CHINESE POLICE have rescued 89 children, aged between 10 days and seven months, after a widespread series of raids on child trafficking rings in the south of the country, state media reported.
Police made 369 arrests in the six-month operation across 14 provinces, the China Daily newspaper reported, and 2,600 police officers were involved in the task force.
“Two large criminal gangs involved in child trafficking have been successfully destroyed, once again showing the public security organs’ solemn commitment to the people,” police told the paper.
In many cases the infants had been sedated with sleeping pills and were still asleep when they were rescued. The children, most of them baby girls, were sold for an average of about 40,000 yuan (€4,360).
All the victims have now been taken to local hospitals and health clinics for further medical observation.
Since April 2009, Chinese police have uncovered 39,194 cases involving the trafficking of people, 14,090 of which involved abducted women and 8,717 involved children.
With over 1.3 billion people, China is the world’s most populous country and the government has sought to control population growth using the “One Child Policy”, which restricts most people to one child, with some exceptions, such as rural families, which can have two if the first is a girl.
The tradition for favouring boys in the countryside and the resulting sex-selective abortions, has led to a serious gender imbalance and some social scientists believe it has led to a rise in cases of trafficking in children and women.
In 2007 there was widespread public anger after a raid rescued thousands of abducted children who were forced into slave labour in brick kilns and mines across the country.
In one case, police in the southern province of Guangdong collaborated with their counterparts in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region to crack a cross-border organisation involved in the kidnapping and selling children from Vietnam.
“A major channel used to abduct and sell children from Vietnam to China and a big criminal network were destroyed,” an officer from Guangdong provincial department of public security told the police.