Chinese Police Arrest Biker Gang Selling Children

Police have broken up a gang of motorcyclists that snatched toddlers to sell in distant provinces, Chinese media reported today.

The children were abducted in broad daylight from the southern city of Yueyang, in Hunan province, and sold for as little as 860 yuan (£85).

Officials do not release figures for the number of children abducted each year, but say that more than 3,000 a year are rescued by police. Experts believe those are a fraction of the total and warn that many cases are never even registered.

The state news agency, Xinhua, said police spent four months investigating the gang before rescuing five kidnapped children and arresting 13 suspects. The Yueyang public security bureau said it did not know how many had been abducted in all.

The Beijing News reported that the children, aged two and three, were the children of migrant workers. They were sold in Yunnan, Sichuan or Fujian provinces for prices of up to 26,000 yuan (£380).

The newspaper added that one child was abandoned when it was found to be a girl, suggesting that the gang may have been selling the toddlers to families who wanted an heir. The traditional preference for boys remains particularly strong in rural areas, but birth control policies prevent many families from having their own.

Other children are trafficked into prostitution, sold as future wives for farmers or used as forced labor.

In 2007, China launched a nationwide crackdown after slave laborers - including children aged 14 - were rescued from brick factories in Shanxi province and neighboring Henan.

But only last year, newspapers reported that thousands of young children in the south-west were sold "like cabbages" to work in factories in other provinces. Others have been sold to orphanages, which place them with adoptive families overseas.

Even reports in the official China Daily newspaper have acknowledged serious errors in the handling of such cases. Many are never registered as criminal cases - which require investigation - but as missing person incidents, and there is no system for reuniting rescued children with their parents.

Only one of 34 babies rescued in a raid in Henan in 2004 was claimed by its parents.