May 25th is International Missing Children’s Day. Dozens of parents from all over the country gathered outside the Kunpai Heze Branch Center in Mudan District, Heze City, Shandong Province on that day, hoping to draw attention to the issue of abducted children.
Heze City, known as a high-incidence area for child trafficking, has become a focal point for these parents in their search for their missing children. Over the past few years, these parents from various regions have endured hardships and spent a long time traveling in search of their missing children.
However, their search for their children was obstructed by the local government on that day. While the local government expressed support for the parents, they also deployed police officers and officials to detain the parents inside the Kunpai Heze Branch Center in Mudan District, Heze City, for several hours.
Videos showed over a dozen police officers and officials on-site intercepting the parents’ search activities.
Jiangxi Shangrao 19-year-old college student Xu Shui bei went missing in 2018. Xu’s father told a reporter, “She’s now 25 years old! We search for her ourselves, checking information every day, hoping for her return.”
Xu Shui bei, born on October 2, 1999, lived in Baishushan Pavilion Village, Fenggang Town, Poyang County, Shangrao City, Jiangxi Province, with her family of four, including a younger brother. At the time of her abduction at the age of 19, she was studying at the Jiangxi Ceramic Arts and Crafts Vocational and Technical College.
Her father recalled that his daughter was away at college when she disappeared suddenly on March 12, 2018. They were supposed to pick her up, but she said she was staying with friends. After three days of no contact, the parents realized she had been abducted.
Xu’s father was at a loss, “We have no evidence, no leads. Reporting to the police was useless. They took advantage of our situation.”
The parents of Xu Shui bei reported the case to the police, but the response was indifferent. “They can’t be bothered because we don’t have any connections. If I were a mayor or governor, they would search the city and the country to find her!”
He mentioned that there are many missing children cases and expressed hope for the safety of other people’s children as well as their own.
The mother of the 3-year-old missing child Wang Pengyu from Guizhou was also present. She posted a video on March 14 of this year, saying she had been searching for her son for 7438 days, “Looking for our treasure in the vast sea of people feels so hopeless. Today marks the 7438th day of searching.”
“Mom just wants to know where you are, how you are, whether you are doing well… I hope the children can bravely come forward…”
Regarding the population of missing children, the official statistics of the Chinese Communist Party have not yet been compiled nationwide, and there is no national missing persons information system. Chinese media have reported that there are 200,000 missing children in China each year, with an average of about 550 children missing every day. Nearly 80% of missing children are abducted for trafficking, and the chances of being found are only 1 per thousand.
In September of last year, a trafficker in mainland China was arrested for abducting and selling 11 children over three years. Surprisingly, her first deal was selling her own biological child.
Media personality Li Yiming told a reporter, “The Chinese countryside is too poor, and this trafficker was impoverished from a young age, with little education and no moral compass. For them, as long as they can make money, they’ll do anything without understanding the concept of moral decency.”
“Today’s Chinese people have been brainwashed by the atheistic propaganda of the Communist Party. If a person still has faith in gods and Buddhas, they would not engage in human trafficking no matter how poor they are,” he said.
Li Yiming believes that the Communist Party police are generally involved in criminal activities. “Why do abducted children have local household registration? The household registration system of the Communist Party is very strict. If the police scrutinize carefully when registering a child acquired by traffickers, they would not be able to legalize the child, which would reduce the phenomenon of child trafficking.”
Some netizens also questioned why surveillance cameras are omnipresent for traffic violations in various parts of China, yet they seem to malfunction when someone goes missing.