A few months ago, some Chinese children who were abandoned by the parents committed suicide by drinking poison. In a reversal of the incident, but with similar circumstances, a Chinese mother recently killed her four children because she could no longer feed them.
The 28-year-old woman, Yang Gailan, gave her children pesticide and then hacked them to death outside their house in Agushan, Gansu Province on Aug. 26. Yang then drank also the pesticide and committed suicide, reported Metro UK.
When her husband came home and discovered the five dead, he also drank the poison and killed himself. The reason behind the children’s killing and the parents’ suicide is the family’s poverty. The kids were also excluded from national medical insurance coverage.
Failure to register the children with China’s Hukou residence system until 2015 resulted in the children not being able to acquire education. They were also not included in the country’s poverty relief scheme and lived on crops alone.
Following media reports on the incident, the death of the family became viral on Weibo, China’s microblogging site, as it became the most searched subject with many netizens criticizing the mother by calling her a murderer.
The Yang family was one of 200 million families across China who live under the poverty line, despite China’s poverty rate going down to 6.5 percent in 2012 from 88 percent in 1981, reported LATimes. An expert on rural development said the incident shocked urban Chinese who reside in developed eastern cities because many “cannot imagine that millions of Chinese people still live in poverty in rural areas, especially in a country with the world’s second-largest economy.”