Faded photos, fading hopes

• Source: Global Times
• [21:22 June 14 2009]
• Comments

A rescued son is reunited with his mother in Xiamen, Fujian Province. Snatched boys can fetch 30,000-40,000 yuan on the trafficking market, according to Zhang Baoyan, head of the Baby Home website.

By Yin Hang

She clutches six A4 pieces of paper. Stapled together are 176 names. They curl and flutter in the breeze: 176 unthinkable stories, 176 devastated families, 176 perhaps forever-lost children.

Holding the list tightly is 33-year-old mother Deng Huidong from Liaobu town in the city of Dongguan, Guangdong Province, who witnessed her 9-month-old son Ye Ruicong grabbed from under her nose on November 12, 2007.

She was leaning at the door frame about 5pm on a mild afternoon watching her 7-year-old daughter and her son playing – about two meters away – when Deng half-noticed a white van backing slowly toward them.

She never expected a man’s hand to stretch out from the van and grab her son in the blink of an eye. As the van accelerated over the horizon, Deng remembered thinking she could hardly believe what was happening.

All she could do at that moment was spend all her strength on chasing the fast-disappearing vehicle, screaming at the top of her lungs but to no effect, Deng told the Global Times.

“I so regret I wasn’t strong enough to get him back at that moment,” she said. “I swear I will never give up my struggle to get him home.”

Searching high and low for her son over the last two years, Deng has bumped into more and more families who share her destiny. As of yesterday, Deng had made acquaintance with 176 couples.

176 snatched from same city

Their children were all snatched in the same city, the earliest four years ago. All the parents of the 176 children are working together on searching for the children. Some claimed that more than 1,000 children had been snatched and sold in recent years by human traffickers.

Police announced at a press conference on April 22 that 43 out of 80 cases of children trafficking had been solved, with 50 children saved, according to Nanfang Daily. The “1,000” figure had been exaggerated, the police reportedly told a cable news channel of Shanghai Media Group.

Nearby Chaoshan, an area on the Fujian-Guangdong province border, is rumored to be the place where lost children are sold. Deng has organized trips there to search door-to-door for their children. Their most-recent trip was halted by police who feared a disturbance to social order, Deng told the Global Times.

Zhang Baoyan, head of the Baby Home website (http://www.baobeihuijia.com), a volunteer website aimed at helping lost children reunite with their parents, told the Global Times that although children lost from this area were usually sold to neighboring cities or provinces, a proportion were sometimes sold in Henan or Shandong provinces, according to their research.

Zhang said they learned from rescued children that most were sold in the countryside, where male children are considered necessary to carry forward the family name and also vital to supporting the family. The price varied with gender and age.

“A girl can fetch only a few thousand yuan. Prices for boys are much higher. The average prices, according to statistics that we’ve got from the recent rescued children cases, they stabilize at about 30,000 ($4,392) to 40,000 yuan,” said Zhang.

Dongguan, a city famous for its manufacturing and easy transportation, attracts millions of migrant workers.

“Migrant workers have less time to take care of their children and they rarely keep a close eye on them. A wild child, just hanging about, is exposed to a high risk of being abducted,” said Zhang.

Systematic trafficking

According to a recent report published in the British newspaper the Guardian, organized criminal gangs have exploited a children’s home near Heathrow airport for systematic trafficking of Chinese children to work in prostitution and the drugs trade across Britain.
At least 77 Chinese children have gone missing since March 2006 from the home. Only four have been found. Two girls returned after a year of exploitation in brothels in the Midlands. One was pregnant while the other had been surgically fitted with a contraceptive device. Others were coerced with physical threats to work as street vendors of counterfeit goods.

The China embassy in London said it hoped the United Kingdom could clarify the issue as soon as possible. At a May 7 press conference, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Chaoxu said China paid great attention to human trafficking and will actively participate in international crackdowns.
“Through unremitting efforts, the Chinese domestic children trafficking crimes have been effectively controlled. Great progress has been made in the fight against human trafficking,” said Ma.

Chinese children now account for a quarter of all suspected trafficking cases involving under 18s, according to a secret intelligence report from the UK Border Agency reported by the Guardian. Children were also reportedly sold to neighboring countries like Vietnam and Cambodia.

Launched by the Ministry of Public Security on April 9, another crackdown is under way (see sidebar), and trafficked children are expected to be rescued.

Trafficking crimes are starting to take on a worrying new character, Chen Shiqu, Head of the Human Trafficking Crackdown Office told Oriental Outlook magazine.

“Snatching cases are seeing an upsurge in violence,” he said. “Villages within the city are easier targets. The complicated environment of suburban villages facilitates trafficking.