Fingers point, but little children are still dying
Authorities are swift to punish and dole out cash, but no-one is taking action on illegal school buses
Fifteen kindergarten pupils in rural Guixi, Jiangxi province, crammed into a van designed for seven, plunged into the cold waters of a roadside pond on Christmas Eve because their driver, who owned their unauthorised kindergarten and who had only been driving for a year, lost control of the vehicle. Eleven children died.
They were the latest casualties in a string of such accidents on the mainland involving rural children in overloaded, modified vans because there is a lack of safe school buses.
The authorities quickly punished 12 officials, including a Guixi vice-mayor, but that did little to stem public anger.
People asked how such tragedies kept being repeated, despite promise after promise to tackle the problem. Wasn't a school-bus-safety regulation adopted in March after multiple accidents last year, including one that killed 21 children in Gansu?
"Such a tragedy in a rural area would serve no purpose if all it aroused was some tears shed by urban people, especially amid the social context of bold urbanisation," the Southern Metropolis Daily said.
Many children are left behind in rural areas by parents who move to the city to make a living and grandparents tend to send them to private kindergartens, even though they are far away, because they don't know how else to care for them.