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China stresses protection of vulnerable children as winter break nears
CGTN
An employee of Baojing County Power Supply Company explains safe electricity use to children at Mawang Primary School in Qingshuiping Town, Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, central China's Hunan Province, November 28, 2022. /CFP
An employee of Baojing County Power Supply Company explains safe electricity use to children at Mawang Primary School in Qingshuiping Town, Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, central China's Hunan Province, November 28, 2022. /CFP

An employee of Baojing County Power Supply Company explains safe electricity use to children at Mawang Primary School in Qingshuiping Town, Xiangxi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, central China's Hunan Province, November 28, 2022. /CFP

A State Council office leading the country's work on the protection of minors issued a circular recently, asking local agencies to pay attention to children suffering from difficulties, including orphans and de facto unattended children, during the upcoming winter break and Spring Festival holiday.

To better protect these children, the office gave local officials orders to visit grassroots areas and conduct investigations and information gathering about the families, financial and health conditions of these children, including the guardianship or care services they are receiving, their immunization and psychological health situation, their living circumstances and the challenges they are facing.

The circular stressed that local civil affairs departments should guide parents or other family members to fulfill their responsibilities as guardians or caretakers. For those rural children whose parents are away from home and work in cities, the local officials should urge and guide these parents to strengthen family communication through telephone, video chat and other means, giving their children proper care, and strengthening parent-child companionship during holidays.

As for orphans and those children whose parents or other guardians are unable to fulfill their responsibilities as guardians or caretakers due to emergencies, local civil affairs departments, according to law, should provide temporary guardianship to them. Besides, officials should also organize professional social workers to provide companion and psychological counseling to ease children's anxieties during the New Year holidays.

The circular also pointed out that local officials should guide the residents' committee and village commission, China's grassroots mass autonomous organizations, to conduct a comprehensive inspection of the living environment of children in distress, focusing on basic living security conditions such as electricity, gas, water, fire and food safety. Officials should promptly eliminate hidden risks found, or report to superior authorities immediately if the problem is difficult to be solved.

According to the office, children suffering from difficulties must be subject to basic living allowances, medical security system, temporary assistance and the price subsidy coordinating mechanism, in a timely manner.

It emphasized that all local governments should make thorough arrangements, organize and implement them carefully, and do a solid job of ensuring all children spend the winter holiday in a warm and happy way. To achieve this goal, local governments need to diversify the inspection methods, take measures such as mutual inspections in different regions and entrusted third-party evaluations to do supervision and inspection, and for those whose work is not fully implemented, the superior government will report and hold them accountable.

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