The almost 50 euros of purchases in a famous supermarket of products imported from Taobao, the electronic commerce platform of the Chinese giant Alibaba, arrive at the Shanghai home in a large recycled cardboard box. A bit of Manchego cheese, a bottle of Nutella, two of olives and one of anchovies, a couple of packets of ham, a liter of olive oil and a bottle of London gin. But before you take out your order, the first thing you find when you open the box is a rather blurry black and white photograph of a baby.
His name is Liang Zihao, he has little hair and puffy cheeks. Although its current appearance should be quite different. The image is taken in 2008, the year she was born. Her family does not have more recent photos because the child disappeared in June of that same year.
All that information is written in Chinese on the box: Liang was kidnapped in the village of Yangxu, west of Shanghai. “If you find the boy – who will now be a 15-year-old teenager – contact the police officer Chen, who is handling the case,” it can be read next to the agent’s number.
In another corner of the box it is detailed that some Taobao online supermarkets are involved in a project to try to locate missing or kidnapped children from rural China. It is also recommended that parents, in addition to reporting, go quickly to DNA banks to register their samples in the national database. “We have already managed to reunite three children successfully. We trust that good things happen and that all the love leads to a reunion,” reads a last note written on the box.
The old national campaign to find China’s stolen children is everywhere. On television, on social media and at supermarket checkouts. Because in the Asian giant, regardless of the year in which the minors disappeared, it is common for news of happy family reunions to break out. Thanks above all to the large bank with thousands of DNA bases from the families of children who have disappeared during the last six decades.
Last February, a Chinese man who was abducted as a two-year-old in the southern province of Yunnan, and later adopted by a billionaire family, was found by his biological family. Mei Zhiqiang, who was now 27 years old and who found her biological parents thanks to DNA banks, decided to look for them when she found out that her family had adopted him after paying off baby traffickers.
A similar story lived by Li Jingwei, who, in 1989, when he was four years old, was kidnapped from his village in Yunnan by a neighbor and sold to a child-trafficking ring. A family from Lankao, a county 2,000 kilometers from his village, bought the boy for the equivalent of 300 euros. Last year, while Li was watching a program on television that told the stories of stolen children who had managed to find his biological family, he decided it was time to look for his own, although he didn’t know where to start. He only remembered some details of his hometown, but quite clearly despite the fact that more than 30 years had passed.
Li sat at the desk in her home, took a white piece of cardboard and a pencil, and began to draw on a map everything she remembered: a school, a bamboo forest, a pond, stone paths, mountains, grazing cows, and a couple of rivers Later, she uploaded a video showing the map and explaining her story on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
Thousands of users shared it. Most agreed that it resembled the peoples of southern China. The police also received Li’s drawing and compared it to a village in Yunnan where a woman reported the disappearance of her son 33 years ago. After DNA tests, the stolen child and his parents were reunited.
In 2021, all the DNA databases were unified in the same system, with amazing results. Police said they had found 1,205 people who were kidnapped more than 20 years ago; 888 makes more than 30; 173 40 years ago; 95 50 ago and 22 more than 60 ago. Some of the cases were even resolved with the child having already died as an old man.
This system is also supported by different facial recognition and artificial intelligence programs developed by the Tencent company, capable of simulating what the current face of the missing child would be like and then comparing the image with photos from national databases.
In the midst of the harsh confinements of the pandemic in China, the viral reunion, in prime time broadcast by the state chain CCTV, was that of Mao Yin with his biological parents. Mao had just turned two years old when he was abducted outside a hotel in Xi’an, in China’s central Shaanxi province. It was 1988. His captors sold the child for the equivalent of 790 euros to a childless family from the neighboring province of Sichuan.
In April 2021, police received a tip about a Sichuan man who had bought a child in Xi’an in the 1980s. The officers took a photo of Mao as a baby from his parents and used intelligence software artificially to age his face more than 30 years, comparing the result with the national database of the identity cards of Chinese citizens. A month later, the police informed the family that their son had been found.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project