It's hard to be a parent on the mainland these days, with children's safety threatened everywhere.
The risks have ranged from melamine-tainted baby formula to poorly built schools - blamed for the deaths of more than 5,000 children in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 - and the callous attitude of fellow citizens, with 18 people ignoring a toddler who was run down in Foshan in October.
Last month, 19 children from a kindergarten in Gansu's Zhengning county died on their way to class when the nine-seater van they were travelling in - packed with 62 children - slammed head-on into a coal truck.
Overloaded school buses are not only a problem in poor rural areas. They are common in Pearl River Delta boom towns, with hundreds of thousands of children of poor migrant workers taking them every day. A day after the crash, Guangzhou traffic police announced they had impounded two overloaded buses from schools for migrant workers' children. One, a 26-seater, had 43 children crammed on board, and the other, with 19 seats, was carrying 27 children. Neither was licensed to operate as a school bus and they lacked necessary safety equipment such as seatbelts and signs warning other drivers to watch out for students.
Police say they punished and fined the operators of more than 1,100 school buses in October and November, many for overloading.
In Dongguan , traffic police stopped a 50-seat school bus carrying 75 migrant workers' children a few days after the Gansu crash. Some were sharing seats and many were standing in the aisle. 'We have to take the overloaded school buses even though we're afraid of possible accidents,' one boy told the Dongguan Daily. 'We don't have any other way to get to school.'