A widely circulated video of a young girl weeping on a muddy road has made many people’s hearts ache. In the video, the girl is standing beside her bike, which remains stuck in the mud no matter how hard she pushes. Local residents later confirmed that the girl, Ma Yuanlu, is an 8-year-old left-behind child living in a village near Tengzhou, Shandong province.

One net user wrote on his Weibo account that the village’s road condition hadn't improved at all since he lived there 20 years ago.

“Most young adults [from Ma's village] leave home to work as builders in cities, leaving their children at home. But when the children face such obstacles just to go to school, who can help them?” he wondered. Because of bad roads, a number of Ma’s peers have been sent to schools in other places.

A 4-meter-wide dirt path is the only road linking the local school with the village. It used to be an asphalt road, but gradually fell apart due to a lack of maintenance, according to the man in charge of the village’s road projects. The man also admitted that he and his colleagues felt sorry for the girl after they saw the video. The next day, they paved the road with a layer of stone saltpeter so it wouldn’t be as hard to traverse. Two weeks ago, he went with village officials to apply for an allowance to fully re-pave the road. The money would be allocated in 2018.