355 Suspects Arrested in New China Child Trafficking Ring; 89 Children Rescued

Police began cracking down on nine trafficking rings on December 18, 2012 “in provinces including Guangdong and Sichuan, two of China’s most populous, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the Ministry of Public Security.”

“We will collect the children’s DNA and use it to find their parents within a national DNA database established for anti-trafficking purposes,” Xinhua cited Chen Shiqu, director of the ministry’s anti-trafficking office, as saying.”

89 Chinese children rescued from trafficking in nationwide bust

[MSN 12/24/12]

“The official Xinhua News Agency said that in one case, a 1-month-old baby boy from Yunnan province was sold for 62,800 yuan ($10,000) to a family in Fujian province. A baby boy could fetch as much as 90,000 yuan ($14,250), Xinhua said.

Despite severe legal punishments that include the death penalty, child trafficking is a big problem in China. The commerce is highly profitable for the traffickers, and the demand is strong, driven partly by the traditional preference for male heirs, a strict one-child policy and ignorance of the law.

Child buyers in China are not subject to criminal prosecution if they do not obstruct rescue efforts or mistreat the children, and legal experts are pushing for a law revision to make it a crime to buy abducted children, Xinhua reported.”

China arrests 355 suspects, rescues 89 children in operation against child trafficking

[Washington Post 12/24/12 by Associated Press]

“Wang Xizhang, deputy head of the criminal investigation division of the Fujian provincial public security department, said large profits have also led to rampant child trafficking.
Wang said a healthy male infant bought with 30,000 yuan (4,810 US dollars) in poverty-stricken provinces such as Yunnan can be sold for 70,000 to 90,000 yuan in the comparatively well-off provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. ”

89 children rescued in trafficking ring bust

[Global Times 12/25/12]

“In announcing the rescue of 89 abducted Chinese children on Christmas Eve, a senior police official said baby boys could now be purchased in China’s interior for less than $5,000 — and then resold for three times that amount in the wealthier coastal provinces.”

“Almost always, the abducted children are boys.

“Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam,” Andy reported, “most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir.”

Su Qingcai, a tea farmer in Fujian Province, admitted buying a 5-year-old boy for the equivalent of $3,500, even though Mr. Su already had a teenage daughter.

“A girl is just not as good as a son,” Mr. Su, then 38, told Andy. “It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one.”

In his story in The Times on the latest round of arrests, Andy wrote that “the Chinese government says that 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, but some experts suggest the number may be as high as 70,000.”

The nationwide scourge of child abductions and baby selling in China first came prominently to light 10 years ago, when the police in Guangxi Province discovered 28 baby girls in the back of a long-distance bus.

The babies, all younger than 3 months, had been drugged to keep them quiet. News reports said they had been stuffed into tote bags. A story in the state-run newspaper China Daily was chilling in its matter-of-fact accounting of the incident in May 2002:

One baby died of suffocation. Others were blue from lack of air. Twenty passengers on the bus were arrested for trafficking. The babies were on their way to Anhui Province after being purchased from a hospital in Guangxi for $12 to $24 each. After they were rescued the children were sent to an orphanage.

The following year, China carried out its first executions of child traffickers.”

“Child-welfare advocates working in China say some kidnappings are the result of the increasing prices paid for adoptions by foreigners. Abducted kids often end up in orphanages, even though they aren’t orphans at all. Paperwork is forged. Identities are erased. The orphanage takes its cut.

It was revealed in 2005 that government officials and orphanage employees in Hunan Province “had sold at least 100 children to other orphanages, which provided them to foreign adoptive parents,” as John Leland reported in The Times.”

“One trafficker, Chen Zhijing, said that during the 1990s she would get a few dollars from an orphanage for bringing in a child.

But then the orphanage began asking for more babies. “It started paying $120 each,” she said. “Then $250. Then $500 by 2005.”

Her son, Duan Yueneng, got involved in the trade, which expanded, and they began buying infants from a supplier hundreds of miles away in southern China.

“We sold babies to orphanages. Others did, too,” he said. “They bought them because foreigners wanted them, and then made big profits when the babies were adopted.”

Mr. Tong said Mr. Duan “reckons he trafficked 1,000 or more. Duan says the orphanages falsified foreign adoption papers for each of the trafficked babies.”

“Sometimes the orphanages listed my sister as the finder, or they just put down a fake name,” Mr. Duan said. “For Americans who adopted babies, let me put it this way: When were the kids really born? Who really found them?”

Local family planning officials in Hunan Province also were known to have forcibly taken babies from their parents for a variety of offenses, as my colleague Sharon LaFraniere has reported. Officials would prowl neighborhoods looking for unregistered newborns, working off indicators like baby clothes hanging on laundry lines.

Where the seized children ended up is unclear.

One man Sharon interviewed, Yuan Xinquan, said his 52-day-old daughter was taken from him when he couldn’t pay a fine for having been too young – 19 – to have married and had a child. Six men jumped from a government van, confronted Mr. Yuan at a bus stop, then took the child.

“He was left with a plastic bag holding her baby clothes and some powdered formula,” Sharon wrote.

“Adoptions from China currently account for more than one-third of all international adoptions to the United States,” said a statement on the Web site of the U.S. consulate in Guangzhou, a workload that makes it “one of the largest adoption units in the world.”

Over the years, the consulate said, it has issued more than 70,000 visas to Chinese orphans adopted by Americans.

A total of 2,587 Chinese children went to American homes last year, most of them girls, most between the ages of 1 and 2.”

Buy, Sell, Adopt: Child Trafficking in China

[New York Times Blog 12/26/12 by Mark MacDonald]

“Police detained a family planning official during a crackdown on child trafficking in southern China, state media said on Wednesday.
The official, identified only by the surname Wang, was in charge of the government’s family planning work in an unnamed village in Anxi county in the south-eastern province of Fujian, the Global Times newspaper said.
Police charged Wang with trafficking four babies, while they also detained an official in Fujian’s Quanzhou city who bought a three-month-old baby from traffickers.
Several other cases of officials taking part in or turning a blind eye to child trafficking were reported in recent years.
“Police are also bribed by people who need to register a hukou, or household registration permit, for their purchased baby,” the newspaper quoted Zhang Zhiwei, a campaigner against child trafficking, as saying. ”

China detains family planning official over child trafficking

[The New Age 12/26/12]

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