bronx. But how the cases played out is very different.

In the American case, which happened last month, as The New York Post puts it, “The silver Jeep was found abandoned just over an hour later with the child unharmed — after the perp phoned in the car’s location to police.”

[...]

The grisly fate of 2-month-old Haobo has led to an outpouring of shock and grief online. “The difference between China and the U.S. is not just the crime rate,” commented a young writer named Sun Yuchen, who works for the outspoken Southern Weekly newspaper, “The fractured Chinese reality has made people lose their basic morality. We are becoming a nation with no bottom line, no humanity.”

The Washington Post blog has more on the reaction to the crime by netizens and residents of Changchun, where Baby Haobo was killed:

As thousands turned out for a candlelight vigil in Changchun, sorrow online turned to hand-wringing and even anger over the money-crazed values of China’s new society.

“How did the social security become this bad? How did man lose all his humanity?” posted one mother named Che Xiaoyan.

And the Guardian reports on the way story has been controlled by propaganda authorities, and used by commercial enterprises:

Other posts held a mirror up to the intense government control and crass commercialism that define life in China. Journalists leaked a circular from the Changchun propaganda department instructing local media on how to report on the crisis. “No frontpage coverage allowed,” it said. “There shall be no questioning of the police’s work.” Posts containing the instructions have since been deleted by internet censors.

A Buick dealership in a neighbouring province used a picture of the baby in a microblog post advertising a GPS system that would guarantee customers “peace of mind” in similar circumstances. The dealership was skewered by netizens – “go die” wrote one – and subsequently issued an apology.

Jalopnik.com has more about the Buick ad.

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The five children, all male and with ages ranging from four to six, were discovered by local villagers in Majiang county at 5:40 pm.

Four of the boys were dead upon being discovered, while the fifth died in the hospital, the county publicity department said.

The children come from five different families. Their parents were helping out at a wedding dinner held for one of their fellow villagers and had apparently left them unattended.

An initial investigation showed that the children died due to suffocation after straw in the abandoned house was ignited.

AP reports it was unclear why the boys decided to burn the hay:

The deaths Monday in the southwestern province of Guizhou focused attention on the welfare of children in one of China’s poorest regions.

Three months ago, five runaway boys in the same province died inside a garbage bin, where they lit a fire to stay warm on a cold, damp night in the city of Bijie. Media reports said those boys were largely unsupervised because their parents had sought work in more prosperous parts of the country, and the incident prompted nationwide soul-searching on China’s wealth gap and the effects of its economic boom on families in rural areas.

State-run China Central Television said the government gave each of the five families 22,000 yuan ($3,500) and 100 kilograms (220 pounds) of rice as consolation.

According to the South China Morning Post, the villagers used the shack to process tobacco, but it has been abandoned. The shack was poorly ventilated and had only one exit.

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Four children died at the scene in Lankao county and three died on the way to hospital, Xinhua news agency said.

One other child, aged about 10, is being treated in hospital. The cause of the fire is not yet clear.

Local residents say that a woman named as Yuan Lihai had used the house to shelter orphans and abandoned children.

It remained unclear how many children were in the house at the time.

According to AP, the fire occurred at an illegal shelter run by Yuan, who took in and cared for 18 abandoned children and young adults:

“There is a direct relationship between today’s situation and the fact that some related government departments failed to enforce supervision and loosened management on purpose,” deputy county governor Wu Changsheng said at a Saturday press conference as quoted by the news report. “They should shoulder responsibility, and that’s a loophole in our work.”

Wu also told reporters that the local government had provided some assistance to Yuan to help her care for the children.

The deaths have spotlighted China’s lack of government-run child services, which have often been left to private citizens with few resources and no legal authority. It is unclear whether Yuan would be punished.

On China’s social media, the public have shown overwhelming sympathy toward Yuan. A Saturday editorial by the official Xinhua News Agency blamed the local government’s inaction and media — who had previously praised Yuan’s actions — for the tragedy.

