A Chinese father has been reunited with his son 24 years after he was abducted by human traffickers in front of their home in Shandong Province at the age of two in 1997.
Guo Gangtang (郭剛堂) spent 24 years crisscrossing the country, traveling more than 482,800km on a motorbike, with two banners each showing a photograph of his son, Guo Xinzhen (郭新振).
After nearly a quarter-century odyssey, the tearful reunion on Tuesday — held in front of camera in a police station — captured the imagination of the nation. On Tuesday, the Guo family’s moving reunion was reported across the country.
On social media, related hashtags have been read hundreds of millions of times, with many people sending well wishes to them.
In 2015, the story of Guo Gangtang’s search for his son also inspired a movie, Lost and Love (失孤), starring Hong Kong star Andy Lau (劉德華).
Lau said that he felt “extremely happy and inspired” to learn of the news, while pleading with the public to support the government’s anti-human trafficking campaign.
“Now that my boy has been found, everything can only be happy from now on,” Guo Gangtang told local media, adding that he would regard the couple who eventually raised his son as “relatives.”
Child abduction has been a problem in China for decades, with thousands of children being snatched by traffickers every year. However, with the help of new technologies and bioscience, more and more families are being reunited in the past few years, authorities said.
Last week, a mother in Guangzhou finally met her son, 26 years after he was kidnapped at a railway station.
Guo Gangtang’s journey to find his missing son was bumpy, too. Shortly after his son was abducted 24 years ago, he began to travel across more than 20 Chinese provinces to look for clues. He suffered broken bones in traffic accidents, and damaged 10 other motorcycles.
“Only by hitting the road looking for my son did I feel I am a father,” he once told Chinese media.
His perseverance drew media attention and won the public’s respect. In 2012, as social media began to become ubiquitous in China, he helped set up a Web site that assists other Chinese families looking for their missing children.
The Chinese Ministry of Public Security said police eventually helped trace Guo Xinzhen’s identity through DNA testing. They said they had also arrested two people suspected of abducting him in 1997.
According to local media reports, Guo Xinzhen was kidnapped on Sept. 21, 1997, while playing alone outside his home by a woman only identified by the police with her surname, Tang. She and her boyfriend then immediately sold the two-year-old to a family in nearby Henan Province.
Guo Xinzhen was still living in Henan when the police told him that his father had been looking for him all these years, local media reported. The 26-year-old is now a teacher.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS