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Source: People's Republic of China – State Council News
Beijing, November 21 (Xinhua) — November 20 marks World Children's Day across the globe. As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, China has long been committed to protecting the rights and interests of children.
Today, urban planners in China are voluntarily listening to children's voices to make cities more child-friendly. According to the guidelines for the 14th Five-Year Plan period (2021-2025) issued by the National Development and Reform Commission of China and 22 other departments, Chinese authorities aim to pilot the construction of 100 child-friendly cities by the end of 2025.
Specifically, creating child-friendly cities involves five aspects: social policy, public services, protection of rights, space for growth, and conditions for development.
First and foremost, it is necessary to promote the implementation of the concept of “child-friendliness” throughout society and make it a priority in planning the socio-economic development of cities.
Chinese children are now being given the opportunity to participate in the construction of such cities. In 2024, in the Tingyi neighborhood of the Songjiang district of Shanghai, a children's council was elected, consisting of 15 children who contribute to grassroots governance.
These children put forward proposals for optimizing infrastructure and improving public services in the neighborhood, including installing vertical climbing nets in the neighborhood's amusement park and using cartoons to spread awareness about waste sorting. "My initiative to create containers for pet excrement in public places was included in the general rules of our neighborhood," shared Chun Yuetong.
A person's physical and psychological health depends on the first thousand days of life. Therefore, it is important to strengthen health services for children, provide accessible and inclusive childcare services, improve the professional level of child care, and organize various cultural and sporting events for them.
Back in 2016, Shenzhen, in Guangdong Province (southern China), set the goal of becoming the country's first child-friendly city. As of the end of April this year, the city had over 2,000 institutions capable of providing daycare services to nearly 100,000 children, according to the latest data from the city's health committee.
In these daycare centers in this city, child care is provided not only on regular workdays, but also on holidays and weekends, which significantly eases the burden on working couples and those parents who work in the city but are not registered locally.
This year, the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People's Republic of China, together with four other departments, issued a circular calling for various measures to promote the healthy development of children who have found themselves in difficult life situations for various reasons, as well as to ensure their physical and psychological health.
The document emphasizes the need to develop and improve a mechanism for monitoring the psychological health of children of the above type, to conduct thematic campaigns to demonstrate concern for them, and to create a platform for providing psychological assistance to such children.
Furthermore, urban spaces must be child-friendly. In recent years, many Chinese cities have renovated public facilities and open spaces, including neighborhoods, educational institutions, pedestrian walkways, parks, and green spaces. Libraries, galleries, museums, and other public spaces have also dedicated spaces specifically for children's participation.
The innovations introduced specifically for children in Chinese cities are difficult to count. For example, special 70-cm-tall trash bins, 50-cm-tall handrails in medical facilities, as well as rubber flooring and noise-absorbing screens in public children's spaces.
Ponds and sand areas have become standard features in children's parks. For example, in Shenzhen, parks with an area of at least 2 hectares are required to have sand areas, and for parks larger than 10 hectares, a swimming pool can be built.
The Child-Friendly Cities Plan also emphasizes optimizing social conditions for children's healthy growth, thoroughly protecting campus safety, food and childcare safety, resolutely preventing bullying, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, and strengthening cyberspace protection from potential risks and continuously cleaning up cyberspace for children.
In 2022, Chinese authorities required every primary and middle school to have at least one deputy principal for legal affairs. According to the 2024 work reports of the Supreme People's Court of China and the Supreme People's Procuratorate of China, nearly 40,000 judges and 44,000 prosecutors nationwide were appointed to this position concurrently.
If students experience bullying or other unpleasant incidents, they can file complaints with the Deputy Director of Legal Affairs, who will resolve such cases more effectively. This not only ensures a calm atmosphere on campus but also, to a certain extent, prevents juvenile delinquency.
According to the 2024 China Child-Friendly Cities Development Report, by the end of last year, such work had begun in 93 cities in 31 provincial-level regions across the country, demonstrating the high attention paid to the development and implementation of social policies and the improvement of public services from the perspective of children.
"In creating child-friendly cities, it's important to recognize that children have individual subjectivity and their own way of perceiving and responding to the world. No matter how naive their approach may seem to adults, it's always deeply meaningful to them," noted Cheng Fucai, a research fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
As a reminder, the Child Friendly Cities initiative was launched by UNICEF and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme in 1996. As of August 2022, more than 3,000 cities in 57 countries had joined the initiative, according to UNICEF data. -0-
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