A Chinese man who was kidnapped more than 30 years ago is reunited with his biological mother after drawing from memory a map of the village where he lived as a child until he was taken away.
Li Jingwei was just four years old when he was lured out of his house by a neighbor and sold to a child trafficking gang.
Decades later, on December 24, 2021, he shared on the internet a hand-drawn map that he drew in his head. The illustration published on the Douyin video sharing app went viral on social networks and was compared by police to a small village in the country. Then the case was linked to a woman whose child had been missing for three decades.
After carrying out DNA tests to prove the link between them, mother and son finally met again, in Yunnan Province, on January 1, 2022.
The video of their meeting shows Li Jingwei carefully removing her mother’s protective mask, used against the coronavirus, so that he can examine her face. Soon after, he starts to cry and hugs her.
“Thirty-three years of waiting, countless nights of longing, and finally a hand-drawn map of memory: this is the perfect moment after 13 days,” Li wrote on her profile in Douyin, just before the expected reunion . “Thanks to everyone who helped me get my family together.”
Li was kidnapped near the town of Zhaotong, in southwestern Yunnan Province, in 1989, and later sold to a family living more than 1,800 km away.
A current resident of southern China’s Guangdong province, he was unsuccessful in his questions to his adoptive parents or in queries to DNA databases. That’s when he decided to turn to social media.
“I am a child trying to find his home. I was taken to Henan by a bald neighbor around 1989, when I was about four years old,” he said in the video, shared thousands of times.
“This is a map of my residential area that I drew from memory,” he says in the video, holding up a rough guide to the village, which included features like a building he believed to be a school, a bamboo forest and a small lake.
Child abductions are not uncommon in China. Many children are kidnapped at a very young age and sold to other families inside and outside the country. In 2015, an estimated 20,000 children were kidnapped every year in China, a country of 1.4 billion people that adopted a strict one-child policy from 1979 to 2015.
The year 2021 was marked by several episodes of young people who managed to find their biological parents after decades of separation.
Last July, for example, Guo Gangtang reunited with his son 24 years after he was kidnapped in Shandong Province. This disappearance story inspired a movie in 2015 starring Andy Lau, a famous Hong Kong actor, singer and producer.
After his son was kidnapped in 1997, Guo reportedly traveled to more than 20 provinces across the country on a motorcycle following tracks.
Carrying banners with his son’s photo, he said he spent his life’s savings on his mission, sleeping under bridges and begging for handouts when he ran out of money.
While searching for his son, he also became a prominent member of missing persons organizations in China and helped at least seven parents reunite with their kidnapped children.
According to China’s Ministry of Public Security, police were able to trace Guo’s son’s identity through DNA testing. Two suspects in the kidnapping were later tracked down and arrested, the Chinese newspaper Global Times reported.
The suspects, who were dating at the time, planned to kidnap a child to sell him for money, according to a report in China News.
After seeing Guo’s son playing alone outside his house, the suspect—identified only by his surname Tang—grabbed him and led him to the bus station, where his partner, Hu, was waiting. The couple then took an intercity bus to neighboring Henan Province and sold it there.
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