Chinese police this week smashed a baby-snatching gang that was stealing and selling boy babies for up to €1,200. Miriam Donohoe reports from Beijing.
GaoYuanchun cuts a sad and lonely figure as he pays his weekly visit to the Handan County Police office in Hebei Province in China. The 28-year-old coalminer always prays for good news. But so far, there has been none.
Eight months ago, Gao and his wife Jin Li were sleeping in their shack in a temporary mining village in Handan when a gang, armed with iron bars, burst in and beat them. It wasn't money they were after but their four-month-old baby boy and pride and joy, Liu Bo.
Between October 2000 and April of last year, a total of 20 babies aged between 27 days and two years were snatched from migrant miners in this depressed part of north China by criminal gangs. Eighteen were boys and two were girls.
The pattern was the same each time. Gang members broke into workers' homes and smashed the lights before taking the baby away. In most cases, parents were injured during the raids.
Last week, police in Handan County revealed that they have finally managed to smash the baby kidnap ring, arresting 34 of the gang members and rescuing 16 of the babies. Four victims, including Gao Yuanchun's son, have still not been traced.
According to a police spokesman in Handan, Qi Xiaobo, there is little hope now that little Liu Bo will be found. "His father comes to the office or telephones us every week to see if there are any developments. He is very distressed."
The families of the snatched babies are migrant miners, most of them from Yunnan Province in the south of China. They were working last year in illegal mines in Handan County which have now been closed down now by the government for safety reasons. Most of the families have since moved on.
According to the police officer, male babies were a favourite target of the gang as they fetched a much higher price than girls. Because of China's one-child policy, boys are in popular demand in the underground baby market.
This baby-snatching ring sold the boys for between €1,000 and €1,200, approximately three times the average annual income in rural China. Girls fetched only between €400 and €600.
The buyers were mainly well-off families from the neighbouring counties of Quzhou and Shexian, and from the cities of Xintai in Hebei Province and Anyang in Henan Province.
"These buyers bought the babies as they did not have children of their own or did not have boys," said another senior police officer from Handan who did not want to be named.
The police are near the end of a long investigation which involved the delicate business of getting the babies back to their real parents.
"Even when we traced the babies we found it hard sometimes to persuade the buyers to give them back" the senior police officer said. "Their view was they had paid for them and they were therefore entitled to keep them."
In other cases, it was difficult to identify which baby belonged to which family as many parents had moved on to find work in other places after the illegal mines were shut. "We had a lot of difficulty tracking down these parents and matching who belonged to whom."
He said some of the babies had been sold twice. "The original buyers sold them on to other families in a few of the cases. That made it even harder to track them".
Trafficking of babies, and indeed, women, is not new in China. A massive flesh trade stretching from remote villages to big cities including Beijing and Shanghai is still flourishing. Chinese farmers desperate for brides are willing to pay for them. Families who want a son to carry on the family line, and are restricted due to the one-child policy, are willing to pay for their heir.
Thousands of women and children are kidnapped and sold each year in China. In 2000 the Ministry of Public Security ordered a nationwide crackdown on human trafficking following criticism both from within China and internationally over the burgeoning trade in brides for peasant farmers and young babies for urban families. The authorities pledged to punish with "iron hands" anyone found guilty of involvement in this gruesome trade.
As a result of the crackdown more than 10,000 women and children are said to have been rescued from a life of slavery.
Recently four members of a gang in southern China that kidnapped babies were executed. The ring operated between 1997 and 1999 and kidnapped 41 children. All the children were recovered and returned to their parents.
But despite the crackdown, the government admits trafficking is still a huge problem in the countryside where many children are left unattended and buyers are easily found.
Back in Handan, despite the fading hopes, the police are not giving up in their efforts to track down the last four stolen babies. This week they interviewed four more men suspected of involvement in the ring.
There was a happy ending for one miner, Wang Wenjun. He had his six-month-old boy stolen on October 19th, 2000 when a man wielding a rod broke into his quarters in the middle of the night. A few months ago, the baby was found and parents and son reunited.
But for Gao Yuanchun, the agonizing wait continues. He refuses to leave Handan and return to his native Yunnan until he gets news of his boy. "He said it doesn't matter how long it takes. He will wait," police officer Qi Xiaobo told the Irish Times.