“Hello kind people! When you see this child, you will doubtless criticise the parents for being immoral. But we have no way out — please help us, we don’t know what to do.”

Thus begins that very rare thing: a letter from a father, forced to abandon his disabled infant on the streets of Ningbo — a city near Shanghai that is one of the richest in China — explaining why he did it. And, no, he had not lost a packet in the stock market slump that has rattled the rest of the world. The financial calamity that befell this father was to bear two sons, both of them deaf. Raising one son had taught him how hard it is to care for a disabled child, even today, in the age of the Chinese dream. Raising a second deaf child was simply out of the question.

So the father abandoned his six-week-old son — for his own good. And, remarkably, he felt moved to explain his reasons. “We don’t own a house, or even a place to live. I thought I could make life gradually better by being diligent: but God has had no mercy on us,” the father wrote in May 2012. “In 2004 my wife gave birth to a boy, but when he was two years old we found he couldn’t hear or talk.”