China's top civil affairs authority has ordered that foster care centers be reformed, after a foster center in South China's Guangdong Province reportedly caused 20 deaths in 49 days this year.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs has instructed local civil affairs departments in China to immediately inspect and reform care centers, and to report back to the ministry before April 10, The Beijing News reported on Wednesday.
The ministry said all local civil affairs departments should learn from the case of the Lianxi Foster Center in Guangdong and guarantee the legal rights and interests of homeless people, said The Beijing News.
The ministry has ordered a thorough inspection of the care centers' qualifications, facilities, services, safety measures, bidding process, sources of funds and funding standards.
The ministry has also ordered provincial departments to inspect the management information system and networks to help the homeless find their relatives.
Records of a local funeral home show that, from January 1 to February 18, the Lianxi Foster Center of Xinfeng county, Guangdong, an NGO registered in 2010, delivered 20 corpses.
The civil affairs bureau of Xinfeng county has demanded that the center rectify its mistakes, and asked other institutes to take over the 733 people at the center, The Beijing News said.
An anonymous employee from a rescue station said that they had sent more than 200 people to the Lianxi Center in the past six years, with almost 100 dying there, mostly from pneumonia.
"They were sent there healthy," the employee said, but some of the people they took back on March 2 were found suffering from tuberculosis, syphilis or HIV, The Beijing News reported Wednesday.
Local police, civil affairs authorities and other departments have formed a special team to investigate the deaths, and four managers of the center were "placed under coercive measures," the Nanfang Daily said Monday.
