Thirty-three years after being abducted and sold as a child, 38-year-old Li Jingwei's search for his mother ended last year with the two reunited after years of searching.
On Tuesday, the two human traffickers that kidnapped him — a man surnamed He and a man surnamed Wang — were sentenced to 11 years and 10 years in prison, respectively.
Yanjin County People's Court in the city of Zhaotong, Yunnan province, said the defendants abducted infants for the purpose of selling them and the behavior of the two constituted the crime of human trafficking.
After the case, which was heard publicly in December of last year, He and Wang were also ordered to pay Li compensation of 50,000 yuan ($7,000) each, far less than his claim for 7.08 million yuan.
Li, unsatisfied with the scale of criminal punishment and civil compensation, said he will appeal the ruling.
After the verdict was issued, many netizens showed sympathy for Li's suffering and also felt that the punishment for the traffickers was too light.
In his original complaint, Li said that in December 1989, the defendant surnamed He lived in his uncle's home in Yanjin county, and then prepared to kidnap and sell him to a buyer in Junlian county of Sichuan, about 25 kilometers from Yanjin, for the price of 500 yuan.
He lured Li to a nearby roadside, and the other defendant Wang, who was sent by the buyer, was waiting there. The three rode to Junlian county where Li was handed over to the buyer. Later, the 5-year-old was sold to another buyer in Lankao county of Henan province, about 1,600 km from his hometown.
The defendants' actions caused the plaintiff to be separated from his family for 33 years. During that period, the plaintiff and his relatives searched for each other continuously and suffered great losses both financially and mentally, the complaint said.
Li's relatives had searched for him after the kidnapping to no avail. After the public security department carried out a DNA comparison for him, Li found and was reunited with his birth mother in January last year, the court said.
In 2021, Li saw the news about how Guo Gangtang and Sun Haiyang were found and reunited with their abducted children after searching for many years. This made him more determined to find his original family members.
In December 2021, he contacted a volunteer group dedicated to searching for missing children and asked them to help find his birth parents.
After noticing Li's story, police in Lankao went to Yunnan to look for Li's hometown and found his birth mother in Zhoukou city of Henan, about 100 km from Li's step-family, and conducted a DNA comparison.
According to Li, before he was abducted, his cousin and aunt were also abducted at the ages of 14 and 13 respectively. Police in Yanjin county said on May 30 last year, that the abduction of Li and the abduction of his aunt and cousin were two separate cases, and that the four suspects involved in the two cases have been captured.
Human trafficking in rural areas was a serious issue in China in the 1980s and though it has reduced, it still remains a problem. Since 2017, Chinese courts have handled thousands of cases involving human trafficking and the victims of human trafficking.
From March 1 to Dec 31 last year, the Ministry of Public Security launched a special operation to crack down on the crime of abducting and trafficking women and children. According to the ministry, in 2021, the number of abductions of women and children across the country dropped by 88.3 percent compared with 2013.
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