Cracking down on the trade in children

China is redoubling its efforts to combat the abduction and trafficking of the most vulnerable members of society, as Zhang Yan and Wang Qian report.

Lying asleep in their cribs, the 11 babies at the Kaiyuan Social Welfare Institution in Yunnan province were blissfully unaware of the furor that surrounded them earlier this year.

In August, the children, all younger than 12 months, were rescued from a child-trafficking gang that had abducted them and 10 other babies a few months earlier, and had planned to sell them to the highest bidder.