A Desperate Search For Stolen Children

Lax Protections Leave Chinese Vulnerable To Human Trafficking

BEIJING -- The man was a distant relative, so Yuan Cheng thought he could trust him. They both came from the same impoverished village of corn farmers, where most teenagers leave home for city jobs that pay in one month what a family earns off the land in a year.

Last March, Yuan said he asked the relative, a construction team leader in central Henan province, to find a job for his 15-year-old son, Yuan Xueyu. Two days later, the boy and 18 others set off on a 500-mile journey to the city of Zhengzhou.

Xueyu was assigned to a job installing windows between the 23rd and 24th floors of a skyscraper. But at the end of a shift three weeks later, the boy vanished, the relative later told Yuan in a phone call.

Yuan's year-long search for his son has turned into an odyssey through the ill-defined world of human trafficking, an underground system that has helped fuel China's economic might and flourished in the absence of protections against forced labor.

Joining with other desperate parents and harnessing the power of the Internet, Yuan has looked everywhere he could think of: bus stops, train stations, construction sites, police stations in two provinces and furnace-like brick kiln factories, where forced labor is common.

"I clenched my teeth and tried to soothe my wife by saying my son must be playing somewhere. But he was not that naughty, nor that clever," said Yuan, who also has a 7-year-old daughter. "The police said it wasn't a criminal case. They asked me to search more carefully. I asked if it was possible that my boy was cheated or tricked into working somewhere else, and they said they had heard of too many similar things."

Officially, 2,375 trafficking cases were reported in China last year, a 7.6 percent decrease from 2006, according to the Public Security Ministry.

But the statistics are based on China's narrow definition of trafficking, which covers only the kidnapping, purchase or sale of women and children younger than 14, not older teenagers and men. Activists say the number is grossly understated and that tens of thousands of people are trafficked each year.

Historically, many victims have been women forced to marry lonely farmers, or male babies illegally adopted by couples who wanted a son. But those types of cases are leveling off, while cases of migrants deceived into sexual exploitation and forced labor are increasing, activists say.

Three years ago, Zhang Aihua's son, Hao Bingbo, was abducted in Zhengzhou while delivering food to a construction site. Five people surrounded him, taped his mouth, tied his hands, blindfolded him and threw him into a car, his mother said in an interview.

Hao, then 15, was taken to a kiln in Henan, where he spent three months, then to a kiln in Shanxi province, and a year later to another kiln in Henan.

He eventually managed to run away and returned home in August 2007. "I could barely recognize my son at that time," said Zhang, a street vendor, who made two unsuccessful trips to Shanxi to look for him. "He was skinny, his hair dirty and messy. I saw many scars and bruises on his body, knife cuts on his elbow and burns on his feet. He didn't wear shoes while he was laboring in the kiln, and his feet have not yet recovered."