PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP: A worker comforts a child in the Aid Center for Street Children in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province, on November 22, 2012 (ZHAO PENG)

In 2009, the MCA ruled that each orphan being raised by welfare agencies should be provided with a subsistence allowance of at least 1,000 yuan ($161) per month. Children housed by individuals should receive a minimum of 600 yuan ($97).

However, in reality, a large number of orphans are neither recognized on government records nor receiving state allowances due to their failure to present parents' death certificates or presumption of death required for registration. Xu Jianzhong, an official with the MCA, said at a recent symposium that in the remote countryside, relatives fostering orphans with one parent dead and the other missing often find it difficult to obtain documents showing presumption of death.

The strict identity confirmation requirements for orphans have also made it difficult for abandoned children to apply for state allowances, Wang said.

Meanwhile, the lack of an inclusive child welfare system has made the lives of other groups of disadvantaged children more difficult. For example, none of the abandoned infants adopted by Yuan had received state allowances as her facility was unregistered.

Desperate for support

In China, non-public children foster facilities have long complained about the daunting procedures to register as a non-profit organization.

Zhang Shuqin founded a child foster institution in 1996, focusing on helping those with parents serving terms in jail. The institution now has six branches across China and has helped more than 4,000 children.

Zhang said that her institution failed to register as a non-profit organization mainly because no government department wanted to supervise it as required by law.

"As the supervising department would also be held accountable if the operation of the supervised organization went wrong, few government departments are willing to take the responsibility," Zhang told The Economic Observer, a Beijing business weekly. Eventually Zhang's institution had to register as an enterprise, which forbids it from fundraising, and has to run its own farms and orchards to support the children it fostered.

According to Child Welfare in China 2011, China had over 5 million people with disabilities aged below 17; the number of children whose lives are affected by HIV/AIDS was between 496,000 and 894,000; 58 million children in rural areas were left behind to live with relatives by their parents who seek employment in cities.

The country is still reeling from the shocking deaths of five street children poisoned by carbon monoxide inhalation after lighting a fire to fend off the cold, on November 16, 2012, in Bijie, southwestern Guizhou Province. They were the sons of three brothers, two of whom had left Bijie to scrape a living collecting rubbish in Guangdong. Bodies of the boys were found the next morning in a trash bin where they burned charcoal to stay warm.

Hou Yuangao is secretary general of a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping women and children with difficulties caused by poverty or drug addiction in Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province, one of China's poorest regions. Hou told The Economic Observer that his organization helped more than 2,000 children over the past four years.

Hou said that in the prefecture, the number of children whose parents could not support them due to extreme poverty, drug addiction or HIV/AIDS is about thrice the number of orphans. However, these children only receive a 135-yuan ($22) monthly allowance each from the local government.

"It is proven internationally that foster care in institutions is not the best way to raise children. In recent years, the model of foster families explored by welfare institutions around China proves effective in creating a better environment for orphans to grow up," said an MCA press release.

The ministry also said that it will continue to purchase services from qualified non-public foster facilities and improve their conditions by supporting them.

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