It has been six years since Zheng Chunzhong’s 3-year-old son was abducted from a market in his hometown. During the past six years, Zheng tried everything to look for his son, but to no avail.
By Wang Yan
By noon on a typical warm day in late June, there are only a handful of customers milling about the Tangbian Food Market in suburban Dongguan, Guangdong Province. The 200 or so permanent stores that line both sides of the street are mostly empty, and the peddlers and food cart operators have either packed up or begun a mid-day nap.
Zheng Chunzhong lives in and operates a store at the No. 1 stall at Tangbian Market. His is the first stall many customers stop at after leaving the busy traffic on the street and passing the market’s gates.
It was here, six years ago, that his 3-year-old son, Shalong, disappeared. Zheng, who is now 33, has been searching for him ever since.
A Constant Nightmare
Dongguan is located in the southern Guangdong Province, famous for its recent rapid development as a manufacturing hub. Since China’s reform, the city has attracted over 9 million migrant workers from across the country. Zheng Chunzhong left his hometown in nearby Fujian Province to join the throngs of migrants flowing into Dongguan in 2001. The family started a small bakery stand at Tangbian Market soon after they arrived.
Zheng remembers April 19, 2003 being a very hot day. In the early afternoon, while Zheng was taking his daily nap on a bunk bed in the rear of the shop, his wife was doing household chores and their son, Shalong, was playing outside with a little girl from the neighborhood.
At around 2:00PM, the little girl ran into the store to tell Shalong’s mother that, “An auntie (older woman) took Shalong with her to go and buy him some toys.”
Shalong’s mother quickly scrambled outside to ask people on the street if they had seen the older woman with Shalong. Nearby shopkeepers confirmed the little girl’s story, but, they said, they did not stop the suspicious-looking woman carrying the boy because she told them she was a relative of the family.
Zheng’s wife returned home to wake him. As Zheng remembered how two other families had also lost children in the same market, he panicked at the thought that his son could be gone, too. He went to a phone to call 110 (China’s equivalent to 911).
Fruitless Attempts
Zheng was shocked when the police asked him to come back the next day. Zheng was told that, according to regulations, a missing person case can only be filed after the person has been missing for 24 hours. “The first few hours after abduction is the most crucial in successfully recovering missing children,” said Zheng, referring to a well-known saying among law enforcement officials.
But, according to Zhang Zhiwei, a Beijing-based public interest lawyer there is no “24-hour” mandated waiting period between the time someone goes missing and when one can report them missing; police in China years ago adopted this as “common practice.”
Not to be deterred, Zheng began his own pursuit to find his lost son. He made over 15,000 flyers with Shalong’s photograph and posted them on lampposts, walls, in train stations, bus stops, markets, and other public places all over Dongguan. After canvassing the city for two full days, he borrowed money and asked friends and relatives to put up flyers in other cities including Guangzhou (the capital of Guangdong, 70 kilometers west of Dongguan), and Shenzhen (80 kilometers south).
The police, for their part, were coming up empty-handed in their investigation because they lacked any clues. Zheng concentrated his efforts into everything he could, including private investigations into child smuggling rings he had heard about in the eastern part of Guangdong Province. Apparently the Chaoshan coastal region, which includes the cities of Chaozhou, Shantou and Jieyang, is known to be a place where children, especially boys, who are viewed as a means of carrying on the family name and bringing prosperity, are purchased.
Zheng went directly to Chaoshan. “I spent an entire month riding my bicycle and calling my son’s name throughout a number of villages, hoping he might hear me and respond,” Zheng said of his first trip in the Chaoshan region. “But the whole area was too large to be covered, and the chances of me stumbling upon my son were slim.”
He enlisted the help of a local homeless man who knew about some of the illicit activities around Chaoshan. Zheng gave him two cartons of cigarettes and promised to pay the man 50,000 yuan (US7,200) if he found Shalong. The man did not allow Zheng to follow him. He was familiar with several families who had purchased abducted children, and he visited them and took photographs of the children. Within three days, he found seven little boys between the ages of two and four and presented their pictures to Zheng. Unfortunately, Shalong was not among the children.
In 2004, a year after Shalong’s disappearance, Zheng provided some of the clues and information that he had obtained during his research to Dongguan police. Police investigated the evidence and went to Chaoshan and finally cracked down on a gang of 11 suspects and rescued 38 kidnapped children.
Family Alliance
Soon after beginning his mission to find Shalong, Zheng found himself exhausted from all the traveling between various places in Guangdong. His friend, a local police officer from his hometown in Fujian, suggested that Zheng come up with a way to make the search a little easier. He told Zheng to contact other families of missing children and ask them to work together to find their missing children and get the public’s attention to the issue. Part of Zheng’s routine was to post fliers everywhere he went, and as he did, he began to notice other fliers for missing children in some of the same places.
Every one of them mentioned a child that was lost near to Dongguan. As Zheng recalled, there were a number of these cases between 2003 and 2004, and most of them involved the missing children of migrant workers.
