Following the recent tragedy in China where four abandoned children appeared to have committed suicide, Chris Steele-Perkins takes a look at the importance of the family, and the shifting nature of rural communities.

China is going through a rapid process of urbanization and as a result the family structure and traditional role of responsibility for children is changing. Modernity is largely embracing the West, and living in the countryside is proving to be hard for many people, particularly in terms of providing for a family. Rural education is suffering from a shortage of teachers, as not many are willing to work in the remote areas of China. Inevitably many are travelling across the country to seek opportunity in the towns and cities. This shift has a human cost, as parents are having to leave their children behind. For some this means abandoning them, but for most the grandparents or elderly relatives are the ones left to bring up the children.

The system works, in a creaky way. When the parents stay together and find work in the city, they start on the ladder of the Chinese Dream by earning increasingly more than their previous $1 a day, and send money home to support their children. But there are also tragedies, and these are triggering much debate in the country. Only recently the deaths of four children, aged from 5 to 13, who drank a bottle of pesticide has shocked the nation. The children appear to have been abandoned, surviving on corn and processed meat.

Fortunately the vast majority of grandparents and relatives care for their charges and do what they can to make ends meet, often working despite their age. Of the families photographed one grandmother had to collect rubbish to recycle in order to provide food for her grandchildren, while others were still farming.

Chris Steele-Perkins was working with the ProspectFoundation on issues concerning rural schools and communities. The work was facilitated by the NGO Hope and China Youth Foundation. He photographed along the China/Tibet border in Yunnan and Qing Hai provinces - a beautiful, mountainous and poor region where many of China’s ethnic and religious minorities live.