On Saturday, August 25, grandmother Wang took her 5-year-old granddaughter to a nearby playground at around two o’clock in the afternoon in Xuanwei, a county-level city in the northeast of Yunnan Province. Within just thirty minutes, the calm afternoon turned into a nightmare as the little girl went missing in the blink of an eye.
A close family member told Chinese media outlet Sina News that another woman, who also had a little girl with her, was also at present at the playground. Because the two little girls were playing together, the grandmother was less vigilant, knowing that the other woman was also there.
When the little girl was gone without a trace, the grandmother immediately notified police. The worried family also spread the message about their missing child via Wechat, which soon went viral on chat groups all across town and nearby cities.
Photo of the little girl, spread on social media.
With the help of police and watchful citizens, it later became clear that the little girl was spotted nearby the playground at 14:41, leaving the area in a white mini-van together with a middle-aged woman and another child. Just fifteen minutes later, they would depart Xuanwei by train, getting off at the Qujing station, some 60 miles away, at around 16:30.
After receiving various calls from people who had spotted the girl, local police were able to catch the woman and find the child at midnight, in a hotel nearby the Qujing station. When the police caught the woman, it turned out she had already purchased train tickets to leave to Chongqing, a city 500 miles northeast of Qujing.
Upon receiving the news that his daughter was spotted in Qujing, the child’s father rushed to the city and was reunited with his daughter at the hotel.
Father and daughter reunited.
The woman was arrested on the spot and taken away by police. The other young girl allegedly is the woman’s own granddaughter and was used as a ‘decoy’ to kidnap the 5-year-old.
The suspected abductor is taken away by police in the early morning of August 26.
Just within nine hours after her disappearance, the girl had undergone a big transformation; her clothes were changed, her hair had been shaven off, and she seemed unusually quiet. She will reportedly get a medical check-up to check for traces of drugs or medication.
The father turned to social media to thank everyone for their help in rescuing his daughter from the hand of a “child trafficker.”
The woman is held in custody while police further investigate this case. According to a close family member source, quoted by Sina News, the suspect’s family originally is from Xuanwei, but she moved to Chongqing with her husband after getting married.
Mother and daughter together at the police station.
Child trafficking is a serious problem in China, where many children are trafficked every year. As Simon Denyer described in Washington Post last year, there are no reliable figures for how many children exactly go missing in China annually, with academic estimates going from 20,000 up to 200,000. Official statistics, however, have previously stated (2011) there are fewer than 10,000 kids abducted every year; in 2016, according to China’s Children’s Development Report (中国儿童发展纲要), there were just 618 cases nationwide.
Studies suggest that children trafficking in China is mainly done for domestic illegal adoption, altough children also also kidnapped to be sold in to the criminal market (Shen 2016, 66-67).
In 2014, when there was also heightened media attention for the problem of child trafficking in China, one state media report (CCTV) suggested that the market price for a boy was about 100k RMB (±$14.685) and 40-50k RMB (±$7000) for a girl.
On social media, netizens now warn parents that even women with children might be dangerous, as this story shows, and to keep an eye on children at all times.
Also read: “China’s Stolen Children – Why Babies Are Booming Business”
By Manya Koetse, with contributions by Miranda Barnes
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Shen, Anqi. 2016. “Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China: An Empirical Study.” Journal of Human Trafficking 2:1, 63-77, DOI: 10.1080/23322705.2016.1136537
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