A campaign was recently launched in Yaoan County of southwest China's Yunnan Province to provide loving care to children left at home to live with grandparents or other relatives while their parents leave their hometowns to seek employment in big cities.

Earlier this year, local authorities in charge of women and children's welfare distributed nourishing food worth 5,000 yuan (about US$648) to about 40 such children aged below six years, and also provided free physical checkups for 19 children.

This activity is just the prelude to the intensive campaign, which expects wide social participation in order to achieve its goal, said a local government source.

Left-behind children such as those in Yaoan have become an emerging social phenomenon in rural China over the past few years, as increasing numbers of surplus rural labor flock to the cities to look for jobs.

Every year, 32,600 Yaoan laborers leave to work in cities, leaving 20,000 children at home, 5,000 of them with their grandparents.

Lack of parental care and discipline has brought about a number of problems for these youngsters.

Due to old-fashioned educational concepts, the grandparents tend to spoil the children and, as a result, some of them lag behind in their studies or develop bad habits.

In May last year, the local government conducted a survey about left-behind children countywide and adopted a series of measures to tackle the issue.

(China Daily April 27, 2007)