cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/50241630
On a sweltering summer night 30 years ago, infant Li Yuanpeng was finally fast asleep, nestled between his parents, when a group of men burst into their home in southern China’s Guangdong province.
They beat Chen Mingxia and her husband and tied them up as baby Li, in his pale green gown and whorl of dark hair, wailed from the bed.
It was the last time they would ever see their son.
They “took my child away”, Chen told AFP between sobs.
Baby Li was kidnapped in 1995 when China’s one-child policy was in force and child-trafficking was rampant.
While no official data is publicly available, Li is one of thousands of children that experts estimate went missing in China during the 1980s and 90s.
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During the one-child era, the trafficking of young boys was fuelled by parents seeking a son to carry on the family line, experts say. Unwanted girls were often abandoned or sold into sex work, forced marriage or labour.
“Only a male heir was seen as a legitimate vessel for the family line,” [says] Jingxian Wang, a researcher at King’s College London’s Lau China Institute.
The Communist Party introduced the strict population planning initiative in 1979 to address poverty and overpopulation, and maintained it for decades despite demographers’ warnings.
While the policy ended in 2016, its effects still linger, with the drop in children and ensuing sex imbalance contributing to a demographic bottleneck.
Last year, the country’s birth rate plunged to its lowest level since records began in 1949.
The legacy of the kidnappings is also apparent, with social media platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin awash with “missing person” photos, including some posted by families still searching for their sons.
Xu Guihua hopes crowd-sourcing among China’s one billion internet users could help locate her nephew, who disappeared the same year as baby Li.
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