Four children were found dead last week in southern China. The police said they had been living alone and killed themselves by ingesting pesticides. Their tragic deaths lay bare the tough ordeal facing a third of children in the Chinese countryside, forced to fend for themselves when their parents leave to work in the cities. The four brothers and sisters, aged between 5 and 13 years, had been fending for themselves for several years. Their mother had abandoned them and their father had left their home to work in a city 1,400 kilometres away. In a goodbye letter, the eldest wrote that he could no longer stand the pressure of looking after his brothers and sisters while studying at the same time, as his dad had wanted. Currently six million children have been left to fend for themselves - that’s one-third of China’s rural child population.