With a swollen, almost dark-purple arm, little Cheng Yuqiao was crying and struggling in a woman's arms as she sat at the Guangzhou Railway Station one day in May.
Passengers suspected kidnapping and called police. As it turned out, the woman, who was mentally unstable, was admitted to hospital. The 3-year-old boy received medical attention before being sent to the Guangzhou Welfare House.
Hoping to find the youngster's family, a hospital employee posted the boy's photograph on the Guangzhou Television Station's online forum (club.gztv.com). Netizens began a month-long search. Hundreds of people swapped information.
Eventually, the pieces fell into place: The woman at the railway station was actually the boy's mother. They were from a village in Southwest China's Sichuan Province. The boy had fallen and fractured his arm, and his mother had apparently suffered a mental breakdown during the journey to seek treatment. The family was finally reunited and returned home earlier this month.
In Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province, 2-year-old Xue Yucheng disappeared when his mother suffered a mental breakdown in 2004. But this boy was not as lucky as Cheng Yuqiao; he hasn't been found. His family has printed 5 million leaflets in a desperate attempt to find their child.
It's not known if kidnappings have increased on the mainland because no nationwide data are available. But with media reports of children being stolen from hospitals, snatched by motorcycle riders, wrenched out of their mothers' arms and even abducted from homes, many parents are worried.
"We have to be on guard all the time," said Eva Deng, a Beijing mother, who launched a signature campaign to draw attention to missing children after hearing Cheng Yuqiao's story. She has already collected more than 2,000 signatures and plans to send the letter to Premier Wen Jiabao.
The tradition of a male heir is deep-rooted in Chinese culture, more so in the rural areas where an abducted child could fetch up to 18,000 yuan (US$2,250). Such is the malaise that some local government officials don't consider buying children to be a crime.
Chinese laws exempt buyers from prosecution if they have not physically abused the child and co-operated with police in the investigation. Criminals take to child trafficking not only because of the hefty profit and a ready market, but also because of the low detection rate of child abduction cases. In fact, when a child is reported missing, more often than not, a police station will register the event as "an incident," rather than "a case" that demands immediate investigation. In other words, police don't have to investigate a missing person's case unless there is some evidence of kidnapping or injury.
Almost two years after Xue Yucheng's disappearance, his father has not been able to get police to register the case. "All I got was a promise to 'help investigate,'" Xue Peng said.
According to a Nanfang Weekend report on missing children in Kunming, Yunnan Province, only 25 per cent of such cases are investigated by police.
More police needed
From the police perspective, one of the problems that keep them from doing more investigations of missing children lies in sheer numbers. On the mainland, there is one police officer for every 1,000 residents, compared with three officers per 1,000 residents in developed countries.
What's more, only half of the officers work on the frontline a problem that ongoing Ministry of Public Security reforms have targeted. And more than 40 per cent of the 52,000 mainland police stations have fewer than five officers, and about 3,700 of them have just two, or even one.
Making the police work more difficult is the fact that more than 100 million of China's 1.3 billion people are migrants.
Another problem is that existing laws do not stipulate how a missing person's case should be handled, so there is no budget or designated personnel to deal with such incidents.
Zhu Boru, police chief of Mancheng in Central China's Hubei Province, who is writing a book on the government's efforts to find missing persons, said that after receiving a missing report, police can do two things: "One is to upload the information on to the police database. The other is to try their best to find the person."
But even cases that are considered child abduction are often too elusive to solve.
Ma Ning, who leads a team probing missing child cases in Kunming, said that kidnapping gangs were highly organized and efficient. The act of abduction, transportation and the selling of children were handled by different people. And the gangs work fast. A child can be smuggled out of a city within half an hour of being abducted, Ma said.
"Police smashing abduction rings deters criminals but police alone are unable to root out the crime," Ma said.
Another handicap for police is the lack of an effective mechanism to match missing children with their parents.
Police in Xinxiang, Henan Province, rescued 34 infants after arresting the Guo Shixian gang in 2004. But as of July 2005, the parents of only one child have come forward with a claim.
A case in Kunming is even more ironic: After police rescued children in a 2003 crackdown, 26 of them had to be returned to their buyers, making them lawful adoptee parents, and 10 others were recognized as orphans.
Websites and poker cards
Zhu says one has to depend on a family and warm-hearted people to find a missing person.
He qualifies as one of those warm-hearted people. Taking money out of his own pocket, he set up a free missing persons website, souren.net.
The website posts notices on missing persons and photographs of unidentified people at aid centres, hospitals and morgues. Volunteers take photographs of children found begging on the streets and post them on souren.net to find out if they are kidnapping victims.
Zhu opened the website after a youth died in a traffic accident in Mancheng. His family members spent a year looking for him until they happened to come across the accident file.
Regular residents are not allowed access to the police database. "It was painful to see how much time and money his family members had spent searching for their loved one," he said, referring to the youth who died in the traffic accident.
In East China's Anhui Province, Shen Hao also has a website, www.xrqs.com. He has been recognized as one of the "Top 10 Volunteers in Anhui Province" for his efforts in tracing missing people. He is making "missing child playing cards," with a face on each one, and plans to distribute 10,000 decks in areas notorious for child trafficking.
A family had to pay 600 yuan (US$75) to join the scheme, which aimed to cover rural areas where there was no Internet access, Shen said. He conceded that the cards may not necessarily help in getting useful leads but said that even a small lead was worth the effort. "I know a family that has printed and distributed 5 million leaflets to find their child 5 million! That has to be a world record," he said.
What China really needs, Shen said, was a system similar to the Amber Alert used in the United States and Canada. The Amber Alert system created in 1996 after the kidnapping and murder of 9-year-old Amber Hagerman in Arlington, Texas uses electronic highway signs and designated broadcasters to announce a kidnapped child's name and description along with the description of any vehicle suspected to be involved in the crime.
Prevention better than cure
To prevent abductions on the mainland, an ounce of prevention is worth tons of investigation and rescue work, advocates said.
All-China Women's Federation Chairwoman Gu Xiulian has called the British organization Save the Children's project against child trafficking in Yunnan "a commendable model." One of the organization's target areas was a village in Wenshan Prefecture, where almost 70 per cent of the residents were reported to be linked to trafficking groups. What's remarkable is that these villagers regarded their "work" as no different from that of adoption intermediaries. Today, the change in the village is visible, thanks to awareness-raising campaigns and community-building measures.
"The women in the village even go to other villages to spread the message of women's and children's rights," project officer He Ye said. It's time to review the legislation system so police resources are available for missing child cases, he said.
"And the police could probably start with the child beggars in the streets. I think many of them are trafficked and their parents are waiting for them to come home," said Eva Deng.
(China Daily 07/20/2006 page1)
