How badly do you want an iPhone? One young Chinese couple had an insane answer to that question, according to Chinese news reports: badly enough to sell their firstborn child.
According to the Xiamen Daily, the teenaged couple had their daughter just 18 days before deciding that perhaps selling her would be more profitable. They began searching for customers on Tencent’s QQ instant messaging platform, and found one who was willing to pay US$3,533 for their daughter – enough, they thought, that they could buy an iPhone and a motorbike.
The parents were eventually arrested by police and given terms of three (the father) and two (the mother) years’ imprisonment as punishment for their crime. The mother was reportedly shocked: “I was adopted, and in my hometown many people gave their kids to others to raise. I genuinely didn’t know this was illegal.”
Neither, apparently, did the buyer of the girl, who turned herself in after hearing that the selling parents had been arrested. Amazingly, the judge has allowed the buyer to keep custody of the infant girl.
Child trafficking in China
To be frank, it sounds like none of these people are intelligent enough to be parents. The buying and selling of children – child trafficking, in other words – is extremely illegal in China, and convicted traffickers are frequently sentenced to death. Neither the parents nor the buyer were serial offenders in this case, but their pleas of ignorance are a little difficult to believe. China’s government has been running propaganda campaigns about the evils of trafficking for years.
China’s government fights against domestic child trafficking, but it has also been reticent to admit how widespread it is
On the other hand, the naive-sounding mother isn’t wholly wrong: there are indeed places in China where families exchange or give away children on a somewhat regular basis. One Chinese subject I spoke to for a film I made on this topic was kidnapped and sold to a new family as a toddler, and the people in his new village were very willing to accept that this family had suddenly received a child that wasn’t originally theirs. It was well over a decade before anyone even thought to mention it to police.
Child trafficking for the purposes of adoption – both domestically and internationally – is a serious problem in China. Tens of thousands of children are trafficked and sold each year. The Xiamen couple are actually remarkably lucky; in their search for a buyer they found someone genuinely interested in adoption rather than a criminal trafficker who would be more interested in selling the child for profit. Based on the parents’ apparent ignorance, the fact that they avoided handing the child over to traffickers was probably just dumb luck.
While China’s government fights very publicly against domestic child trafficking, it has also been reticent to admit how widespread the problem is. It has been well over a decade since China’s government released any statistics related to how many children are trafficked each year, and parents of missing children attempting to get attention for their cases often face repression and obstinance from local authorities that would rather keep the problem in the dark.
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