Article 53 of China's Law on the Protection of Minors stipulates that when guardians of minors refuse to perform their duties or infringe upon the lawful rights and interests of said minors under their guardianship and fail to mend their ways after education, the court may designate new guardians for said minors. The disqualified guardians shall continue to bear the cost of child support according to law.

The General Principles of the Civil Law, which devotes a section to guardianship, also carries a similar clause.

However, such clauses have never been quoted in Chinese courts.

Chen Huiqi, a lawyer in southwest China's Guizhou Province, has been petitioning a local court for the termination of Yang Shihan's custody over his five children. Yang was sentenced to 18 months in jail on charges of intentional injury in July. The victim of his five-year-long streak of physical abuse was his 11-year-old daughter. Police investigations found that Yang poured hot water over his daughter's head last October, which resulted in severe scalding on her scalp.

Chen, who expressed his worries about the girl's fate after her father is released from jail, said that what impedes the termination of parents' guardianship in Chinese courts is the legal gray area concerning who is to initiate judicial proceedings in such cases and who will be selected as a substitute guardian.

The clause on the termination of guardianship in the Law on the Protection of Minors says that the court may, upon application by the persons or units concerned, disqualify parents from being guardians and designate other persons as guardians according to law.

Han Jingjing, a senior research fellow with the Beijing Juvenile Legal Aid and Research Center, said that the clause fails to clearly define "the persons concerned" or those that could be designated as a guardian and it also fails to specify responsibilities of guardians.

Han said that as a result, it is not possible to properly implement the clause and minors are not effectively protected from abuse at the hands of their parents.

"No government department or social organization is held responsible when nothing is done to stop abuse," she told Beijing Times.

During an interview in the wake of the Nanjing girls' death, Li Bo, an official in charge of child protection at the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said that the ministry would allocate temporary shelters for children when they are found living with guardians who are unable to take care of them.

Meanwhile, Li admitted that China lacks a clear judicial procedure for the transfer of guardianship.

Shang Xiaoyuan, a professor at Beijing Normal University and a long-time observer of child protection practices in China, said that to effectively protect children from abuse, China needs to prioritize setting up authorized agencies that can take care of children taken from neglectful parents.

An anonymous worker with a shelter for the homeless under the Ministry of Civil Affairs told Beijing Times that although shelters take care of many children who run away from home due to abusive or incapable parents, they are not ideal foster care givers as homeless adults in various conditions also live there.

The emphasis on children's obedience to their parents in China's traditional culture also hinders the transfer of guardianship in the country. In a society with a saying that "dutiful sons are the product of rods," many parents use mild corporal punishment to discipline their children. Many consider beating your own children a household affair and something that should not be interfered with by outsiders.

Gu Feipeng, a social worker who has helped single-parent families for a long time, told Beijing Evening News that people don't report child abuse to the police when they see their neighbors beating their children and even upon receiving such a report, police officers are unlikely to detain any parents to investigate the possibility of intentional injury.

Gu said that traditional ideas like these are harming child protection and are inconsistent with rapidly changing family structures in China.

"In a transitional society, we see a surge of children born out of wedlock and living in single-parent families. The old social support network based on relatives and friends is collapsing and more and more people are living next to total strangers. If the reliability of government departments and our social safety net are not strengthened, no one can guarantee what happened to the girls in Nanjing won't be repeated," Gu said.

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