China’s president, Xi Jinping, has told villagers in one of the most deprived areas of the country, where four children killed themselves last week by swallowing pesticide, that poverty is nothing to fear.

He made the comments in Huamao, a village in the south-western province of Guizhou, according to China’s official news agency.

The president was quoted as saying: “A good life is created with one’s own hands, so poverty is nothing to fear. If we have determination and confidence, we can overcome any difficulty.”

Xi’s three-day visit to Guizhou follows nationwide outrage over the deaths of the children, who were aged five to 14.

The “left behind” siblings, who lived in a rural area outside the city of Bijie in Guizhou, were abandoned when both parents left the village to look for work. Bijie is about 130 miles south-west of the area Xi had been touring.

“I have truly failed them,” said their mother, who had been working in a toy factory in Guangdong province, after returning for her children’s cremation.

The deaths provoked an outpouring of grief and criticism, with many blaming the authorities for failing to address issues such as entrenched rural poverty and deficient social services. Bijie witnessed a similar incident in 2012 when five young boys died after lighting a fire inside a bin in which they were sheltering from the cold.

“Why does [the government] only pay attention to this problem when terrible things like this happen?” one critic wrote on Weibo, the social media platform, according to the Global Voices website.



They added: “The houses of corrupt officials are brimming with cash, while people at the bottom of society suffer and starve.”



China’s economic miracle has seen living conditions improve dramatically over the past three decades. About 680 million people came out of poverty between 1990 and 2010, according to the World Bank.

Yet deprivation remains a major challenge in the countryside. Studies also show that althrough China is growing richer, it is also becoming more unequal, with a widening gap between the wealthier eastern regions and deprived inland areas such as Guizhou.

Hu Xingdou, an economics professor from the Beijing Institute of Technology, said: “Government spending on poverty-stricken areas is far from sufficient. More funds are needed to guarantee people’s livelihoods.”



Speaking to Caixin, a current affairs magazine, in the wake of the children’s deaths, Ye Jingzhong, a scholar from the China Agricultural University in Beijing, said: “Rural society is withering.”

Xi’s trip to Guizhou appeared partly designed to address such concerns. The ruling Communist party of China “cares a lot about farmers, particularly those in poverty, and has enacted various policies to boost rural development”, the president reportedly told villagers.

Qiao Mu, an outspoken academic from Beijing’s Foreign Studies University, said he was disappointed Xi’s itinerary had not included the community where the four siblings died. He said: “If he really wanted to solve the problem of poverty or other social problems he should probably have visited Bijie.”

One step the president could take to protect China’s estimated 60 million left behind children would be scrapping the controversial household registration or hukou system, the academic argued.

The system means migrant workers are forced to leave their children behind when they set off for the cities since they have no access to schools or other social services in their new homes.

Qiao said: “The children cannot go with their parents to be educated in the cities. They have to stay in their hometowns. Nobody cares about them.”

Additional reporting by He Jiao

