A Chinese man who was stolen from his family as a toddler has been reunited with his parents after 32 years.
Mao Yin (毛寅), then two-and-a-half years old, was snatched in 1988 when he was walking home from nursery with his father. His parents finally embraced him again on Monday in Xian, where he was born.
After Mao vanished, his mother Li Jingzhi (李靜芝) quit her job and launched a decades-long search for her son, that included sending out more than 100,000 flyers and appearing on numerous TV shows.
Photo: AFP
That long campaign helped 29 other families find their own missing children and made her search one of the most famous in the nation.
“Hope is what motivates me,” Li said in a interview earlier this year.
“I believe that someday I will find my son,” she said.
After more than three decades, a tip-off late last month finally led to that long-awaited reunion.
Police received information about a boy from Xian who had been sold to a family more than 600km away for 6,000 yuan (US$844 at the current exchange rate), state media reported.
Authorities utilized facial recognition technology to help with the search, using photographs of the toddler to create a possible image of the adult Mao and comparing the image to ones in a national database, state TV reported.
A DNA test confirmed Mao’s identity and on May 10, Mother’s Day, police told Li that her son had been found.
“This is the best gift I have ever got on Mother’s Day,” Li was quoted as saying.
Officials arranged the reunion for just a week later, in front of a sizeable crowd and ranks of TV cameras. Mao, who had been waiting in a side room, ran toward his mother when the door was opened.
The family embraced, all weeping, and Mao Yin’s father, Mao Zhenping (毛振平), gently kissed his son’s forehead. He had last seen his son when the toddler asked for water and they stopped at the entrance of a hotel to get some.
“I would like to thank the tens of thousands of people who helped us,” Li told Xinhua news agency. “I can’t believe that after helping 29 missing children find their families, I am able to find my own son.”
Renamed Gu Mouning (顧某寧), Mao had been brought up in Mianyang, Sichuan Province, without any idea that he was the target of a decades-long, high-profile search.
His mother remembered a toddler who was “clever, cute and healthy.”
She had started her search in villages and counties around Xian, and at one point followed a lead to Sichuan, only to find that she was on the trail of a different boy with the same name.
Child kidnapping has been a problem in China for decades.
Some of the minors snatched from their parents have been directly exploited by criminals and coerced into begging, pickpocketing, forced labor or the sex trade. Others have fed a market for adoptees, both among Chinese couples who want to have a son and from orphanages seeking the large donations that foreign adoptive parents are obliged to make.
In the past year alone, Chinese authorities have reunited more than 6,300 snatched children with their families using DNA tests, but that represents just a tiny fraction of missing children.
Mao Yin, who runs an interior design company, plans to spend several days with his parents, before returning home to deal with the implications of having his life turned upside down overnight, Xinhua reported.
“To be honest, I’m not quite sure about the future yet,” he said.
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
US President Donald Trump on Friday said Washington was “locked and loaded” to respond if Iran killed protesters, prompting Tehran to warn that intervention would destabilize the region. Protesters and security forces on Thursday clashed in several Iranian cities, with six people reported killed, the first deaths since the unrest escalated. Shopkeepers in Tehran on Sunday last week went on strike over high prices and economic stagnation, actions that have since spread into a protest movement that has swept into other parts of the country. If Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to
Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss, the stepsister of teenage diarist Anne Frank and a tireless educator about the horrors of the Holocaust, has died. She was 96. The Anne Frank Trust UK, of which Schloss was honorary president, said she died on Saturday in London, where she lived. Britain’s King Charles III said he was “privileged and proud” to have known Schloss, who cofounded the charitable trust to help young people challenge prejudice. “The horrors that she endured as a young woman are impossible to comprehend and yet she devoted the rest of her life to overcoming hatred and prejudice, promoting kindness, courage, understanding
‘DISRESPECTFUL’: Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s most influential adviser, drew ire by posting an image of Greenland in the colors of the US flag, captioning it ‘SOON’ US President Donald Trump on Sunday doubled down on his claim that Greenland should become part of the US, despite calls by the Danish prime minister to stop “threatening” the territory. Washington’s military intervention in Venezuela has reignited fears for Greenland, which Trump has repeatedly said he wants to annex, given its strategic location in the arctic. While aboard Air Force One en route to Washington, Trump reiterated the goal. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security, and Denmark is not going to be able to do it,” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “We’ll worry about Greenland in
RSS