A 9-year-old boy in a rural county of Anhui province hanged himself recently after getting to know that his mother, who works in a city, would not return home for the Spring Festival holiday. The mother's inability to return home for the Lunar New Year may be the direct cause of the suicide, but the tragedy also reveals the plight of many left-behind children in rural areas, says an article on gmw.cn. Excerpts:

Chinese media reports say the boy's parents divorced two years ago, and since then he had been living with his maternal grandparents and not seen his mother.

The urban-rural dual structure and the unbalanced distribution of public resources have created material and cultural gaps between urban and rural residents. The falling price ratio of agricultural to industrial products, or the "price scissors", is believed to be a key reason for the widening rural-urban income gap over the past decades.

Also, industrial development and urbanization have taken away massive swathes of land from agricultural production, forcing hundreds of millions of farmers to leave their villages for better-paying jobs in cities and unwittinggly create the so-called left-behind generation that includes not only children but also senior citizens.

Grandparents cannot fulfill the parental needs of many left-behind children in rural areas, which severely affects their growth. This is one of the many prominent problems arising from the process of social transformation and is an issue the country cannot afford to overlook while it embarks on the journey to deepen reform.