Zhang Dayong: lying in bed looking for an unknown corpse
China News Weekly reporter / Kui Yanzhang
Issued in the 982th issue of 2021.1.25 in China News Weekly
Standing on the terrace of Zhang Dayong’s house, you can breathe the cool, flowing air outside, with small green onions planted in a foam box at your feet, and you can see the winter sky of Luoyang when you look up. In the distance is a high-rise office building with a glass facade. Trees with dead leaves, a two-way four-lane highway with roaring siren and flying dust.
Turning and walking back from the terrace, Zhang Dayong's bedroom is located on the second floor of a residential building, less than 10 square meters, and the light is dim.
As a patient with ankylosing spondylitis, Zhang Dayong was in bed 30 years ago.
For the first 17 years of being in bed, there were only white ceilings and white walls in front of him.
After two operations, he could walk to the terrace on crutches and breathe the outdoor air for a while, but he could see the buildings, roads and trees in the distance, but he could no longer enter them.
In 30 years, he has gone out less than 10 times.
But he used another way to enter the outside world.
Ten years ago, he founded the only database of unknown dead in China.
To put it bluntly, he created a website where people can claim unknown corpses.
This person who was physically trapped on the bed used a network cable to connect himself with the fate of those desperate family members, nameless corpses, and people lost in another country, and also felt his own existence.
Database of Unknown Dead
Zhang Dayong is 1.85 meters tall, and his body almost fills the entire bed.
On the right side of his bed, there are crutches, a desk and a stool. When a visitor comes, he turns to the right and chats with the guest.
On the left side of the bed is a desktop computer.
The webpage he opens most often is the "Database of Unknown Dead" he created.
He searched for information on the nameless corpse on Baidu, Weibo, WeChat, and the official websites of public security and civil affairs systems in various places, and then sorted everything into this website.
In the eight years since the website was founded, more than 4,000 unnamed corpses have been integrated.
There are 180 messages in the message board, almost all of them are looking for missing relatives.
Now there are 500~600 IPs logging on to the website every day, and on average 20 webpages are browsed.
"This may mean that more than 500 people come every day to find information about their families." Zhang Dayong told China News Weekly.
However, he has never made any profit using this website. He is afraid of being said to "make money for the dead". So far, he and his mother still live on the minimum allowance and subsidy for the disabled that add up to more than 1,000 yuan a month.
Zhang Dayong first helped the family of the deceased to find an unknown corpse in the winter of 1997.
That was his sixth year in bed.
One day at noon, my mother came back from buying vegetables and told him that a body was found downstairs in the community. Many people were watching.
The body showed signs of burning. It was a woman wearing a red sweater with floral patterns on her sleeves and her trousers halfway down.
At that time, Zhang Dayong's neck and spine were stiff, unable to watch TV, but only listen.
The next day, he was lying on the bed and heard that on the TV, Luoyang TV was broadcasting a missing person announcement: A couple in Luoning County quarreled, the woman ran away from home, and the husband was looking for his wife.
The female physical characteristics described therein are almost the same as the nameless corpse Zhang Dayong heard from his mother yesterday.
Zhang Dayong took down the phone number and asked his brother Zhang Xiaoyong to contact his family.
Soon, the family confirmed at the public security department that the unknown corpse was his wife.
It was this experience that when Zhang Dayong started to try to make a tracing website in 2001, he set up a separate "Anonymous Corpse" section on the website.
After several years of operation of tracing websites, there are already 200 to 300 similar family tracing websites on the market, many of which are corporate operations.
Zhang Dayong felt that the competition was not good enough. Around 2007, he considered separating the "Nobody's Corpse" column and making it a separate website "Database of Unknown Dead."
To accomplish this goal, a lot of information about unknown corpses is needed.
At that time, Zhang Dayong had information about unnamed corpses released by the police that had been extracted from newspapers after years of reading newspapers.
Many of the contact information left in these messages are still BP phone numbers, which are no longer available.
Around 2008, Zhang Dayong was lying in bed, using telephone, fax, and e-mail to try to contact public security, civil affairs, and funeral homes more than 1,000 times, hoping that the other party would provide information about the unknown corpse.
In the end, only 20-30 public security units agreed to provide.
The reason the other party was willing to provide was that when he contacted the police, the other party happened to be investigating an unnamed corpse case and was about to publish the relevant co-investigation announcement, so he chose him as a private channel to find the door.
Zhang Dayong also sent an email to the then Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Tsang Yinquan, to inquire about the handling of missing persons and unknown corpses in Hong Kong.
Later, Tsang's personal secretary Yao Yifeng forwarded the mail to the Hong Kong Police Force.
The Hong Kong Police Force replied to him that Hong Kong has a special missing persons investigation team, and there are only 10-20 unknown dead bodies in Hong Kong every year.
The reply of the Hong Kong Police Force gave Zhang Dayong a lot of encouragement.
After that, he wrote letters to the secretaries of the provincial party committees and the directors of the civil affairs departments of ten provinces including Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangxi, hoping to learn about the information and handling methods of the unknown corpse.
"Now I feel this kind of thinking is naive, and they haven't replied. At that time, I felt that I should go to the relevant departments of the provinces to ask for information in person." Zhang Dayong recalled China News Weekly.
In 2011, Zhang Dayong won the "Millions of Youth Entrepreneurship Program" awards organized by the League Central Committee and China Mobile.
His entry is "Walking in China". He plans to follow the route of the Olympic torch relay to collect information on unknown corpses in person from relevant departments in various provinces.
At the end of the year, with the help of volunteers, Zhang Dayong went to Guangzhou, Nanchang, Shenzhen and other places.
In this line, Zhang Dayong collected more than 500 pieces of information.
