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For some Chinese parents, however, Children’s Day only reminds them of their deepest sorrow. Some of them have been looking for years for children that simply disappeared – with little hope that they will ever be found.
Based on conservative estimates, more than 70,000 children go missing in China every year – an average of 192 per day. The most common cases occur in poor mountain areas – where a family might sell a child for money or buy a son to carry on the family line – and in big cities where many migrant workers move with their families to live in crowded temporary housing without proper documentation.
Some 600,000 parents are actively looking for their lost children. But their prospects are not good. Only 0.1 percent of those who disappear are ever returned to their parents.
Many parents have complained of a lack of support and effort on the part of the police in tracing their lost children. The current police system requires parents to provide evidence to prove their child has been abducted before the case can be officially filed. Moreover, the police will not accept a report until a child has been missing at least 24 hours – which means precious time is lost in rescuing the victim and catching the criminals.
According to the police, many crimes involve the kidnapping of children who are then sold in other provinces. Tracking the criminals would require cross-border cooperation, but currently such cooperation between independent provincial police systems is not common.
However, despite police claims as to how difficult it is to trace child traffickers, there was one surprising case in 2007 in which nine missing children were recovered at once from abductors or the families who had purchased them, after Premier Wen Jiabao voiced concern about these children. This rare breakthrough showed that local police had failed to do their duty until coming under pressure to do so, Beijing lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan pointed out.
In fact, some local police have taken steps such as collecting the DNA of parents with missing children. But such data is collected only in certain regions, not nationwide. Also, parents cite cases in which local police appeared unwilling to use DNA data and refused even to create files on their children’s cases.
Facing such obstacles, one group of about 20 families whose children were abducted last year started an unofficial group they call the “Alliance of Child-seekers.” A representative of this alliance told the media that police indifference to their plight resulted from concerns over their “political achievements.” In other words, if the police put on file cases of missing children and then cannot find those children, it will negatively influence their rate of solving cases and diminish their record of performance. So the police would prefer to ignore the problem.
Consequently, many parents have no choice but to take action themselves. Some put up posters in public places or distribute flyers with information about their children; some drive around with big signs on their trucks or cars; some offer rewards for information about their children.
Some members of the parents’ alliance are shopkeepers – they have changed the names of their shops to things like “Seeking my Missing Child” and placed big photos of their children outside the shop.
Meanwhile, one nongovernmental group set up a website called “Baby, Come Home” in 2007. Its operator registered as a non-profit organization under the country’s Ministry of Civil Affairs. The site has attracted about 6,000 volunteers who help share or collect information about missing children. It has the advantage of being able to share information across municipal and provincial borders. But it has brought little result without cooperation from law enforcement or administrative officials.
Advocates for the missing children have called upon the state to create legislation that would offer better protection to at-risk children. This includes correcting abuses of the country’s household registration system – which requires every citizen to have an identity card and a registered address. They have also called for families who buy children to be prosecuted.
It has been reported that people who buy children have little difficulty purchasing fake birth certificates and household registration cards for them. Another option is to wait for the population census that is carried out every five years. When the census taker discovers the “extra” child, the parents have only to claim he is their own child, born outside the strict one-child quota. They then pay a fine – called a “social support fee” – and the child is given a legal identity and household registration.
“The village authorities actually knew that we bought the child, but they decided to let it pass out of sympathy,” one parent who bought a child explained to local media.
It seems that such “sympathy” can be very misplaced. In one story reported by local media, the tearful mother of a child who was found was almost apologetic in requesting the family who bought her child to return it.
Local police tend to not punish people who purchase children. The country’s criminal law states that as long as the buyers release the child when its original parents are found, prosecution can be waived. In cases where an abducted child’s real parents cannot be identified, the police tend to let the buyers keep the child until the real parents are located.
There seems little hope of stemming the steady stream of unsolved child abductions as long as there remains a high demand, which is partially attributed to the state’s birth control system and one-child policy. If a couple’s child is not healthy, or if they have only a girl, they may resort to buying a child. By tradition a Chinese family must ensure the continuation of the family line – even by illegal means.
There is another dark side to the child abductions. Some children end up in the hands of criminal gangs who force them to work as beggars on the street or to labor in coal mines or at other dark and dirty jobs. When such situations are discovered many questions arise as to how groups of children were overlooked by local authorities and allowed to work illegally.
There is no doubt that child traffickers in China have become more professional, integrated and well-coordinated. Yet there is no comparable well-organized law enforcement body prepared to confront and stop these criminals. While China’s leaders celebrate International Children’s Day with happy schoolchildren, are any of them giving a thought to the tens of thousands of parents and children who have been tragically and criminally torn apart?