Although some netizens and officials have expressed sympathy for Yuan, others have accused Yuan of using the children to make money, China Daily reports:

“Yuan generally didn’t stay with the children at night. She hired a local person to take charge of their daily lives. She doesn’t earn much by selling snacks at the gate of the county hospital, so where does all the money (to run the home) come from?” asked one neighbor, who declined to be named.

Some experts and media reports claimed that the local officials have made Yuan a scapegoat because of the public outcry, which has drawn attention to both the inadequate provisions afforded to orphans and a lack of child welfare.

The basis of adoption is not simply being kind-hearted, said Zhang Zhiwei, a lawyer in Beijing, who has followed cases of adoption for more than five years. He attributed the tragedy in Lankao to the lack of a coherent policy. The government should be responsible for the care of orphans, he said.

“Before the tragedy, Yuan’s work won great approval from society. She almost wore a halo. But after the fire, everyone pointed the finger of blame at her.”

As a result of this fire, six county officials have been suspended, from another AP article:

A man from the main office of Lankao government who would only give his surname, Zhao, said Tuesday that six officials had been suspended but he gave no other details.

The deputy county governor had already said that some departments had failed in supervision and management and should shoulder responsibility.

The Global Times reports the fire has provided fuel for the debate on children’s welfare:

The Lankao orphanage fire provides food for thought. There are no accurate statistics showing how many abandoned babies are adopted each year. But we know the total must be large given that more than 80 percent of adopted children were once abandoned babies, and that children born with physical or mental disabilities are all too often given up by their parents.

These large numbers of kids deserve help from the government, private organizations and other social forces. Systematic regulation should be there to clarify responsibilities and standardize procedures.

Unfortunately, China severely lags behind in setting up systems regulating the adoption of abandoned babies and laws that guarantee and protect children’s welfare.

However, further regulation measures are missing, and in reality, many problems exist such as unqualified adoptive parents, illegal adoption procedures and poor supervision. Without clear regulation, local governments turn a blind eye to the adoption of abandoned children.

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Post tags: abandoned children, child safety, children, fire, Global Times, Henan, orphanages, orphans
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At least 10 people, including five children, died when their overloaded minibus plunged into a mountain valley in southern China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a string of such accidents which have sparked public anger.

The nine-seat vehicle was carrying 20 people when it ran off the road in Guangxi region, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Ten survived, including a three-month-old infant who was in critical condition, it added.

The deaths of 18 nursery school children in a bus crash in November last year caused a wave of fury and prompted Premier Wen Jiabao to pledge more money for rural bus services, especially for those carrying children.

Chinese state media reports aside from the ten killed, another ten have been injured, according to Xinhua:

The 10 injured are receiving treatment, including a three-month-old infant who is in critical condition, the spokesman said.

The infant’s mother, 24-year-old Wei Yuefang, said she and her family were in the minibus heading for the home village of Bahaotun in Qibainong township to attend a wedding.

She said she was carrying her sleeping daughter when the accident happened, adding that they were thrown out of the vehicle while it was falling into the valley.

The cause of the accident is under investigation.

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Xinhua says an initial investigation found that the seven-seater van — carrying 15 children and two adults — was speeding on a rural road that was undergoing repairs and ended up in a 3-meter (yard)-deep pond Monday morning.

Three children died at the scene, while eight others died later in hospital.

Most of the victims were the children of migrant workers and lived with their grandparents.

Xinhua said Tuesday that the privately run kindergarten had operated without a license and officials have ordered it closed.

According to the BBC, four of the children survived the crash in Jiangxi:

Many vehicles in rural parts of China are badly maintained.

In November last year, the deaths of 18 young children in a bus crash caused public outrage and led authorities to promise more money for school bus services.

It is unclear what caused this latest accident, but police have detained the driver of the van.

State broadcaster China Central Television suggested the van was travelling too fast and had swerved to avoid a parked vehicle before crashing.

The Ministry of Education also commented on the recent string of incidents involving children, from the Wall Street Journal:

In a circular issued on Tuesday, the ministry described such events as “heartbreaking” and singled out the Monday crash involving a school van from a privately owned kindergarten in China’s southeastern Jiangxi province.

