China's boys stolen and sold, police ignore grieving parents

Posted on Tue, May. 04, 2004
China's boys stolen and sold, police ignore grieving parents
By Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KUNMING, China - With startling frequency, little boys who go outside to play here don't come back. They are snatched, spirited across China, sold and resold.

Powerful social and economic crosscurrents have created a market for stolen boys in parts of China. Parents desperate for a male heir to sustain family lineage often pay a handsome price for a healthy lad.

In Kunming, capital of Yunnan province in southern China, kidnappers move freely within the teeming outlying districts of migrant workers. By one worker's tally, at least 215 of their children have gone missing in Kunming, a city of 4.5 million people, in the past four years.

China's nationwide state television highlighted the news recently even as police dispute the figure. Parents say police pay little heed to the abduction spree.

"When we report this to the police, they say, `You've still got another child. Don't worry about it,'" said Jin Cuihua, who lost her 6-year-old boy on Jan. 5.

Heartbreaking stories abound of parents whose boys have fallen into the hands of what appear to be organized gangs, which shuttle them hundreds, and even thousands, of miles to be sold to families eager to pay for additional offspring.

"We lost our children on the afternoon of October 4 last year. My two boys were playing in front of our building. My wife and I were at home," said Xu Yongcheng, a 31-year-old security guard, who spoke in an alley near his bare one-room apartment.

In an instant, 5-year-old Xu Xinmin and 3-year-old Xu Xinsai were gone.

"If the kidnappers are determined to get your kids, there's no way to stop them," Xu said. "I heard that some parents lock their kids in their rooms, but the kidnappers break into rooms."

In China, a longstanding "one-child" policy has caused birth rates to drop sharply, stabilizing the population at 1.3 billion people but also frustrating many couples eager to have a male heir.

Economic reasons fuel the desire to have a boy. Most workers in China, especially in rural China, have no pension or health care coverage, so parents rely on male offspring to care for them in old age or ill health. In this tradition, while a daughter is lost to her husband's family, a son supports both parents and sometimes two sets of grandparents.

Social traditions also come into play. Many Chinese feel that the family tree continues only with males, so they eagerly seek sons to carry on the family name.

The use of modern medical equipment to detect the gender of embryos - and facilitate abortions of girls - is widespread. In some parts of southern China, such as Guangdong and Hainan provinces, about 130 boys are born for every 100 girls.

Even so, the demand for boys remains unsatisfied, experts say.

So kidnappers prey on migrant families, who occupy the lowest rung on China's social ladder. China's floating migrant worker population may number as many as 120 million people. Migrants toil long hours in factories and construction sites, ensuring that the economy hums along, but city officials feel little responsibility for them. In China's authoritarian system, migrant workers have no way to press for government action.

Bone-weary from long work shifts, migrant parents sometimes are careless with their children, and kidnappers know it.

Gangs have established routes to take abducted children from Kunming more than 1,000 miles northeast to Shandong province, near Beijing, and Fujian and Zhejiang provinces along the East China Sea. The youth are sold and resold along the route, the national People's Daily newspaper reported April 23.

In Kunming, boys are worth $360 to $425, the newspaper said. As the boys move to Guiyang, capital of neighboring Guizhou province, their value doubles. It more than doubles again by the time the lads reach the coast, it said.

"Some kids have been sold 13 times" by the time they reach their ultimate buyer, the newspaper said. By then, the price can be as much as 20,000 Chinese yuan, or about $2,400.

Kidnappers are particularly active during holiday periods. Last Oct. 1, China's national day, they swept through the Hufu village area of Kunming. In one swoop, Pan Kunkun, 5, and two friends, Wang Tao, 7, and Wang Wei, 5, were taken as they played together.

Pan's father, Pan Benqiang, a peasant laborer from Guizhou province, remains deeply distraught and is unable to hold a job.

"I miss him every day," Pan said. "I'm in no frame of mind to work."

Ding Yong was opening an umbrella at an urban vegetable market to shade his stand one day last August when kidnappers snatched his toddling 20-month-old son, Ding Wuting.

Ding said police initially declined to write a police report.

"They said there was a lack of evidence," Ding recalled.

At one police station after another, officers declined to answer questions.

One mid-level officer lectured migrant fathers accompanying a journalist for not taking better care of their children. At another station, an officer suggested that migrants themselves were stealing children.

Police say migrant workers have inundated the city, adding to existing problems of public order. Some 1.5 million migrants live in Kunming's Guandu District, outnumbering Guandu's 560,000 permanent residents. The district reports 150 robberies a day.

Migrants to China's cities, coming from far away and speaking different dialects, have failed to unite into any kind of political force, yet Communist officials remain wary that they could spark unrest. Even as authorities pay little heed to individual migrant woes, they keep a close eye on organized protest.

When Wang Xingpu's two boys were kidnapped Oct. 1, he grew frustrated that police wouldn't give him a list of other missing boys. So he began compiling his own. His list of 215 missing children captured national media attention.

Last month, Wang and up to 60 other angry parents of missing children held an unusual rally in a downtown park in Kunming. Police watched closely.

"We blame the police," Jin, the mother, said later. "They catch thieves and killers. But they can't find the kidnappers of children? This is more serious. We can't understand this."

Police have told local Kunming media that they have recovered 63 abducted children and smashed four kidnapping rings. Parents say they know of only four or five couples who have found their children.

Zhang Meiyong reels from the loss of her 5-year-old boy, Xu Kun. She and her husband had paid rural village officials a fee of about $2,400, or several years' earnings, for the right to have a second child. On Jan. 5, her son was stolen.

"We think he's been taken far away," Zhang said.

Xu said he, too, thinks his two abducted boys are far away.

"They are probably in another province," he said. "China is so big."