KEY POINTS:
The Madeleine McCann case has meant that almost all of us will have considered, for a moment at least, the horror of having a child snatched.
The emotions parents must endure aren't hard to imagine: the creeping numbness of realisation; the shock turning to panic as the minutes tick by; the helpless reliance on the goodwill of others, particularly the police.
In the West, cases of child kidnapping are sporadic. In China, however, they are increasingly common.
Around 190 children are snatched every day - stolen from their beds and the streets. If that number were dying every day from the same illness, you'd call it an epidemic. And that's exactly what it is, except nobody wants to talk about it. Especially the Chinese Government.
They won't talk about it because it's a short step from fully acknowledging the kidnappings to having to address why they're happening.
Which means entering dangerous territory - a root cause of such large numbers of children being snatched is the fact that having a son in China is a necessity. He carries the family name, he is the child who will provide for his parents as they age. A daughter will leave the family to marry into another name, passively obliterating her own family line and leaving her relatives without the assurance of help in old age. The One Child Policy - which Save the Children calls a "mass, live experiment in family life which is unique in the history of the world" - has resulted in prohibitive family-planning laws in China: prospective parents must have a birth permit before conceiving, and while rural families are allowed a second child if their first is a girl, urban families must pay a fine for flouting the one child rule.
And if you haven't had an abortion to get rid of your female child (although it is now illegal, around 40 million girls have been selectively aborted since the One Child Policy was instituted in 1979), how can you be sure to get a son? Sometimes the only choice seems to be to buy a stolen child, gender already determined.
"I did think about suicide," says Li, a woman in her early 20s. "I missed my child so much." It has been a year and a half since her little boy, Chen Jie, was taken. He was 5 years old, playing at his grandmother's vegetable stall in Sichuan, when Zhang, a trusted neighbour, passed by. Offering to bring Chen Jie back to his mother - and persuading the reluctant boy with the promise of sweets - Zhang left, taking the child with him. This was the last time Chen Jie was seen by his family.
Later, when parents and grandmother realised that neither had the little boy, they ran to Zhang's door, desperately hoping he was there. Calmly, Zhang claimed that after giving him money for sweets, he'd left Chen Jie at the apartment block. Their suspicion of his involvement in their son's disappearance could not be translated into evidence - even though when the grandmother confronted him later, she said he yelled, "I sold the kid, okay?" After police questioning, however, Zhang was free to go about his normal business, unlike the Chens.
"Sometimes I don't want to carry on my life," Li continues. She has come close to killing herself many times, she says.
Culturally, the responsibility for the family weighs heavily: Li and her husband, Lung, already feel they have let their parents down by depriving them of the grandson who would carry on the family name. The couple are determined to do anything to get their son back, but their options are severely limited.
The media is too close to the Government to be used as a tool, and even joining a parents' support group must be done in secret. They saved RMB600 ($106) to put Chen Jie's picture on a poker set that features missing children on every card; in their desperation they're gambling on gamblers.
Putting up "missing" posters of Chen Jie was risky because it's forbidden (the authorities aren't keen to have the reminder of missing children on show), but they did it. Hiring a private detective costs money, but they did that because the detective had a reputation for successful rescue missions. Speaking to Westerners about their plight was also dangerous, but they've done that, too.
IT'S not that the Chinese Government doesn't report on child trafficking: there is coverage of rescue successes, or assurances that the Government is doing all it can to combat the criminals. The stories are often, however, conspicuously free from statistics or analysis.
Article 240 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China makes illegal the abduction of women and children (men are overlooked) for the purpose of selling. There is no clause for abduction without being sold - if you are taken away to be a slave or a sex worker, that doesn't count. And currently, if you are abducted at 14 in China, you are an adult, and not part of the statistics.
Chen Jie is very much part of the statistics - one stolen child in the mass of 70,000 snatched every year. His little life had already been fraught with difficulty. He was born a year after the Chens started seeing each other: the One Child Policy stipulates children cannot be born without a birth permit, and you cannot have a birth permit if you don't have a marriage certificate. So Li had him in secret, giving birth in her mother's pig sty.
The couple hid their little boy for a year until they came to a decision that without a birth permit, without an official existence, Chen Jie's life would be nothing. They confessed to the authorities, and were ordered to pay a fine of $1400.
They only finished paying that debt last year. Now, the strain of being left without the son for whom they struggled is palpable.
"It has been very difficult," Li says.
Part of the Chens' problem, and the problem for many parents like them, is that they are up against a highly organised criminal network which supplies a seemingly never-ending demand. In China - as incongruous as it may seem - while it is illegal to abandon, steal or sell a child, it is not necessarily illegal to buy one.
CCTV, a government-sponsored news outlet, recently reported that: "Under the current law for families that adopt trafficked children, if they have not abused the children, and have not obstructed the rescue operations, the law enforcement can choose not to press charges, not to pursue further."
Parents of stolen children are immediately on the back foot; the law is essentially non-punitive, so child traffickers can justify their actions - they are simply supplying a demand that is not, in itself, a crime. Except, of course, those buying a child have no guarantee that the child was willingly given up.
And when the motivator for providing that child is money, reassurances mean nothing. A boy can fetch around $1765 - a lot of money when you consider that a skilled production worker in China earns $3200 a year.
One trafficker explains how he and his cohorts would identify the suitability of a child through the vulnerability of his mother. They would watch, wait, take a note of her routines, and bide their time for that moment when she would leave her son unattended. One such prize, he says, happened when the child was in bed, and the mother nipped out, unaware of watchful eyes.
"We shoved a handkerchief into the boy's mouth to shut him up", the trafficker remembers, calmly plotting the strategy as if there was nothing abnormal in his actions, "and we bundled him into a sack."
Another trafficker says, "I think there must be something wrong with treating children as goods, but I can't figure out what it is."
As soon as the Chens discovered that Chen Jie was missing, they called the emergency services. The police called back instantly for details and a description, but didn't come to their home. After a day of frantic searching, aided by neighbours with a car, the Chens went to the police station. A mix-up had occurred: because the emergency call happened late at night, the local police hadn't been passed the details.
Looking around the train station and hotspots of trafficking didn't turn up any clues; they interviewed the neighbour, Zhang - nothing. By then, Chen Jie could have been halfway across China. Zhang has now moved to Mongolia, allowed to melt into another crowd in another country.
The Chens are encouraged, however, by a sliver of hope: Lung has heard breaking news that a ring of traffickers has been uncovered. The police have rescued around 40 babies, and families will be reunited with their kidnapped children - this is hope, in his eyes.
"We're both victims of the situation," Lung says of himself and his wife, yet they are unwilling to criticise the Government's policies But Li breaks down, admitting that she's not sure if she can keep living like this. Pregnant again, she worries that she won't know how to treat her new baby, that it will be unfair to Chen Jie to have another child.
She doesn't sleep well, she says, dreaming every night of Chen Jie suffering in a poor village. And with a heart wrench Li realises she has never dreamt he was bought by a rich family and living well, despite the plethora of news stories about children having a "better life" with new parents. But she forces herself to keep going.
"I always remember what a father said who got his stolen boy back," she says. "He said as long as you keep your hope there is a chance; but if you give up hope and stop looking, the child is gone forever."
Li's mother, the last to see Chen Jie, grief-stricken and carrying her own burden of guilt, often dreams of her missing grandson, too. The word in Chinese for dreaming and wishing is the same "I had a dream that my grandson came back," she says. "I held him in my arms and he asked me, 'Grandma, are you tired?' I replied that I was not tired at all when holding my grandson.
"I was so happy that he finally came back. And then I woke up."
* Some names have been changed.
- Observer
