Children without parents still lack help, protection

Editor's note: After the deaths of several vagrant children and orphans in recent months, including seven in a fire at a private care home, experts in the public and private sectors have called on authorities to speed up their efforts to resolve issues concerning the guardianship of abandoned and orphaned children.

Chang Guizi needs heart surgery, but a local hospital refuses to operate on him because he has no legal guardian to sign the consent form.

The 13-year-old, a third-grader at a primary school in Kunming, Yunnan province, has had to forgo all physical exercise since he was diagnosed with congenital heart disease in November.

One day after school, he returned home to his foster family and complained of difficulty in breathing.

"We took him to a hospital, and an X-ray showed he has a hole in his heart," said Pi Zhonghui, a retired driver who takes care of Chang and five other homeless children. "The doctor told me it's a kind of congenital heart defect and the boy needs surgery."

Andrew Lok, director of the Yunnan Jiaxin Children Assistance Center, an NGO that helps street children and is providing Chang's living expenses, said: "The hospital told us the surgery would cost about 20,000 yuan ($3,200). A charitable foundation has agreed to cover the expense."

At first, doctors at the First Affiliated Hospital of Kunming Medical University agreed to operate, but the hospital's legal advisers later said the surgery should be halted because of the status of the child.

Neither Pi nor the center is eligible to sign consent forms for the boy's operation. "The hospital's lawyer said we have to find his birth parents," Lok said.

Chang barely remembers any useful information about his parents.

A passer-by found the boy wandering near a train station three years ago and took him to the center, Lok said. Chang told the center's staff he had lived with his mother after his parents had divorced but she abandoned him, Lok said, adding the boy has forgotten his parents' names.

He only remembers his home was in a street called Xijie and it was in Zhaotong, a city in Yunnan. But police in Kunming and Zhaotong have been unable to find his family.

"We've turned to the provincial civil affairs bureau for help, to see if the government can act as Chang's legal guardian, but officials are still mulling over the case because there is no precedent," Lok said.