Children share a breakfast at the Lijiang Ethnic Orphan School in Lijiang of Yunnan province, China
When police in China’s southeast Jiangsu province arrested seven members of a child-trafficking ring in late August, they also rescued 10 babies who had recently been trafficked by the gang. In a country where thousands of children are thought to be kidnapped each year, it seemed, for once, that there might be a happy ending for some of the affected families.
The only problem? The parents of the rescued infants didn’t want to take their offspring back.
The tragedy of children being bought and sold, and the seeming indifference of their parents, has intensified the debate about the darker impact of China’s one-child policy.
(MORE: China’s One-Child Policy: Curse of the Little Emperors)
All 10 of the children rescued by Jiangsu police came from Liangshan, a hardscrabble region in the mountains of southwest China’s Sichuan province, where the average annual income is less than $400 per year.
The price traffickers will pay for a healthy child is more than 10 times that amount. Male children are particularly sought after by traffickers, who generally take children from rural areas and sell them to couples in wealthier areas who can’t conceive.
In Liangshan, it emerged that all 10 of the infants were not kidnapped but were sold to the traffickers by their parents. Compounding the problem, all of the children were born to couples who already had children.
(MORE: Have Foreigners Unwittingly Adopted Victims of Baby-Selling in China?)
According to authorities, after news of the rescue reached Liangshan, not one of the parents of the 10 children contacted the police to claim their offspring. Police believe the parents feared that they would have to surrender the payments they received from the traffickers — a small fortune for these subsistence farmers — and were also concerned about having to pay the taxes and fines associated with having an extra child under the one-child policy.
The fines, called Social Support Payments, vary from region to region but are substantial. In some areas, parents will be fined two times their annual income, in other regions up to 10 times their annual income. In 2012, the Chinese government took in more than $2 billion in Social Support Payments, with Sichuan province alone accounting for close to $400 million.
In the case of the Liangshan children, police have said there is nothing they can do. With the parents refusing to claim the children, and child-care institutions unwilling to house young babies, for now, at least, the children will stay with the families who bought them.
MORE: A Powerhouse Province Wants to Relax China’s One-Child Policy — but Don’t Bet on a Baby Boom