Search for China’s missing children slowly gains momentum
XIAN, China: In 2002, Five-yearold Cheng Ying was kidnapped near the gates of her school.
And so began an ordeal that was to last the rest of her childhood, robbing her of an entire decade of her life.
Ying was one of hundreds of thousands of children in China thought to have gone missing over the past four decades, a problem that the country is slowly beginning to wake up to thanks to public pressure expressed through the Internet and social media.
Academics estimate that the number of missing children could be anywhere between 20,000 and 200,000.
Infant boys are at a premium, says Anqi Shen, an expert at Britain’s Teesside University, and can now fetch more than 120,000 yuan (RM77,000) in China’s richer eastern provinces.
Ying’s story, although traumatic, is extremely rare in having a happy ending.
She was taken to the home of a woman who trafficked in children, where she was kept along with half a dozen other children, she said. “I was beaten and half-starved,” she recalled, dredging up painful memories. Once, at the age of seven, she escaped and ran to the police, who, she said, simply dismissed her as a “mischievous” girl. It was a huge blow to her morale, destroying her trust in the authorities and leaving her feeling lost and alone.
Finally, she was sold to a family who ran a honey and beekeeping store hundreds of miles away in a neighbouring province and who couldn’t have children of their own. “I had no bond with them, no attachment,” she said. “I always wanted to leave.”
Her parents, meanwhile, were trapped in their own nightmare.
Her mother, Jin Lunju, turned up at the school minutes after her daughter had vanished. She assumed she had gone to a friend’s house - exactly the same thing had happened only a few days before. The mother went home, but her worries wouldn’t go away.
She phoned her husband. Cheng Zhu, a decorator, left work early and went straight to his daughter’s school. When she didn’t emerge, his world collapsed.
At the time, his business was going well. He was renovating the family home and planning to buy another. As a rural peasant whose first child was a girl, he had been given permission to have a second child, and the family was to celebrate his second daughter’s 100th day.
“Everything in my life was becoming good and normal,” he said. “Then my oldest child went missing. There are no words to describe that.”
In unbearable pain, he went to the police, who said they couldn’t register a case until 24 hours had passed. Even then they weren’t interested, two stations passing the buck to each other, unwilling to take on a case that would likely remain unsolved.
So, in rising panic, he took matters into his own hands, searching the neighbourhood, going door-to-door and bus stop to bus stop, enlisting more than 70 relatives and friends to join the hunt. There was no trace of his little girl anywhere. It was the start of a decade-long odyssey.
Zhu combed China by car and train, giving up his job, racking up hundreds of thousands of miles, spreading his daughter’s name and photograph far and wide by poster and word of mouth, through the media and the Internet.
He was detained by police and chased out of towns, harried by fraudsters trying to cash in on his misfortune, but still he kept going.
The Ministry of Public Security says academics exaggerate the scale of the problem, but it declined to comment for this article. In 2014, it said it rescued 4,000 children, but a campaign that ran from 2009 to 2012 brought in more than 35,000 and busted 9,000 trafficking gangs, state media reported.
In the United States, by contrast, according to the FBI, about 465,000 children were reported missing in 2016. But one Justice Department study found that just 115 in an average year are “stranger abduction” cases, in which the child was taken by an unknown person.
Definitions vary from country to country, and a large number of “missing” children around the world are involved in custody fights between parents. But China appears unusual in facing child abduction and trafficking on such a massive scale.
Indeed, in June, the State Department said China was “not making significant efforts” to prevent human trafficking generally, downgrading it to the ranks of the worst offenders in the world along with places like North Korea, Iran and Syria.
In his journey around China, Zhu was sometimes joined by Wu Xinghu, whose one-year-old son was snatched from the family bed the night of Dec. 19, 2008.
“It was a day just like any other,” he said. “I came home from work, Jiacheng raised his hands - he wanted to cuddle with me. He was too young to talk, but I remember his every gesture and expression.” Hours later, he was gone. Like Zhu, Wu met official resistance everywhere he turned; his social media accounts were closed down. To the authorities, he was a nuisance, a threat to “social stability,” a man who gathered other families together to search and complain.
“Local police will never register cases until they are solved,” he said. “Cases of missing children need to be covered up,” he said, or they will reflect badly on the performance of the police.
Zhu’s daughter Ying kept the memory of her parents alive throughout her ordeal.
At the age of 15, she was given a smartphone for the first time. Her first move, she says, was to go online and search for her family.
The only thing she could remember was one word: “Dabaiyang.”
She went to an online forum and asked if anyone knew: “Is Dabaiyang a village or a street?”
In a matter of minutes, she had an answer - it was a suburb of Xi’an - and she was chatting online with a woman, who, incredibly, had heard of her case and knew where to find Zhu’s contact details. His relentless effort to publicise his daughter’s story had finally paid off.
Within hours, they were in contact with each other.