The ministry’s statement outlined steps aimed at increasing protection offered to young children, calling for increased safeguards against traffic accidents, greater security at schools and stepped-up vigilance during the winter months to prevent death and injury from fires, carbon monoxide poisoning and accidents related to ice skating.

The ministry said schools should carry out safety education programs ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday—a period when skating and fireworks-related accidents are common.

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After the Newtown attack, a Chinese commentator with a nationalist bent wrote, “When I see these democratic elites pretending to condemn the murderer, it seems absurd. You are the people who sustain the gun policy. You are also the people who condemn the shooter.” And another:

As the ‘free, democratic, human-rights-based’ land of heaven, the one that has lectured other countries everyday for a hundred years about ‘freedom, democracy, and human rights,’ even to the point of armed intervention, America should calm down and examine its own gun-control policy.

It takes a lot to make China’s government—beset, as it is, by corruption and opacity and the paralyzing effects of special interests—look good, by comparison, in the eyes of its people these days. But we’ve done it. When Chinese viewers looked at the two attacks side by side, more than a few of them concluded, as this one did that, “from the look of it, there’s no difference between a ‘developed’ country and a ‘developing’ country. And there’s no such thing as human rights. People are the most violent creatures on earth, and China, with its ban on guns, is doing pretty well!”

The Chinese government has taken the opportunity to urge the Obama administration to enact stricter gun laws, through an editorial in Xinhua News Agency:

Obama said of the latest tragedy the country had “been through this too many times,” and it was time to put aside political differences and “take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this.”

Some people have noticed Obama’s tougher tone this time, compared to the Colorado shooting, when he called for “prayer and reflection.”

Action speaks louder than words. If Obama wants to take practical measures to control guns, he has to make preparation for a protracted war and considerable political cost.

But online comments translated by chinaSMACK show a different side of Chinese responses, with many comparing the government reactions to the two incidents:

The United States have lowered their flags to half-mast, I want to know what China has done.

我抵制日货：

Democracy is a very complicated thing, so complicated that it is the only thing Chinese people have not been successful in shanzhai‘ing.

Sunder_Coo：

We’re unable to treat the elderly well and we’re also unable to keep our children safe. We have no past and we’ve lost the future as well…

[...]

JACKIE梦里不知身是客：

Yesterday, I watched an entire day’s worth of CCTV4 news. I watched how America is in chaos and an abyss of suffering, with guns spreading unchecked, and had no idea whatsoever about the extremely tragic crime in Henan! May the children rest in peace.

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Local police said they had seized the suspect, a 36-year-old villager named Min Yingjun.

The attack happened at around 7:40 a.m. at the entrance of Chenpeng Village Primary School in Wenshu Township of Guangshan County in the city of Xinyang, a police officer said on condition of anonymity.

China is no stranger to acts of mass violence against children –  In September, a man entered a childcare center in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and killed three children with an axe. Similar attacks occurred on the streets of Gongyi in Henan Province and at a childcare center for migrant workers in Shanghai in 2011.

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The man rushed into the centre in the autonomous region of Guangxi Zhuang in the middle of the day and began slashing the children, Xinhua said.

The age of the victims has not yet been reported.

A man identified only as Wu was later arrested by police in Pingnan county in connection with the attack.

A police investigation is now under way.

A similar incident occurred in a kindergarten in Wuhan in 2010.

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Xinhua Shizhaizi Co, Ltd (XHS) remitted more than 14 million yuan ($2.2 million) as an overdue payment for a real estate project, including over 8 million yuan in overdue wages for 500 migrant workers, to the intermediate people’s court in the prefecture of Dali.

Ma Zhonghua, mayor of the city of Dali, where the prefectural seat is located, said the government will ensure that relevant contractors and subcontractors pay their workers in full and on time.

The case drew public attention after 13 of the workers’ children, ranging from 5 years of age to 20, jointed their parents in protesting the company’s failure to pay last Tuesday. Photos of the protest taken by tourists were posted online, triggering calls for the protection of migrants’ rights.

