Ministry of Civil Affairs: The total number of orphans in China has dropped to 190,000, a 66% drop from 2012

According to the website of the Ministry of Civil Affairs, on the morning of May 25, the Ministry of Civil Affairs held a special press conference on the work of child welfare institutions to optimize quality and innovate and transform, introducing the relevant situation and answering reporters' questions.

Zhao Yong, deputy director of the Department of Child Welfare of the Ministry of Civil Affairs and a first-level inspector, said that the total number of orphans in China has dropped from 570,000 in 2012 to 190,000 at present, a drop of 66%. Great strides have been made in the cause of child welfare.

An excerpt from this is as follows:

At present, there are 1217 child welfare institutions in China, of which 336 are child welfare institutions at or above the municipal level and 881 are child welfare institutions at the county level. In recent years, under the leadership of the CPC Central Committee, the cause of child welfare has made great progress, demonstrating the superiority of the socialist system.

At the same time, there are also some common problems in China's child welfare work that need to be solved as a whole, mainly in the following aspects:

First, the continuous and sharp decline in the number of orphans has led to idle resources in child welfare institutions. The total number of orphans in our country has fallen from 570,000 in 2012 to 190,000 at present, a drop of 66%. Of these, only 59,000 children were raised by national child welfare agencies, down 30 percent from 86,000 in 2017. Nearly 70 per cent of the country's county-level child welfare institutions raise fewer than 10 children. A large number of child welfare institutions have problems such as idle resources.

Second, the child welfare institutions established by most county-level civil affairs departments have insufficient risk prevention capabilities. Especially in the prevention and control of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, it has been exposed that such institutions have problems in terms of personnel quality, facilities and equipment, management level, etc., which is a weak link in the prevention and control of the epidemic in the field of child welfare.

Third, the level of institutional specialization needs to be further improved. The children raised by child welfare institutions have changed from being mainly healthy children to being mainly seriously ill and disabled children, and the demand for professional services for children in medical treatment, rehabilitation, special education, social work and other aspects is very urgent, but due to the large number of institutions, it is difficult to concentrate high-quality resources to improve professional standards and promote high-quality development.

In order to solve these problems faced by the development of child welfare institutions and improve the service level of institutions raising children, in accordance with the spirit of the "Opinions" ("Opinions on Further Promoting the Optimization and Improvement of Child Welfare Institutions and the Innovative Transformation and High-quality Development of Child Welfare Institutions"), the child welfare institutions established by the civil affairs departments at the provincial and prefectural and municipal levels, as well as a small number of county-level child welfare institutions with good basic conditions and many children, determined by the provincial civil affairs departments, concentrate on raising children under long-term guardianship in their jurisdictions, and civil affairs departments at all levels should focus on promoting child rearing, medical treatment, rehabilitation, High-quality development of education and social work integration. At present, there are 83,000 beds in child welfare institutions at or above the municipal level, and they are fully capable of raising all 59,000 children under the long-term guardianship of the state.