Three children aged seven to eight years old disappeared from a village near Dongguan City in Guangdong province in recent weeks, bringing the number of missing children from Dongguan to 20 in less than a year.
All of the missing were children of rural migrant workers employed in the area.
Desperate parents in Guanjingtou Village of Fenggang Town in Dongguan City, Guangdong, suspect that the three children have been kidnapped and sold, and have offered a reward of 100,000 yuan for any information leading to their whereabouts and recovery.
In less than a year, almost 20 children have gone missing in Dongguan and none have been returned to their families, putting parents in the city in a state of panic. The police said they have set up a special taskforce to investigate the case, but they also noted that finding the children was like finding a needle in a haystack and urged the parents to be patient.
Southern Metropolis Daily reported that a notice about a missing person was put up on the walls of a market in the Guanjingtou Village. This was the second notice put up within the past month or so. Ms Zhong, a local resident, said that not long ago, she had seen another notice about two missing children surnamed Tang, who were brother and sister, on the doors of a Guanjingtou school set up by the residents.
Mr Tang, the father of the two children, said he had come from Yangxi County in Guangdong to Dongguan four years ago and had been working with his wife in a scrap business. His daughter Tang Minhua was eight years old and his son Tang Xianchong seven.
Abducted from school
Mr Tang recalled that on 31 May, he had gone to the school in the afternoon to pick up his children as usual. He waited for a long time, then alarmed searched the school, but did not find them, he said. Later, a student told him that, at 4.15pm that afternoon after classes were over, he had been sitting with the two Tang children on steps outside the canteen doing their homework when a man about 30 years old with short hair and dressed in a white shirt, approached the school gates and called to Tang Minhua. The young girl went to the school gates and after a short conversation with the man collected her school bag and together with her brother, left with the man.
After hearing this, Tang suspected that his children had been abducted and called the police. He also sent notices to news agencies in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Yangjiang, and even Changsha in neighbouring Hunan province, offering a generous reward of 100,000 yuan for the person who finds his children. However, more than a month has passed since his children went missing and Tang has not received any news about them.
On 28 June, a man unknown to Tang called and told him not to worry. He said his children were well and living in Guangzhou. Tang said the man spoke with a Henan accent.
Local police said Guanjingtou has attracted a lot of people from other areas, which had changed the nature of the village and created law and order problems. They warned that when rural migrant workers were working there, they needed to pay more attention to their children’s safety and not let them go out on their own.
Nearly 70 children missing in past three years
Dalang, another town in the Dongguan area, has reported a series of cases in which boys from the area have been abducted beginning last August, to date, a total of ten. Parents, worried sick, have formed their own alliance to search for their children. The police also set up a special taskforce to investigate these cases.
He Deming, a member of the alliance, told Hong Kong's Mingpao Daily that apart from a boy who had been sold by his father, they haven’t had any news about the other missing children. A policeman handling the case said recovering the children was as likely as finding a needle in a haystack, and urged the parents to be patient.
But the recorded statistics for the greater Dongguan metropolitan area (which includes Dalang), show that a total of 70 children have been reported missing in the past three years.
Source: Mingpao Daily (10 July 2006), Southern Metropolis Daily (9 July 2006)
21 July 2006