[...]After the children joined their parents’ protests, the Dali city government demanded that XHS settle the issue.

Wall Street Journal’s China Realtime Report translates a message from one little girl’s sign, and describes how the sentimentality that the children brought to the rally affected netizens:

“My name is Gao Jia,” read the sign held by one little girl. “I want to eat, to go to school, to drink milk, to eat cookies.”

[...]The appearance of the children appears to struck a chord with China’s sometimes jaded Internet users, prompting new interest in an issue that had fallen out of the headlines in recent years.

[...]While conflicts over unpaid wages have become routine, the children’s protest hovered near the top of Chinese search engine Baidu’s trending topics list throughout the day on Friday and garnered widespread sympathy from Internet users.

“While [a lot of us] are living cotent and happy lives, there are millions out there with no food to eat, no milk to drink,” wrote one user of Sina Corp.’s Weibo microblogging service Weibo.

Not everyone was thrilled with the use of children, including a disapproving microblogger who asked: “What kind of parent lets their five year-old demand their unpaid wages?”

Two photos of the picketing tots can be seen in Chinese language coverage of the protest.

For more on the struggle of China’s migrant workers, see prior CDT coverage. Also see “The Uncertain Future of Beijing’s Migrant Schools” and “Migration Pattern’s Change, Children Still Left Behind” for more on how the lifestyles of migrant laborers affect their successors.

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In a country where many workers earn an annual income of around $1,500, parents paid up to RMB 60,000, or US$9,500, to send their children on whirlwind tours of the continent’s sights. In addition to holiday photos, the children were expected to bring home skills like eating with a fork and knife and learning the appropriate time to clap at a classical music concert.

If it’s school-vacation holiday in China, then it’s study-tour time in Europe.

Chinese tourists, some 3 million of whom visited Western Europe in 2010, have already remade the traditional European Grand Tour according to their own tastes and consumer culture. Typical stops include Paris for romance and Louis Vuitton; Switzerland for mountains and chocolates; German towns like Trier, the birthplace of Karl Marx; and Metzingen, home to several factory outlets and the headquarters of Hugo Boss.

Chinese travelers have also emerged as the travel industry’s knights in shining armor, riding to the rescue of Europe’s industries suffering the effects of stagnant economic growth. In 2011, Chinese travelers accounted for 62 percent of Europe’s luxury goods sales according to one estimate.

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A report from the ministry said police rescued 8,660 abducted children and 15,458 women in 2011 as nearly 3,200 human trafficking gangs were broken up.

It did not give any figures for the total number of women and children abducted last year. Exact numbers of victims are difficult to obtain as China’s vast size, rural poverty and population of 1.3 billion mean many such cases never get reported beyond local areas.

The rescued children are usually put into orphanages while authorities try to reunite them with their families. In order to identify the rescued children, an “anti-abduction” DNA database has been set up to match missing children with their families.

“Public security organs across China will deepen the campaign against abductions to save more women and children and work hard to reduce the number of abduction and trafficking cases,” the ministry said.

Read more about the plight of kidnapped children in China via Charles Custer of China Geeks, who is producing a documentary film on the subject.

Update: Custer responds to the PSB report and compares their findings with his own:

That said, as someone who has spent the last year talking to the parents of kidnapped children, it is difficult to read the report without getting angry. It states, for example, that the disappearances of children are uniformly treated as criminal cases, and that these cases are to be “swiftly developed and investigated” with the same urgency the PSB might use in pursuing a murder case. But in actuality, everything we’ve heard from parents indicates that this is not how things work in practice. In every case we’ve looked into, police initially tell parents to look for their children themselves, assuming the child has run away or is visiting friends, and telling parents they won’t take the case until the child has been missing 24 hours2. When they do take the case, investigations are slow and remarkably lazy. In the 2011 disappearance of Lei Xiaoxia (one of the subjects of our film), it took police months to request surveillance footage from the school where Lei went missing — by which time it was already deleted — and nearly a year after her disappearance, the police still haven’t interviewed any potential witnesses.

