China Campaigns to Recover Stolen Babies

BEIJING, Nov. 3, 2009 — -- No. 30, Chen Ben Hai, looks blankly into the camera. The spindly 8-year-old was kidnapped five years ago. He holds up a piece of paper with his name written on it.

No. 37, Xuyi Fan, a beautiful chubby-cheeked baby girl, was snatched in February.

No. 52, Cheng Xiao Yan, a shy-looking girl, disappeared in 2002. The list goes on.

These are the faces of Babies Looking for a Home, a newly launched Web site that aims to reconnect 60 children rescued from abduction with their families. Many of the young victims have no memory or knowledge of who and where their families are. The site displays photographs of the children and details the information it has on where they are from and the circumstances under which they disappeared.

"This is a significant event because this is the first time that public security has released photos of children they have found who have been kidnapped," says Zhang Zhiwei, a legal adviser to the Chinese nonprofit Baby Come Home, a Web site that helps parents search for their lost children.

It's the latest step in a massive government campaign to deal with China's human trafficking problem. While there are no official figures, experts estimate that as many as 20,000 children are abducted every year.

"There are many reasons for the [trafficking] problem," Zhang explains. "Some families are desperate for a boy and some people are just looking to make a profit by kidnapping the children and selling them on."

China has a traditional preference for male heirs, and to get around the one-child policy, some families sell their baby girls so they can try again for a boy. At the same time, the country's family planning policy has created an imbalance in the gender ratio and there is also now a high demand, particularly in rural areas, for girls.

In 2008 an ABC News investigation found at least two orphanages where employees admitted that they paid anywhere from $300 up for healthy babies.