Letter from Beijing

The announcement came on Friday, February 28. A court in Guizhou Province, in the Southwest of China, enforced the death penalty sentence on Yu Huaying. The woman appeared with her head bowed and a weary face during her trial for abducting and selling 17 children between 1993 and 2003.

During this decade, the disappearances of children were a source of concern for many Chinese families – thousands were reported each year, including Yang's, the victim who would become the voice of this cause. On the last day of February, she was in the middle of a livestream session, discussing other cases to solve with her reunited sister, when news of her abductor's execution broke.

In 1995, Yang was only 5 years old when a supposed neighbor managed to convince her, in front of her parents' home in Guiyang, to follow her to buy sewing needles. Under the influence of the one-child policy, child abductions were peaking. The preference for boys, in a society where sons are expected to care for their elderly parents while daughters live with their husband's family, drove childless couples to purchase children from human traffickers.

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