Father in China abandons infant son injured by fire and steals donations, China News

Police in southwestern China are hunting the father of a one-year-old boy who abandoned him after the child accidentally fell into a fire and suffered serious burns, the Southern Metropolis News reported on Thursday (March 10).

The father, a farmer named Liu Pizhong from Yiliang county in Yunnan province, disappeared on Wednesday with money donated by his fellow villagers for the boy’s treatment, about a week after his son’s accident, the head of the village told the newspaper.

The boy’s mother, who is mentally ill, also left after the incident.

The accident happened on the night of Feb 28 when the mother was holding the boy in her arms beside a stove to keep warm and suddenly she had an epileptic fit and dropped the baby into the fire. The boy suffered burns all over his body, including his ears, eyes and one hand.

The child was sent to hospital overnight but Liu, who didn’t have a stable job, decided to stop paying for the treatment after realising it would cost hundreds of thousands of yuan, said the party secretary of the village committee, surnamed Xu.

A neighbour, surnamed Huang, is now caring for the boy who remains in hospital and the local government has paid part of his medical bills.

“The doctor said the baby is in a stable condition now and could be healed. His mother is mentally handicapped and has gone back to where she lived before her marriage. His father wanted to give up on him, so he just ran away,” Xu said.

“He took the money donated by fellow villagers, about a few thousand yuan. We have been looking for him for two days,” he said, adding that police have joined the search.

Under Chinese law, abandoning one’s own child and could lead to a maximum sentence of five years in jail. Most recent figures from the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that China had over 190,000 children whose parents died or went missing by the end of 2020.

However, the government said this figure had been dropping significantly over the past decade. The figure was roughly three times higher in 2012 at 570,000.

“As the economy grew, the government eased the one-child policy, and social security improved, there have been fewer and fewer cases of child abandonment, and a decreasing willingness of families to give away their own children,” said Wang Jinhua from the ministry’s social affairs department at a press conference in 2019.

In 2020, 11,000 child adoption cases were registered, compared with over 44,000 cases in 2009, according to the ministry.

This article was first published in South China Morning Post.