PHOTOS of a little girl sitting in class with a baby in her arms have caused an outpouring of concern over the plight of unattended rural children whose parents are working in faraway cities.

    The girl, 9-year-old Long Zhanghuan, was a second-grader when the photo was taken in July at a village school in the mountainous county of Fenghuang in the central province of Hunan.

    Long is now in third grade and at a different school even further away. The baby boy is her cousin. Long took him to school because she was worried that her grandparents were too busy to keep an eye on him.

    Long and her cousin belong to a group that is known in China as left-behind children — an estimated 58 million kids who are under custody of a single parent, grandparents, and sometimes a distant relative or a neighbor. Their parents have migrated to cities in search of work.

    The photo collection, entitled “Hush, brother is asleep,” has spread quickly on the Web after being posted on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging service, last week.

    Many Internet users posted comments, saying the motherlike, nurturing look on Long’s face and her baby cousin’s disproportionately large head — a sign of malnutrition — reduced them to tears.

    “You cannot help crying when poverty, helplessness and all the tough facts of the left-behind children’s lives are epitomized in one snapshot,” said a netizen with the screen name “Yannong.”

    Of the 34 students who study at Long’s former school, which has only three classes — one each for preschoolers, first-graders and second-graders, only four are living with parents, said their teacher Wu Xiaohui.

    “As their village is very close to the school, their unattended younger siblings often join them on campus,” Wu said.

    Photographer Lu Qixing, 55, didn’t expect his photos to make him instantly famous.

    Lu joined a team of volunteers to teach at Long’s school in mid-July. “The summer holiday had begun, but all the kids were called back to school to attend a four-day interactive course with us.”

    Long’s grandparents, aged 59 and 54, have three sons and two daughters, all of whom are working away from home, leaving behind eight children.

    “All the kids behave well. The older kids have learned to help their grandmother in the field and around the house,” said their grandfather Long Titing, who is disabled and spends most of his days at home.

    Long Zhanghuan is the second oldest of the children and often helps her grandmother toil in the field, cook, babysit the younger cousins and carry water from neighboring villages as their home village in Shanjiang Township is extremely arid.

    The hard work certainly isn’t fun, but the real agony for these children comes from missing their parents, Wu said.

    “When we read a text about spring in class, a boy told me he hates spring,” Wu said. “He said his favorite season is winter because his parents come home in winter and leave again in spring — and the whole class fell silent.”

    Wu said the plight of left-behind children is “a deep wound in Chinese society.”

    Eleven years into his teaching job in the remote village, Wu said he is familiar with the left-behind children’s agony. “They appear to be strong and carefree, but I know they are fragile at heart.”

    After Long became famous on the Web, many people have called and offered to make donations.

    “These have come suddenly and caught us unprepared,” said Wu Yansheng, principal of the village school. “But Long is not the only left-behind child in our county.”

    Wu Yansheng said the school is planning to work with the local government to set up a fund for all the left-behind children in Fenghuang.

    Noted sociologist Wang Kaiyu said the remedy to their plight is to narrow the urban-rural gap and create more jobs in the countryside to keep parents at home.

    On the other hand, Beijing University professor Lu Jiehua suggests cities grant migrant children equal access to public schools, medication and other social security services.

    Retired teacher Zhang Bingzhu, 72, has opened a free care center for left-behind children from his home village in Chaohu City in eastern China’s Anhui Province, one of the major sources of migrant laborers.

    Over the past five years, he has cared for dozens of children, reading them stories, helping them with schoolwork and playing games.

    The provincial government of Anhui plans to open at least 1,000 care centers for left-behind children in the coming three years. These places will have TVs, books, magazines, sports facilities and phones for children to call their parents.

(Xinhua)