Short of supervision

By January, there were about 615,000 orphans and abandoned children in China, but just 109,000 of them were in State-run orphanages, according to the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

Lou's is one of hundreds of families taking care of abandoned babies or orphans outside the welfare system. Although the practice is illegal, many people are sympathetic to characters such as Lou, who was motivated by the best of intentions, that of saving the life of a child.

Meanwhile, the unofficial adoption of orphans and abandoned children has been the subject of intense public debate since early January, when a fire at an unregistered orphanage in Lankao county, Henan province, claimed the lives of seven children.

A lack of official supervision of abandoned or orphaned children has highlighted the potential risks of private adoption. Now, people are calling on the government to help these "kind-heart adopters".

At this year's meetings of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, NPC deputy Jia Weiping proposed that the adoption law be amended to relax the regulations on families looking to adopt orphans and abandoned children with physical disabilities.

Li Liguo, minister of civil affairs, told the NPC annual session that unofficial adoption should be respected. Li's proposal was accepted, but as yet there has been no further movement.

A national survey conducted this year by the Ministry of Civil Affairs showed that recently around 10,000 abandoned or orphaned children have been adopted through unofficial channels, rather than the children's welfare department. Individual families adopted 25 percent of those 10,000, while various religious institutions accounted for the others.

Li said the ministry will cooperate with families and privately operated institutions to ensure that all unofficially adopted children receive proper, government-supervised care, and will provide financial help to those who cannot afford to raise the children they've adopted.

Meanwhile, the ministry has also proposed amending the adoption laws to improve child welfare, and is preparing a proposal aimed at ensuring the protection of children's rights.

"About 50 or 60 years ago, many families in China had more than one child. The standard of living was not as high as nowadays, so some people abandoned babies with physical defects," said an official at the civil affairs bureau in Jinhua, who asked not to be named. "A large number of healthy girls were also abandoned because many parents still regarded boys as the source of the family fortune."

In recent years, more children have been abandoned because of disability or illegitimacy.. In 2012, Jinhua's civil affairs bureau coordinated more than 400 official adoptions, many of them to families with fertility problems.

Most babies are abandoned at railway stations or left outside hospitals. Lou found her youngest adoptee in a shoebox left in a litterbin close to Jinhua First People's Hospital in 2007. The boy, whose head was no bigger than an orange and was estimated to be two months premature, still had the umbilical cord and placenta attached.

Lou described how large areas of his skin had turned black and was also stained with antiseptic cream. When her neighbors inspected the half-dead boy, they said only Buddha could save him, but Lou's care and devotion pulled him through. He was later named Qilin.

"Mom didn't collect garbage for weeks. She brought milk powder and fed Qilin several drops every hour and held him tight to keep his body warm," said Zhang Caiying. "We were later astonished to see the black color on his body gradually fade away."