What Price Progress?
"Please do not forget the mission of compulsory education. Please spread love and responsibility like sunshine. This is also a tragedy of 'left-behind children', which is a sign of the time and requires introspection from family, society and government."
Chinese Xinhua News Agency
Give a thought for the children. Whose parents seek work, travelling from their rural villages to China's huge cities looking for employment. The jobs they find will be in factories where they will be hard worked and earn subsistence wages. Whatever is left over from paying their rent in huge worker warrens operated by the companies they work for, and their food, is sent back home to their towns and villages.
The children are left with the older generation. Children, it should be recalled, of the one-child policy, although in the countryside monitoring that policy may not always be as strict as it is in urban centres. These children are valued as the next generation. Left in the care of their grandparents. Themselves impoverished and elderly and whose health is compromised by hard work and agedness.
Five boys between the ages of 9 and 13, all related as brothers or cousins, themselves the sons of three brothers, left with their blind grandmother, living with her largely unsupervised. They left their home village of Caqiangyan, and got as far as the city of Bijie, about 25 kilometres away. They were on their own for over a week.
On their own they had to find a way to survive, to find food and shelter and warmth from the cold. They made a shelter for themselves inside a garbage bin. And to keep warm they lit a fire on a cold, damp night, November 15. And then all the boys died of carbon monoxide poisoning, that silent killer that does not warn beforehand of its deadly intentions.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported the boys had poor school grades and decided to drop out of classes. Now China is mourning yet another child tragedy. In a country that is developing swiftly through its blend of capitalism and communism where a steadily growing middle class celebrates the good life, while a far larger indigent population stumbles on.
It is estimated that 58 million children across the country live without adequate adult supervision, or they are in the care of grandparents while their parents look for stable work in the booming cities. The report went on to remark that two of the fathers of those dead children found employment as garbage collectors in Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.
Labels: China, Health, Heritage, Human Fallibility
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, November 22, 2012
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