From Yunnan, one of the poorest provinces in China, and 30 years ago, an impoverished woman sold her own child and then abducted a dozen other children to sell over three years. A local court recently sentenced her to death.
On Sept. 18, a court in Guiyang, Guizhou Province, accused Yu Huaying and her partner of abducting 11 children from 1993 to 1996 in Guizhou Province and Chongqing city, then selling them to Handan and another place in north China’s Hebei Province.
The 60-year-old woman confessed that she started the human trafficking business with her biological child for a transaction price of 5,000 yuan (about $684). Since then, she has never found out what happened to the child, according to state media.
Court records show that Ms. Yu was born into an impoverished family in Yunnan Province with four siblings, of which she is the youngest. She attended school for only two years and dropped out to work because of poverty.
Southwest China’s Yunnan Province had the country’s largest poor population in 2019.
Lai Yiming, a media worker, told The Epoch Times on Sept. 23, “In a morally deficient society dominated by the Communists, China’s rural areas are so poor that traffickers grew up in poverty. The poor are driven by hunger and poverty to do whatever it takes to get money.”
Mr. Lai further explained that since it seized power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has used atheistic ideology to brainwash nationals, ruining the ancient power’s foundation that is rooted in the traditional concepts of the Taoist and Buddhist beliefs.
“If one has faith in the Divine in one’s heart, he or she won’t do such things as trafficking in human beings,” Mr. Lai said.
Official media coverage of the single case is high-profile, saying that the crackdown on the crime of child abduction up to the death penalty. But it is worth noting that Mr. Yu’s case happened more than 30 years ago when she was motivated by personal poverty, according to Mr. Lai.
However, in recent years, some criminal gangs have taken child abduction and trafficking as a means of making wealth, with provinces and municipalities such as Henan, Hebei, Shandong, Tianjin, Beijing, Chongqing, Fujian, and Guangdong being the destinations of child trafficking.
Poor Supervision
A resident of Hefei, Jiangsu Province, Qin Yao (a pseudonym) told The Epoch Times on Sept. 22 that the police were of no help for her nephew’s disappearance, and the family searched on their own for 20 years without finding him.Twenty years ago, Mr. Qin’s sister-in-law brought her son to work as a stallholder in town, but the 4-year-old disappeared just within minutes of her leaving him unattended.
“A few years ago, my father-in-law passed away while looking for her in Zhengzhou [in Henan Province], and my sister-in-law returned to her hometown with an illness; she is almost fluctuating.” Mr. Qin said.
Mr. Lai believes that the CCP police are corrupt and ineffective in handling civil cases and criminal in general. The Chinese police do not take the initiative to solve child abduction cases and track the whereabouts of trafficked children. They often rely on relatives or trafficked persons to find clues and report the criminal to the police.
Children abducted from different places are eventually required to be registered at the local police station, said Mr. Lai, adding, “Suppose the police checked carefully the new registration of a child; the traffickers will not be able to legitimize the children they buy, and this will reduce the number of child abductions.”
