In the grainy video, Zhang Xiuhong (張秀紅) 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 (姚麗) 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 in a nearby ditch as a clue.
Zhang and her husband have since 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 have also been harassed, arrested and jailed repeatedly by police officers 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 was last seen. “Nobody is watching for my daughter. Nobody is 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 are up against a sprawling, opaque network of abductors and illegal buyers and sellers of children. 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 US, 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.
The US Department of State said in its annual trafficking report this year that China “does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking.”
Chinese authorities have tried to show that they are tackling the problem, including launching a special anti-kidnapping task force in 2009, which state-run media outlets report has busted 11,000 trafficking gangs and rescued more than 54,000 children across the nation.
In October, the issue was highlighted in the Chinese-produced movie Dearest (親愛的), which told the true story of a couple who found their abducted son after searching for three years.
Still, many parents say they toil largely on their own, with the police at best leaving them alone.
Xiao Chaohua, whose son was five years old when he disappeared outside his shop in 2007, said appeals to government-run TV to broadcast pictures and names of individual children are largely rejected, as are suggestions to develop a Chinese version of the US “Amber Alert” warning systems to spread information about missing children through roadway signs or other means.
“They will not broadcast it because if they do, it will expose one of China’s problems — that children go missing here,” Xiao said.
The Chinese Ministry of Public Security, which runs the anti-kidnapping task force, did not respond to several telephone calls and a fax seeking comment.
International nonprofit group Save The Children China director Pia Macrae said that Chinese police departments are often more willing to help families with greater means, and even then frequently do not tell parents what they are doing.
“The parents feel uncommunicated to and want to take actions,” Macrae said. “We have seen a real effort to reach out from the police to improve things and we hope it will get better.”
While China has strengthened laws against trafficking and raised more public awareness of the issue, several parents said they were operating on their own.
However, they also said police harassment usually starts when they gather in groups of more than 20, wearing poster boards and handing out fliers with pictures of their children.
Xiao said police have also stopped him when he drives his van, which is pasted with photographs of missing children.
Chinese police departments regularly crack down on any groups they perceive to be organizing without government approval and threatening official authority, no matter the cause.
However, 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 have dedicated myself to finding him,” Xiao said of his son. “If I stop, I cannot do anything because I will be thinking of him.”
Over the past six years, the group has found two children, both of them abducted from small cities and sold to adoptive families, Xiao said. The group found one boy in an orphanage in central Henan Province, rejected by his purchasers because of a heart condition and just days from being sent overseas for adoption.
After China toughened its anti-trafficking laws in 2009, prices for abducted children shot up as much as tenfold — US$32,000 for boys and nearly US$10,000 for girls, he said. Children considered particularly attractive fetch even higher prices.
Wu Xingfo, whose one-year-old son was kidnapped while sleeping at home in 2008 in Shanxi Province, said he, too, has been harassed by police officers for trying to find his child.
“All the parents in Shanxi created our own group to find our children, but the government said our effort was causing trouble in society,” Wu said. “I have been imprisoned for two days. They have torn up the photographs I have passed around of my son. I do not understand why the police do not take this seriously. It is like you lost a dog or a purse to them.”
Zhang said she felt her “heart run cold” when police stormed a rally of more than a dozen parents that she was attending in July in Guangzhou, near where the nation’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 that China has human rights, but this is not 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 is 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.
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