"If I meet my stepmother, I will kill her," says a 13-year-old vagrant boy Zhang Taoshuai, startling the staff at the Children's Protection and Education Center of Shijiazhuang in Hebei Province with his hatred.

Abandoned by his father and stepmother, Zhang led a vagrant life for five years, seeking alms from passers-by or selling roses to lovers.

The Ministry of Civil Affairs has recorded at least 150,000 children aged under 16 years tramping the streets annually in the past three years.

Experts said the growing number of vagrant children is a result of a combination of factors: the growing population of migrant workers, a climbing divorce rate and widening gaps between poor and rich, and rural and urban areas.

By selling flowers, scavenging for scrap food, begging, stealing or robbing, the homeless children can barely manage to fill their stomachs. Public security departments find that they have become a formidable reserve army of criminals.

Among China's 150,000 street children, 30 percent are girls and 10 percent are aged below 10, according to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs. They are from Hunan, Sichuan and Henan provinces and Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

The ministry has set up 128 shelters for street children across the nation, said Jiang Yue'e, vice-director of the Women and Children's Work Committee of the State Council.

However, these shelters can only provide accommodation for 70,000 children and most are badly staffed and reeling financially, according to the China Youth and Children Research Center.

Funding from public donations has helped but not enough.

Zhang Hongzhi, a senior citizen of Zhuozhou City in Hebei Province, set up a Children's Village with property he inherited last January. A total of 29 homeless kids have benefitted.

The government should spend more to protect vagrant kids, while the social donation system should be improved to encourage more help from the public, said Liu Qilin, former vice-president of the Soong Ching Ling Foundation which promotes welfare of youth and children.

Like Zhang Taoshuai, a total of 140 migrant children have been received by the Children's Protection and Education Center of Shijiazhuang since March 2002. The local government invested more than four million yuan (US$481,927) on the center, which can accommodate 300 people. The government pays a monthly subsidy of 150 yuan for each child to cover their living cost.

Many Shijiazhuang residents have also joined the effort to help vagrant children by acting as "weekend parents" for them and taking them home at weekends.

"This will help the children have a taste of family life," said Yang Jun, director of the center.

About 80 to 100 million children roam urban streets worldwide, according to statistics from the United Nations Children's Fund.

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