Families in China ache for sons stolen in one-child era

Beijing – On a sweltering summer night 30 years ago, infant Li Yuanpeng was finally fast asleep, nestled between his parents, when a group of men burst into their home in southern China’s Guangdong province.

They beat Ms Chen Mingxia and her husband and tied them up as baby Li, in his pale green gown and whorl of dark hair, wailed from the bed.

It was the last time they would ever see their son.

They “took my child away”, Ms Chen told AFP between sobs.

Baby Li was kidnapped in 1995 when China’s one-child policy was in force and child-trafficking was rampant.

While no official data is publicly available, Li is one of the thousands of children, experts estimate, who went missing in China during the 1980s and 1990s.

In the days after Li’s kidnapping, Ms Chen and her husband would leave home before dawn, searching the mountains for their son, who was a few weeks shy of his first birthday.

Ms Chen still clings to the hope of one day reuniting with her son, and says that only then will “the burden on my heart be lifted”.

“It feels like a heavy stone is crushing my chest. If I don’t find my son, it will be a huge regret in my life,” the 52-year-old factory worker said.

Preference for sons

During the one-child era, the trafficking of young boys was fuelled by parents seeking a son to carry on the family line, experts say. Unwanted girls were often abandoned or sold into sex work, forced marriage or labour.

“Only a male heir was seen as a legitimate vessel for the family line,” Dr Wang Jingxian, a researcher at King’s College London’s Lau China Institute, told AFP.

The Communist Party introduced the strict population-planning initiative in 1979 to address poverty and overpopulation, and maintained it for decades despite demographers’ warnings.

While the policy ended in 2016, its effects still linger, with the drop in children and ensuing sex imbalance contributing to a demographic bottleneck.

In 2025, the country’s birth rate plunged to its lowest level since records began in 1949.

The legacy of the kidnappings is also apparent, with social media platforms like Xiaohongshu and Douyin awash with “missing person” photos, including some posted by families still searching for their sons.

Ms Xu Guihua hopes crowdsourcing among China’s one billion internet users could help locate her nephew, who disappeared the same year as baby Li.

‘Miss you’

Four-year-old Chi Jianyong was returning home alone after helping to deliver food to his mother’s vegetable market stall. He never made it back.

“How could we have known that there were so many human traffickers back then?” Ms Xu said.

“There was no surveillance (then)... That’s why human traffickers could operate so freely.”

Most of the network ran via direct arrangements between families and traffickers, who often moved victims long distances to make it difficult for them to trace their way home or be located by the authorities, Dr Wang told AFP.

Chinese authorities launched a nationwide crackdown on trafficking in 2024, handing out death sentences to some of those convicted.

Convicted child trafficker Wang Haowen’s death sentence was upheld in January 2025, while a month later a woman accused of having abducted 17 children was executed, according to state media reports.

Ms Xu told AFP she has never given up on finding her nephew, and has travelled throughout the country carrying missing-person signs in search of him.

She wants her nephew to know that he is loved and missed by his biological family, who have gone to great lengths to find him.

“Why don’t you come out? Why don’t you show yourself and find us? Your aunt, your father and your mother have been searching for you everywhere,” she said.

“We miss you so much.” AFP