Search for China’s missing kids slowly gains momentum
Internet, social media create new public awareness of child trafficking
IXIAN, China t was around noon one October day 12 years ago, and 5-year-old Cheng Ying was waiting for her mother to collect her from primary school and take her home for lunch. But her mom was a few minutes late, so Ying decided to start walking home herself. After all, it wasn’t far, just the distance of one bus stop, and she figured her mother was probably busy preparing for a family party planned for later that day.
She didn’t get far. Just 100 yards from the school gates, the young girl was grabbed by strangers and bundled into a taxi.
And so began an ordeal that was to last the rest of her childhood, robbing her of a 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.
There are no reliable figures for how many children go missing in China every year, with academics estimating it 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 $18,000 in richer provinces.
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. Yet awareness is in China is gradually growing. Since its inception in 2007, a website called Baobeihuijia (Baby Come Home) has registered 36,741 sets of parents who have lost children and 30,370 children searching for their parents. It says it has helped 1,963 families reunite.
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 7, 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 neighboring 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 at 12:10 p.m., 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.
By 2 p.m., she had phoned her husband, who left work early and went straight to Ying’s school. When she didn’t emerge, his world collapsed. Cheng Zhu 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 neighborhood, going doorto-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 decadelong odyssey. Zhu combed China by car and train, giving up his job as a designer, 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.
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 had heard of her case and knew where to find Zhu’s contact details. His relentless effort to publicize his daughter’s story had finally paid off.
Within hours, they were in contact with each other.
Ying was sure it was her real father, but Zhu was more cautious — he had chased too many false leads and been the victim of too many hoaxes to let his hopes rise. How could he know for sure if this 14-year-old was his daughter? They kept chatting. He was looking for some telltale remark, something to hang on to, evidence one way or another.
“Dad?” she asked on the third day. “Do you remember that scar on my wrist?”
The scar. And then he knew. Ying had cut herself as a 2-year-old, but Zhu had never mentioned the scar to anyone outside the family. This was Ying, and in 10 days, she would be back home in Xi’an. She would be struggling to get her bearings in her new, old family, she would be awkwardly getting to know both her sisters — because her parents had another child after she was lost — and would be readjusting to being back at school full time.
Two years later, the bond between father and daughter is strong, and Ying is thinking about her next step in life.
“I want to go to a university close to home,” she said. “I don’t want to be far away from my family any more.”