More China Trafficking UPDATED

Last Thursday, China arrested 40 in connection with child trafficking. ” China’s state news agency says 40 people have been arrested for allegedly trafficking at least 22 babies for sale elsewhere in the country.

The Xinhua News Agency says members of the ring were apprehended Thursday in a series of raids involving more than 200 officers in the country’s east and southwest.

It says the ring bought babies in Yunnan, one of China’s most impoverished provinces, and sold them to families in relatively prosperous Fujian.

It says officials have traced 22 babies who were trafficked by the ring and are searching for others.

China’s thriving black market in children endures despite harsh penalties, including death. Some babies are sold by their parents while many others are simply stolen.”

Last week’s trafficking stories  recounted Yang Ling’s abduction. A Canadian article describes a second farmer’s story of his daughter’s abduction.

“Another villager, 40-year-old Zeng You Dong, tells a similar story. With four daughters, Zeng admits that he was in violation of the population control law. In the Chinese countryside, many farmers keep trying to have children until a son is born.

Zeng says his second and third daughter were twins. Shortly after their births in 2002, he and his wife decided that Zeng’s brother could take care of the elder twin.

Zeng was also away working when his brother called to say the one-child-policy officials had swarmed the house and used force to seize the girl.”

““When I returned, they said I could pay a fine to get her back. Then they doubled the fine, later they tripled it,” Zeng says. “In the end, I couldn’t pay and they told me it didn’t matter: She had already been sent from the orphanage and to a foreign family, probably Americans.”

Two important points in this article:

• “It is nearly impossible to determine how many adoptions consist of children stolen from their birth parents. After a similar scandal in 2005 in a different part of Hunan province, a study in the Cumberland Law Review determined that as many as 1,000 babies had been kidnapped and sold to orphanages for a finder’s fee worth a couple hundred dollars per baby. A Chinese orphanage owner who was later sentenced to prison was found to be using the adoption profits to open a number of private old-age homes.”
• “This latest baby-trafficking scandal to hit Hunan has a different twist: Family planning officials are accused of abusing their power to designate babies as “abandoned” despite evidence those babies were still wanted by their parents. Furthermore, it appears those officials also used their administrative power to give the babies new identities. In this case, all 20 babies in question were re-named “Shao,” a reference to Shaoyang, the city closest to where the children were abducted. By changing their identities and processing the stolen children through legally recognized orphanages, the chances of any impoverished Chinese parent ever finding their child are almost nonexistent.”

Chinese baby trafficking leaves farmers forlorn
[CBC 5/16/11 by Anthony Germain]

It is estimated that 100,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad. Most children have been listed as abandoned. These stories are likely the tip of the iceberg of how much trafficking has occurred in China. So far, the China AP community is not showing enough outrage. They are dismissing these stories as “old news.” The adult Vietnamese adoptee community is starting to gather DNA evidence to trace and reunite. We covered that story 10 days ago here. Adoptive parents should study what this group is doing and get their heads out of the sand and fight to establish a similar program. Because of the implication that Chinese government officials have changed the identities of these children, DNA may be the only way to reconnect these families that are CRIME VICTIMS. These parents are NOT birthparents. They are CRIME VICTIMS. It is time to call it like it is.

Update: MSNBC covers the story. The story is not only about this farmer, but the behind-the-scenes- reasoning for why this story is being published now.

“[L]ast week, the highly respected independent Chinese weekly news magazine, Caixin Century, ran a 15,000-word investigative report that featured Yang and several other families in Gaoping whose children suffered the same fate.

This time, the tale of baby-trafficking by corrupt family planning officials electrified China’s media. Even the state-run newspapers covered the story, some reporting that an official investigation was underway.

Within a day of publication, teams of local and foreign journalists (including NBC News) began tramping into the lush, terraced hills of Longhui County, perhaps the poorest area in all in Hunan – which is already one of China’s more impoverished provinces.

So why did the story suddenly capture the media’s attention now?

An obvious reason is that Caixin has a sterling reputation for its investigative journalism. Furthermore, the report was richly detailed and well-researched, the product of four years’ long work…Moreover, Caixin is homegrown, i.e., its reporting is done by Chinese in Chinese.”

“Another reason is the growing popularity of microblogs like Sina.com’s Weibo or Twitter. Although the latter is blocked in China, it can be accessed via virtual private networks (VPNs) that bypass the firewall – a tool widely used by the same crop of intellectual and professional Chinese elites who comprise Caixin’s readership.

Through microblogs, news of the Caixin report spread like wildfire. As with many stories of this nature, anything that survives Internet censors for even a few hours can gain traction and reach readers across the country.

But there’s another reason – one which might seem a bit surprising given the repressive trend of cracking down on dissidents, activists, and media (especially foreign) in China during recent months: good old-fashioned market competition. “

“These organizations constantly recalibrate their coverage, led by senior editors such as Hu Shuli at Caixin (an excellent profile of her ran in 2009 in The New Yorker), for example, who have a finely honed sixth sense for politics, for knowing when to push their agenda.

One way in which the more aggressive Chinese commercial media outlets appear to escape being shut down is to adopt what Bandurski calls “the shouldering the door theory.” One publication knocks the door, then another, then another – the premise being that the government can’t go after every organization all at once.”

Corruption in local media

“”When the foreign media come out here, they work hard. They rarely take breaks and work through the entire trip. The Chinese media? When they get an assignment, they look at it as an opportunity to play tourist. They see the sights. They eat long meals at nice restaurants. They’re not interested in the story.”

More seriously, there are regular instances of blackmail, wherein reporters have demanded money or other forms of compensation in return for keeping silent.”

Adoption scandal exposed by muckraking Chinese journalists
[MSNBC 5/17/11 by Adrienne Mong]