Thread: China’s hidden trade in children

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 98,00.html

September 25, 2005

The Sunday Times

China’s hidden trade in children
The communist party is trying to cover up the scandal of the 'lost boys' stolen for profit, writes Michael Sheridan
THE faces of China’s lost boys stare out from hundreds of pictures that once captured joy but now serve only to remind their parents of a cruel loss of innocence.

A plague of kidnapping has swept across Yunnan, a remote southwestern province, claiming hundreds of boys from the city of Kunming alone.

One vanished while his father bought sweets. Two more were led away in broad daylight from a busy market. The children have gone from poor townships and rural farms. They are the sons of China’s working class but their fate has been covered up on the orders of the Communist party.

“As of the end of 2004 there were more than 200 boys missing from Kunming city alone,� said Lu Youmin, a businessman, who has emerged as leader of a group of bereft parents fighting for action.

The motive is greed. Gangs of traffickers snatch the children to sell to childless couples in the prosperous cities of coastal China, where they will be passed off as “adopted�.

Lu is an exception. The kidnappers took his daughter Lu Shanni, then aged eight, in 2002. But 95% of the stolen children are boys, prized because they will carry on the family line.

It is a well organised trade that the state is plainly unable to stop. Official propaganda highlights the occasional police success. Yet there is no helpline, no nationwide appeal, no television broadcast with pictures of the missing.

Instead, a Sunday Times inquiry has found that police have refused to investigate cases and have harassed families who dared to complain. The official preoccupation with silencing publicity about the kidnappings may stem from embarrassment.

A United Nations report shows that three years ago the authorities were warned about the surge in boy abductions. They have done little, if anything, to curb it.

Last week as Sha Zukang, the Chinese ambassador in Geneva, was defending the country’s record on child protection before a UN committee, police in Kunming arrested parents who tried to contact this newspaper for help in searching for their missing sons.

Some were infants, some toddlers, some were taking their first rides on swings or in plastic cars before they were abducted. The Sunday Times has seen the names, photographs and other details in more than 60 cases. All remain unsolved.

Most of the victims were poor. They were the sons of impoverished migrant workers who exist at the bottom of the heap in China with neither the money nor the political connections needed to get help.

Most of the perpetrators, the people who buy the boys, are wealthy. They can pay up to £3,500 for a child. They are the shame-free rich class of post-revolutionary China.

The pain inflicted by their selfishness is written on the face of Pu Caiju, 32, whose son, Li Shang, was four when he vanished outside the family’s village home on March 14, 2002.

She and several other parents risked official wrath to be interviewed in central Kunming. “My husband had been playing with our son and he said, ‘Just stay here while I go upstairs for a cold drink’. He was away not five minutes but when he came back our son was gone,� she said.

Sixty villagers joined the hunt, scouring the bus station, the alleys, the back yards. Then they went to the police.

“The police just weren’t interested,� said Pu. “They told us to come back if we hadn’t found him in 24 hours. We suspected that a neighbour, who was a drug user, may have been involved but the police didn’t want to know.�

Pu’s husband went all over southern China to try to find their son. Then he had a breakthrough. In a rare, well- publicised success, the police had caught a gang of 11 child traffickers. “My husband was allowed to confront one of the suspects with a photograph of our son and the man said, yes, he had sold him very easily because our son was so smart,� Pu said.

But the parents’ hope that the traffickers could lead them to the missing children was abruptly cut short after their trial and conviction. Keen to impress the public and central government with their zeal, the authorities swiftly executed nine of the 11, including the man who had confessed to selling Pu’s son.

“The police had found out very little before they were executed,� Pu said. “All the families were horrified.�

If Pu, like many Chinese people, conceals her emotions behind a mask, that effort must have been doubly difficult for the woman who sat next to her.

Luo Qin, 28, lost her two sons, Wang Tao, then aged eight, and Wang Wei, then five, on October 1, 2003.

“I was at work, so was my husband, and the boys were playing with a neighbour’s child,â€? she said. “When my husband came home, another neighbour said the three had been just outside 15 minutes earlier â€â€

Hey! Body parts, children, what's the difference?

Most favored nation trading partner?

Keen to impress the public and central government with their zeal, the authorities swiftly executed nine of the 11, including the man who had confessed to selling Pu’s son.

I'll trade ya this here heart we hacked out of a dissident/criminal, for that kid ya got working in the sweat shop. ghastly. Pretty soon you might be able to buy such in mall-wart.

Only after the illegals sweep the place. cheers glenn

We hear so much stuff going in China you have wonder how long they will survive as they are, so much corruption and so much hatred towards the people and the wiliness to stop anything that has to do with the outside world. What a shame, I only see a major decline, China can not conitnue getting bigger and more powerful under the oppression of their own people. After all they know what is out in the real world and they want a piece of it, China cant stop thier people from wanting what the rest of the world has!

P