Kids in the Kansas City area got to sleep late on Thursday morning. School districts on both sides of the state line held ‘snow days’ and cancelled classes, but it wasn’t because of snow. Overnight freezing rain caused icing on roads, and school bus trips would be too hazardous. So happy kids got to stay home and keep warm.

But in China, little Wang Fuman doesn’t have such luxury. On Monday, the 8-year-old boy walked to his school in Yunan Province in southern China. There the temperature was only about 15° Fahrenheit. Little Wang had no hat, and was wearing a thin jacket when he set out on his 2.8 mile trek. When he arrived at school, he looked like this:

His hands looked like this:

His teacher snapped a picture of him and uploaded it to social media. He was dubbed “Ice Boy.”

And the communist Chinese government promptly swung into action. After all, images of a near-frozen little boy who goes to school with ice in his hair, and attends classes in a school with no heat doesn’t look good for the Glorious Revolution.

So suddenly the local Communist youth league donated warm weather clothing for the children. . .

And heat for the classrooms.

Well, that’s all fine and good. But that doesn’t solve the problem of extreme poverty in rural China. We see pictures of the shining cities of Beijing and and Shanghai, but people who live in the Chinese hinterlands have next to nothing. For example, the average annual income for someone living in rural Shanghai province is about 21,000 yuan. In urban Shanghai that income climbs to nearly 49,000 yuan. By contrast, the average income in rural Yunan province — where little Wang lives with his grandmother and sister — is just short of 7500 yuan.

Here’s Wang Fuman and his older sister, and life in their grandmother’s house.

And there’s more to Little Wang’s story than icy hair and life in a mud and brick home. He and his sister are “left-behind children” — kids whose parents were forced to move to faraway cities to find work. Plus, Little Wang’s mother abandoned his family when he was quite young. The BBC reports that there are tens of millions of “left-behind” children.

Once again, however, social media has changed Little Wang’s status as being a left-behind child, too. A construction company has offered his father a job at a local sports park project, so now he can be close to his children.

It’s kind of interesting how shame can motivate those Chinese communist apparatchiks to make things happen, isn’t it?

But what will happen to all the other Little Wangs and their families? They don’t share in China’s recent economic boom. The wealth from China’s vast export economy doesn’t trickle down to them. Eventually the disparity will bubble over, making for social unrest and possible upheaval.

Perhaps Chinese president Xi Jinping sees this as well. And maybe that’s why he just ordered the bolstering of China’s armed police force. There may be Big Trouble in Big China someday.