‘Happiness Built on Misery’

It had been 14 years since Sun Zhuo was abducted by a man surnamed Wu from Sun’s hometown of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province in 2007. Sun was three and a half years old. 

　

Sun Zhuo’s parents never gave up their search. They replaced the signs on their steamed bun stall with reward notices for the safe return of their son. They posted Sun Zhuo’s information and photos online and joined a search campaign with other parents of abducted children. 　

The Suns’ story was featured with those of three other families in the 2014 film Dearest by Chinese director Peter Chan (Chen Kexin), which raised public awareness of child trafficking in China. Thanks to the film’s popularity and work of missing children website baobeihuijia.com (Baby, come home), Sun and the Shenzhen police received many leads about Sun Zhuo. 　

In December 2021, police tracked down and rescued another abducted child, Fu Jiantao. When police showed Fu surveillance footage of Sun Zhuo’s 2007 kidnapping, he identified Wu as his abductor. The police soon located Sun Zhuo in Yanggu County, northern Shandong Province – more than 1,700 kilometers from home. 　

“Fourteen years and 57 days have passed. He is already one head taller than his mother, and he brought us many local foods [from Shandong]. He’s the Sun Zhuo we tried to find for years through everypossible way,” Sun Haiyang posted on Sina Weibo on December 6, 2021, the day the family reunited in Shenzhen. 　

In a video clip of the reunion from China Central Television (CCTV), Sun Zhuo appears a bit uncomfortable with his biological parents. He later told them that he did not want to return with them to Shenzhen and leave his family in Shandong. “I’m a bit in shock. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry,” Sun Zhuo told CCTV. 　

He is not alone. According to Zhang Baoyan, founder of baobeihuijia.com and a National People’s Congress delegate, many trafficked children are reluctant to return to their biological families after years of separation. Some even hold grudges against their biological parents for tearing them from the only family they have ever known. 　

While sympathetic to the trauma and needs of all victims, the court of public opinion usually sides with the biological parents who spent years searching for their lost children. Many online are calling on Chinese authorities to impose heavier penalties not only for child traffickers, but also their clients and others who facilitate the industry. 　

The Guo family had left their village before getting Sun Zhuo, according to the village head. When they returned two years later, they told villagers that Sun Zhuo was their son. 　

The lie was not exposed until police came looking for Sun Zhuo. Wu is currently in police custody. The couples that had Sun Zhuo and Fu are out on bail. 　

Sun Zhuo defended the Guo family. “I’ll be angry if my foster parents are arrested and sentenced,” he told the crush of reporters that had gathered for the reunion. He emphasized that the Guos treated him “very well.” 　

Despite Sun’s remark, the Guos are not “foster parents,” a legal status in a child welfare system. However, in discussions of child trafficking cases in China, many of the public, and even trafficked children themselves, erroneously use the term to distinguish them from biological parents. 　

“My sisters joked that my parents [Guos] found me on the street... but I never thought I wasn’t their biological child,” he said. “Whatever, my foster parents have supported me for more than 10 years. That’s almost as long as I’ve been alive. Their affection is all I’ve ever known,” he added. 　

The public expressed sympathy. “I feel very sorry for Sun Zhuo’s biological parents, but it may be their biggest comfort that he led a happy life with his foster family,” a netizen posted on CCTV’s Weibo account with the CCTV video clip. 　

“I am a mother myself... I feel sorry for Sun Zhuo... Maybe he will understand how his biological parents feel more when he becomes a father himself,” another comment read on CCTV’s Weibo account. 　

“We hope that Sun Zhuo will come back to us, but we want to respect his wishes,” Sun Haiyang told NewsChina in mid-December. One week later, Sun Zhuo changed his mind about staying with the Guos. Sun senior drove 1,700 kilometers to Shandong to pick him up on December 21, 2021 　

“The majority of found children choose to remain with their foster parents,” Zhang told NewsChina, adding that the emotional bond to their biological parents has weakened. 　

“After years of separation, most of the children have grown, have jobs and their own families... They live in the same world as their foster parents. They study and work locally, have local social circles and habits... They prefer the life they know,” Zhang said. 　

Xia Xianju, the mother of Yang Jiaxin who in 2020 was reunited with her 14 years after being abducted, recently told CCTV that Yang never returns to their home in Sichuan Province. He also blocked her on social media. 　

In 2015, CCTV reported on a young man surnamed Chen in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province who refused to meet his biological father after 15 years of separation. Chen’s father approached CCTV for help after police had tracked his abducted son, who was 2 when he was taken, a few years before. When police first found him, he had sent his biological parents a text message saying he did not want them to “disrupt his life.” 　

Zhang Baoyan told NewsChina that one child they reunited with their biological parents refused to talk to them or eat. After the child ran away from home several times, the parents returned him to the family he acknowledged. Another child, Zhang said, told his biological parents “I hate you.” 　

“A totally strange and new environment can make children panic and give them a sense of insecurity,” she said. 　

“The first five years of a child’s life is crucial for bonding with their parents. If they are abducted during this time, that bond and sense of security is missing,” Yang Xiuli, a licensed nanny in Beijing, told NewsChina. “If the foster parents take good care of them, and the child receives love and security from them, they will naturally bond with them,” she added. 　

Zhang agreed. “We have to give them space. It’s impossible they will immediately accept their biological families. They are human beings, not objects,” she said. 　

“Many children have not yet fully established their values and still need time to grow up. During this time, they could strike a good balance between their foster and biological families. It’s also a happy ending,” Zhang added. 　

