BEIJING – In the grainy video, Zhang Xiuhong can see her daughter ride her bike down a country road on her way to school one spring afternoon six years ago.
In the next shot, Yao Li rides down a driveway a few moments after her classmates walk by. Then, the pictures stop: The 15-year-old disappeared just minutes after that surveillance footage was taken, leaving only a shoe as a clue in a nearby ditch.
Zhang and her husband since have searched all over China for Yao Li, hoping to rescue her from a child-trafficking industry that swallows up thousands of boys and girls every year. Along the way, the couple also have been arrested, harassed and jailed repeatedly by police who accuse them of stirring up trouble by joining with other parents and taking their search to the streets.
“We go out and search, and then all these police surround us,” Zhang said in the dingy room she and her husband share near where her daughter last was seen. “Nobody’s watching for my daughter. Nobody’s doing anything. How can we have any more hope?”
In a tightly monitored society where authorities detain even relatives of air-crash victims demanding government action, Zhang and other parents of missing children have learned that they must fight on two fronts.
First, they’re up against an opaque, sprawling network of abductors and illegal buyers and sellers of children. And since police efforts to find children often leave parents unsatisfied, they must negotiate with authorities to hunt for the kids themselves.
As many as 70,000 children are estimated to be kidnapped every year in China for illegal adoption, forced labor or sex trafficking, making it one of the world’s biggest markets for abducted children, according to the state-run newspaper China Daily. By comparison, in the U.S., about 100 children are abducted annually by people who are strangers to them, said the Polly Klaas Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preventing crimes against children and assisting in the recovery of missing ones.
Many parents say they toil largely on their own, with the police at best leaving them alone.
Xiao Chaohua, whose son was 5 when he disappeared outside his shop in 2007, said appeals to government-run TV to broadcast pictures and names of individual children largely are rejected, as are suggestions to develop a Chinese version of U.S. Amber Alert warning systems to spread information about missing children through roadway signs or other means.
“They won’t broadcast it because if they do, it’ll expose one of China’s problems: the fact that children go missing here,” Xiao said.
The Public Security Ministry, which runs the anti-kidnapping task force, did not respond to a fax and several phone calls seeking comment.
According to Pia Macrae, China director for the international nonprofit group Save The Children, Chinese police often are more willing to help families with greater means and, even then, frequently don’t tell parents what they’re doing.
Chinese police regularly crack down on any groups they perceive to be organizing without government approval and threatening official authority.
The parents of missing children refuse to give up.
About 1,000 families have formed a Beijing-based support group that shares leads about missing children and negotiates with police to allow parents to search for their children. They often go to cities where child- and sex-trafficking rings are reported to be operating and try to track down suspected traffickers.
“I’ve dedicated myself to finding him,” Xiao said of his son. “If I stop, I can’t do anything because I’ll be thinking of him.”
After China toughened its anti-trafficking laws in 2009, prices for abducted children shot up as much as tenfold to $32,000 for boys and nearly $10,000 for girls, he said. Children considered particularly attractive fetch even higher prices.
Zhang – the woman whose daughter last was seen riding a bicycle – said she felt her “heart run cold” when police stormed a rally of more than a dozen parents she was attending in July in the southern city of Guangzhou, near where the country’s biggest trafficking networks are reported to operate.
Like Xiao, Zhang and her husband, Yao Fuji, spoke with a haunting lack of emotion, clearly exhausted from years of anguish.
“They say China has human rights, but this isn’t the case at all, not a single bit,” Yao said. “Before this happened with our child, we thought everything was great, just like we saw on TV. Now, we know it’s all fake.”
As her husband spoke, Zhang silently replayed the video of her daughter riding to school, rewinding again and again to the moment she appeared on screen, just before she vanished.
Associated Press video journalists Helene Franchineau and Isolda Morillo contributed to this report.
