Determined parents will never give up on their missing children

BEIJING LETTER:A group pf parents gather regularly in Beijing with photographs of their missing children. They want the government to do more to find their abducted loved ones

LIU JINGJUN went missing in April this year, and his family has been working day and night ever since to try to find their missing boy.

The toddler’s father is one of a group of 30 parents who gathered in Beijing’s Yangqiao district recently, each with photographs of their children and home-made signs saying when they went missing and where.

They are from provinces all over the country, Hebei, Shanxi, Sha’anxi and Guangdong, and they wanted the government to do more to help them find their children.

“My wife and I can’t sit at home waiting for the police; we keep looking. The longer you wait, the more hopeless you get,” he said.

Getting data on how many boys and girls are kidnapped each year is difficult, but the figures range from a few thousands to tens of thousands. The situation is serious enough to warrant a public crackdown by police which has been running since April last year.

In a country where the social welfare net is still being constructed, having a child is your security in old age.

Many of China’s missing boys are sold to childless couples who turn to criminal gangs to supply the treasured male heir, while the girls are trafficked to become prostitutes or brides in rural areas where there is a major shortage of girls because of the one-child policy, which has led to an alarming shift in the ratio between boys and girls.

Baby boys can sell for as much as €4,600, while girls are sometimes sold for just €350, according to child welfare groups.

There have been scandals involving the sale of abducted children to orphanages. Some end up working in brick kilns in the heartland, others as beggars in the booming cities of the eastern seaboard.

The parents who gathered under the watchful eye of the police in Beijing met through a website called Baby Come Home and have gradually become a kind of informal group. There are more than 2,000 missing children on the website.

Some of the parents are reluctant to give their names because of the police presence. Their experience of the police has not always been positive, and parents have complained of police reluctance to follow up on clues.

Li Ni’s son disappeared in February 2009, also in Xi’an, and this is her fourth time to join a group of parents pressing for more to be done to find their children.

“I am so desperate to find my son, and I will continue to look for him using whatever means necessary, no matter how long it takes, no matter how many hardships I have to endure.”

The trade is often for boys. A preference for males is common in China’s rural regions, and families sometimes abort baby girls because they are limited to one or two children by family-planning laws.

The preference among rural Chinese for sons over daughters has caused a potentially disastrous gender imbalance in the world’s most populous country. In some regions the male-female ratio can be as high as 130 males for every 100 females, compared to an average ratio of 107-to-100 in industrialised countries.

Daughters become members of their husband’s family when they marry and move away, prompting the saying: “Raising a daughter is like watering someone else’s fields”, whereas boys grow into men who can till the fields and work as migrant labourers.

A mother from Datong in Shanxi province lost her daughter Wang Min back in 1997, and has searched high and low across the country for 13 years.

“My daughter was only eight years old when she disappeared, she’d be 21 now,” says her mother, her voice cracking. “I went to the police immediately after she disappeared, but since I cannot provide any evidence to the police, they cannot really give any practical help. All I can do is travel to places when I hear of a clue. I have another child now, but I still miss Wang Min, I miss her a lot.

“Maybe I won’t even recognise her now if she passed me in the street, but I will never give up hope.”

The gender gap has created a situation where there are not enough women of marrying age for China’s single men. Police say they have freed more than 10,000 abducted women, including 1,100 foreigners mostly from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Mongolia, since April last year as the widening gender gap fuels bride trafficking and prostitution.

Since the crackdown started, police have broken up nearly 2,400 criminal gangs and detained nearly 16,000 suspects.

Although individual police officers say they have a lot of sympathy for the parents’ plight such public displays are not allowed in China, and the police soon break up the meeting.

The parents believe this kind of public display helps with finding children. One father said he had heard talk about how the social concern generated by the demonstrations led to more children being found. “I don’t know where my son is now, but I hope some kind-hearted person who has seen my son, or whoever has my son, will bring him back to me.”

Ms Li is also convinced she will be reunited some day as some kidnappers have shown remorse and freed children. “Maybe one day my son will also come back to me in this way, and I will fight for him till that day.”