“Even though the foster parents treat the trafficked children very well, they do it out of selfishness, because they need children to carry on their family lines. That child could come from anywhere. But for biological parents, their children are irreplaceable,” read a comment on NewsChina’s WeChat account following its Chinese language report on Sun Zhuo. 

　

In a recent video interview with Tianmu News under Zhejiang Daily, Du Xiaohua, the father of a trafficked child, appealed to the public not to call buyers “foster parents.” “They do not legally adopt children. They bought other people’s children like a commodity... They are buyers, they are criminals, they are the sworn enemies of the families still searching for lost children,” he said. Du’s story was also featured in Dearest. But unlike the other families in the film, he is still searching for his lost son. 　

China’s Criminal Law states that those who buy a trafficked woman or child may receive lighter penalties if they do not obstruct the victim’s return to their biological family nor abuse them. The maximum sentence is three years, while traffickers face sentences from five years to the death penalty. 　

However, few buyers have been penalized, according to published verdicts. Most ended up with probation through settlements with the trafficked children’s biological parents. According to lawyers, these written settlements, called dispute settlements of understanding, do not exempt the buyers from a penalty, but can help in getting a lesser sentence. 　

Xia Xianju, for example, has reportedly settled with her son’s buyers. Both Sun and Fu are persuading their biological parents to reach a similar agreement, according to media reports. 　

While Sun Haiyang said that he will respect the court’s decision, Fu’s biological mother Peng Dongying told media that she will not settle. 　

“I will never forgive them... They stole my child and immersed me in pain for over 10 years,” she told Wanxiang News based in Shanxi Province. 　

In another interview with Cover News under the Sichuan Daily, Peng said that forgiveness will only encourage more people to buy, as there are few legal ramifications 　

Her view echoes National People’s Congress delegate Yan Zhi’s proposal submitted in 2021 to define buying trafficked children as a crime on par with trafficking children. 　

“If no one buys, no one would sell,” Yan told China Youth Daily in March 2021. “If only [child] sellers are penalized, buyers will still create demand.” 　

The proposal won praise from the public, who accused trafficked children of forcing their biological parents to forgive the people who raised them. 　

Some lawyers, however, argue that buyers and traffickers are two different links in the chain, comparing them to drug dealers and drug users. Heavier penalties may drive buyers to obstruct police investigations or even hurt the children, they said. 　

This decade-old debate in China resurges every time media reports on another child trafficking case. In 2015, People’s Procuratorial Semimonthly, a magazine published by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s highest public prosecutor, and prosecutors in Nantong, Jiangsu Province invited legal experts to discuss the issue. According to the resulting article published on WeChat, those in support of increasing penalties included Liu Yuan, a law professor at Nanjing Normal University,argued that demand drives child trafficking, while opponents such as Peng Wenhua, a law professor at Suzhou University, argued that trafficking and buying harm society to different degrees. Li Ning, deputy chief prosecutor in Nantong, said that different penalties keeps traffickers and buyers from allying against authorities. 　

Following the Sun family reunion, CCTV interviewed lawyers about increasing the penalties against buyers of trafficked children. Yu Chong, an associate law professor at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, said that penalties regarding child trafficking generally put the interests of children first, and that lawmakers and judges have to find a balance between cracking down on the crime and protecting children. 　

In 2013, Chinese media reports exposed how underground agents, with the help of local police, faked documents to register trafficked children. 　

Under public pressure, Yanggu County police released a statement on December 8, 2021, vowing to thoroughly investigate the registration of Sun Zhuo and Fu. 　

What they uncovered was startling. Despite being trafficked to Shandong Province, Sun was registered in a county in Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, where he was recorded as two years younger than his actual age. Fu was registered to an address in the same county. However, Fu had never lived there. The house was empty. Its last occupants, an elderly couple, had been dead for years. 　

“If some officials or government employees fail to strictly review the required documents for registration or colluded with suspects to fake documents, this shows we have corruption in our hukou management and healthcare systems,” read an article on the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection website on December 8. 　

The stern response prompted police in Shangqiu, Henan Province to pledge to reopen a nearly 10-year-old case involving 4,885 stolen birth certificates. 　

Police are also investigating a lead Sun Haiyang posted to Sina Weibo in 2011, which alleged an official in the same village as Sun Zhuo’s new parents had bought a stolen boy. Yanggu County police told media they had investigated in 2010 and found no evidence of trafficking, but will reopen the case. 　

During the search for his son, Sun Haiyang also provided important leads to law enforcement about possible trafficking cases in villages across Shandong Province. 　

Child trafficking, particularly involving the abducting and buying of males, is strikingly common in some rural areas. Some cite the prevalence of traditional views regarding lineage, where only males can continue the family line. 　

In 2013, China Youth Daily reported that 595 child trafficking cases were filed with police in Wenshan, Yunnan Province between 2007 and 2013, involving nearly 600 children and over 400 suspects. Many of the accused are of the same family clan or the same village, where they allegedly cooperated to run a child trafficking ring. A village chief, according to police, even headed the operation. These close ties are among the reasons why child trafficking cases take so long to crack. 　

During the 2020 two sessions, China’s top annual legislative meetings, Zhang Baoyan proposed including the number of new cases of buying trafficked children into the annual performance reviews of local officials, and rewarding officials who report and rescue trafficked children. 

　

But for now, this gives little solace to parents still seeking justice. “I may forgive the buyers on the condition they surrender to the police as early as possible or inform us that our children are healthy and happy before the police found them,” Du Xiaohua said during a group interview on December 8. “But do not talk about their sentiments or their years of fostering our children after the police found them... They built their happiness on our misery.”