Internet provides a flicker of hope for China’s missing children

The search for a four year-old boy ignites China’s online community

A woman holds a candle behind a board showing photos of missing children during a campaign to spread information to search for them in Wuhan, in central China's Hubei province.

On Wednesday evening, when four year-old Chen Honghao’s mother sent out a call for help into cyberspace, it was an act of desperation from a parent who feared the worst.

When most of China was out celebrating the Chinese New Year with fireworks and sweets, Honghao’s parents were in a state of panic.

Their four year-old son had gone missing, wandering out of the Chen family’s small home and disappearing into the deserted, narrow streets of Fuan, a small town in China’s southern Fujian province.

Honghao’s mother feared he had been kidnapped. An estimated 200,000 children are abducted every year across China, many taken from families in small towns and sold to families in the city for $ 6,000.

Young boys are often in demand, in a society that has a traditional preference for male children. More than 600,000 children across China are still missing, with thousands of parents desperately trawling the country — some for more than a decade — in search of their children, with little support from the government.

For families like Chen’s, left with little resources and sources of support, an unlikely ally has emerged in their searches for their loved ones — the Internet.

When Honghao’s mother posted a message on the microblogging website Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter, she did not expect a response.

Online campaign

Yet in only two days, more than 50,000 Chinese on the website had spread her message, carrying a description of the four-year-old and a photograph. By Friday, the search for Honghao had become the second most-forwarded message on Weibo, which is used by more than 80 million people, reported Bill Bishop, a China-based blogger.

The online campaign for Honghao reflects how the Internet is redefining boundaries in China, which has the world’s biggest online population with 475 million Internet users. The Internet is closely controlled here, with politically-sensitive information often censored and social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, blocked by the authorities.

Yet the Internet is still providing a platform for mobilising new responses to challenges that the country’s institutions are struggling to cope with in the face of rapid changes. The online fight against trafficking is a case in point. In the past three decades following economic reforms, the number of trafficking cases has grown, many orchestrated by criminal gangs that have sprouted up along with rising corruption.

Between April 2009 and September 2010, the government launched a first-of-its-kind crackdown on trafficking, freeing 5,896 abducted children, breaking up 2,398 criminal gangs and arresting 15,673 people. It has also recently established a database of 130,000 DNA samples of parents and children in an effort to help reunite broken families. It has, so far, matched 813 children.

Internet a key space

But given the scale of the problem, scholars say, the government’s ability to deal with it is limited. The Internet is emerging as a key space for filling the gap. One website launched four years ago, called Baobeihuijia ( Baby Come Home ) has posted photographs of hundreds of missing children.

Social media is further expanding the possibilities, allowing the instant dissemination of information, as in Honghao’s case. Its reach has even extended to remote corners of China, to small towns like Fuan.

One recent initiative is a microblog on Weibo started by Yu Jianrong, a scholar in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Mr. Yu invites people to post photographs from across China of children begging on the street — many trafficked boys end up as child beggars, working for criminal gangs — so that their parents could identify them. More than 38,000 people follow Mr. Yu’s microblog.

After two days of intense searching, Honghao was found on Saturday. A search party led by a neighbour found him lost, in a cave in nearby mountains.

The other search party — made up of 50,000 microbloggers — might not have found the child, but their response brought much encouragement to his worried parents.

“We could not believe that people from across the country were trying to help our son,” Honghao’s relieved mother told The Hindu over the telephone from Fuan. “So many parents in China have been left alone when searching for their children, but we weren’t.”