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Xiao, 47, describes himself as the emperor of his family. As such, he’s laid down an extraordinary system of rules for his children.

“I have more than a thousand rules: specific detailed rules about how to hold your chopsticks and your bowl, how to pick up food, how to hold a cup, how to sleep, how to cover yourself with a quilt,” Xiao says. “If you don’t follow the rules, then I must beat you.”

For each violation of the rules, such as sleeping in the wrong position, the penalty is to be hit with a feather duster on the legs or the palm of the hand. If it doesn’t leave a mark, then it won’t make an impact, Xiao says.

Lim also interviews a 10-year-old who wrote a manual guiding children in strategies to combat authoritarian parents:

“Move No. 4 is useful. You run to Mom and throw yourself on her,” says Chen Leshui, who wrote the book. “Lots of kids say they use this because it makes Mom’s heart go soft, and it makes her cry.”

Leshui says she wrote the book with her friend Deng Xinyi after a particularly humiliating incident.

“Once, when I didn’t do so well in an exam, a friend came over to play, and my mom picked up my exam paper and said, ‘Your friends will all laugh at you,’ ” Leshui says. “My friend and I went to hide in my room and drew these pictures on pieces of paper.”

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A school bus taking primary students home slipped off a country road into an irrigation ditch in eastern China, killing 15 children and highlighting continuing safety problems in the country’s school transport system following a similar tragedy last month.

[...]The accident occurred Monday evening as the bus was traveling along a rural highway outside the city of Xuzhou in the province’s north. News reports said it careened off the road after swerving to avoid a pedicab. Xinhua said the driver had been detained for investigation.

[...]The crash comes amid an emotional national discussion over the poor condition of Chinese school buses and chronic underfunding of public schools, particularly in rural areas which have lagged far behind cities over the past three decades of rapid economic development.

An article in China Daily describes policy actions being drafted just prior to Monday’s crash aiming to prevent such accidents:

A day prior to the accident, the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council published draft regulations aimed at improving school bus safety, a move sparked by a nationwide outcry following the deaths of 19 children in an overcrowded, nine-seat bus.

[...] The draft proposed that school buses will have right of way in traffic under the command of police, the vehicles will be able to use bus lanes in rush hour, and private vehicles will be forbidden from overtaking a school bus picking up children.

It stipulates government will establish standards to test the quality of school buses, which now have to go through safety checks every six months.

While the Jiangsu case appears to have resulted in the most fatalities, it was not the only school bus crash to hit the news so far this week. Xinhua carries word of another devastating school bus crash that occurred yesterday:

Two students were killed, and more than 20 others were injured, including seven seriously, on Tuesday morning in a bus-truck collision in Zhumadian city of Central China’s Henan province, local government authorities said.

A bus rented by Gucheng Middle School collided with a truck at around 8:50 am Tuesday.  More than 50 students and teachers were on their way to a training campus when the bus they were on rammed into the truck, officials said.

And Shanghai Daily reports on yet another early week bus crash:

Thirty-seven pupils were injured after a school bus and a heavy truck crashed yesterday morning in Foshan City, south China’s Guangdong Province.The students were sent to hospitals for treatment and one of them was in intensive care for brain injuries[...]

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News of the donation ignited a torrent of criticism, with 500,000 comments posted by Monday to Sina Weibo, China’s most popular Twitter-like micro-blog service, run by Sina Corp. Many asked: How could China make the donation to a foreign country when Chinese schools contend with shoddy transport?

Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei would not comment on the online furor but did say the buses were provided under a 2010 agreement. He said China had accepted large amounts of foreign aid — including assistance from Macedonia during a major earthquake in Sichuan in 2008 — and was now providing assistance of its own.

Zhang Ming, a politics professor at Renmin University, suggested the donation was a betrayal to the Chinese people.

“One does not have to go through exams to get qualifications (to be a traitor). When one climbs up there and becomes a big official, one will have them,” he wrote on Sina Weibo.

Overcrowding vans and buses to bring children to school in rural areas is a common phenomenon, with a lack of funding and few options for safe transportation available. See photos of children crammed into a school van from 2009.

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