The state of my family’s home village of Jingmen, Hubei Province, is common across China. Its roads are no longer usable as they have not been maintained for over a decade. The community buildings have been torn down; the last time I was there I only saw dust and broken tiles all around.

Rural families are suffering. The suicide rate in the countryside is three times as high as in the cities, according to reports from 2011. My uncle, who had been living in a makeshift shack after his grown children kicked him out of their house, hanged himself four years ago, never having recovered from the death of his wife two years earlier.

It is common for both parents to leave their small children at home in the village while they go to work in factories elsewhere. Some 60 million children suffer this fate; most are left in the care of their grandparents, but more than 3 percent — millions of children — are left to live on their own. Children who stay behind often have to cope with loneliness (not many have siblings) and helplessness. Some reports say that sexual abuse of left-behind children is on the rise.

Meanwhile, increasing numbers of rural children are dropping out of school. One study suggests there are at least 20 million school dropouts in rural areas, or 1 in 10 young villagers. The primary school that I attended in the 1970s was dismembered a decade ago, due to dwindling numbers of students. As a result, young kids in the village have to travel along more than five miles of mud roads each day to go to school.

In many cases, men go to jobs in the cities while their wives stay behind with the children in the village. They get to see each other only a few days a year. Distance, emotional stress and financial frustration tear families apart.

According to the journal Learning Weekly, China’s rural divorce rate surged fourfold between 1979 and 2009. Lianhe Zaobao, a Singapore-based newspaper, and numerous government publications have reported that many parts of rural China have become anarchic, with rising crime rates and election fraud.

Beijing’s effort to decentralize the country’s governance over the past few decades has played a major role in this social decay. The elections of village heads are often rigged and corruption is rampant. The retreat of the state has left a dangerous power vacuum, and many villagers have been left to fend for themselves. There is a lot of talk of mafia-like groups wielding power behind the scenes.