After returning to Luoyang, he spent more than 2,000 yuan to formally set up the website "Database of Unknown Dead."
Dilemma
Now, Zhang Dayong collects the latest unknown corpse information on the Internet several times a week on average.
Zhang Dayong remembers that at the beginning of last year, during the two months when the epidemic was the most severe, almost no information on unknown corpses appeared on the Internet. After the epidemic eased, more information on unknown corpses could be found online.
In the past eight years, not many unknown corpse information provided on the website has been claimed by family members.
About 30 family members called Zhang Dayong to express their gratitude and inform him that the body has been claimed and hope that he will withdraw the information.
After saying this, the other end of the phone usually becomes silent or hangs up, and will not talk too much about Zhang Dayong about the death of his relatives.
"This is a particularly sad thing for every family. They want to say goodbye to this experience soon." Zhang Dayong told China News Weekly.
The family members did not know whether their lost loved ones were alive or had passed away before they found the remains of their loved ones.
Zhang Dayong discovered a special psychological condition in his dealings with these family members who were looking for relatives: If the missing person is an adult or an elderly person, and the family member has not been found for half a year, he will think badly and think that he has probably passed away.
And if the missing person is a child, even if he can't find it for more than ten years, the family still forces themselves to think that "the child should grow up now."
According to Zhang Dayong’s intuitive impressions of unnamed corpses collected over the years, there are probably six categories of unnamed corpses that were lost due to Alzheimer’s, ran away from home, went to work in other places, visited relatives in other places, traffic accidents, and involved criminal cases.
Over the years, the number of people who lost their cause of Alzheimer’s and migrant workers has increased significantly, while the number of people running away from home has fallen.
There is no official data to disclose how many unnamed corpses in China.
It’s just that some provinces will disclose some data sporadically: According to data released by Guangzhou funeral homes, the average number of unclaimed corpses received each year is more than 1,000, of which about a quarter are unknown and cannot be claimed by family members. For various reasons, no family members came to deal with it.
Feng Xin is a PhD from the People's Public Security University of China.
He once published a paper titled "Difficulties in the Investigation and Handling of the Unknown Corpse Case" in the Journal of Hubei Police Officer Academy, which specifically discussed the issue of Chinese unknown corpses.
In his memory, those unidentified corpses that have not been identified or whose family members cannot be found will be frozen in the funeral home. If they are unclaimed, they will remain forever, and some have even been parked for decades.
"No matter who's relatives, (cremated if they are not claimed), morally speaking, you can't justify it." Feng Xin told China News Weekly.
Feng Xin mentioned in his papers and interviews that the public security has an "unknown corpse management system" and a "missing person management system", and the inquiry authority is delegated to the county-level investigation team.
However, it is not easy for the police to confirm the identity of the unknown corpse.
On the one hand, the "Anonymous Corpse Management System" and the "Missing Persons Management System" are not interoperable, and data has to be compared manually, which is extremely police-intensive.
In addition, the data of the "Anonymous Corpse Management System" is not interoperable between provinces, and even between different public security departments in the same province. If the deceased is from another province, the department can only take the hard disk with the data and send it to the Ministry of Public Security for unification. exchange.
Even if the data is finally copied and you are willing to spend a lot of law enforcement costs to compare, you will also face another difficulty: the data of the missing people are more social information such as appearance characteristics and addresses, and when the unknown corpse is discovered, many appearances are unrecognizable. , What can be extracted is more physiological information such as DNA and fingerprints.
There are certain difficulties in matching and corresponding between the two.
The U.S. approach is to delegate the inquiry authority to the public.
In the United States, 600,000 people go missing each year, and 4,400 unnamed bodies are found each year.
Since 2007, the National Center for Forensic Science and Technology has launched the "NamUs Unknown Corpse Database", in 2008, the "NamUs Missing Person Database" was launched, and in 2009, the automatic comparison between the "NamUs Unknown Corpse Database" and the "NamUs Missing Person Database" was completed. Features.
10 tons of newspaper
There are many homemade tools in Zhang Dayong's room.
Next to the desk, there is an alloy rehabilitation device with a motor.
He had undergone two hip replacement surgeries. Due to the stiffness of the spine, too high height, and muscle degeneration after lying in bed for too long, he couldn't use any rehabilitation equipment on the market, so he found someone to do one.
On the right side of the bed, there is a high chair with high and low handles. It was specially made by him to help him go to the toilet.
Before Zhang Dayong became seriously ill, he was a top-ranked student in Luoyang No. 1 Middle School. His vision for the future was to be a scientific researcher.
In the first year of high school, after a large amount of dexamethasone hormone treatment, the body became extremely weak and chose to suspend school.
After staying at home for 10 years, in July 1991, he had a high fever for many days and was eventually bedridden. Only his arms and palms could move physically. He could not turn over. He could only face the ceiling all day and felt that his future was ruined.
Wang Yuping is Zhang Dayong's mother.
She remembered that Zhang Dayong had thoughts of suicide when he was just lying in bed.
After she found out, she kept on saying, “I took a nap at night, and then stayed awake.” Wang Yuping recalled to China News Weekly. Before that year’s New Year’s Eve, Zhang Dayong said to her, “No matter how hard it is, no matter how hard it is. No matter how much it hurts, I can survive it."
Before lying in bed, Zhang Dayong wanted to refer to the Guinness Book of World Records and make a "Chennes World Record" to record information about China.
After Zhang Dayong gave up the idea of committing suicide, Wang Yuping went to various schools and collected a large number of newspapers for Zhang Dayong by collecting scraps for him to read and make "Chennes World Records."
During the first ten years of bed rest, Zhang Dayong read nearly 10 tons of newspapers.
Because these newspapers were bought through waste collection, some of them were covered with noodles and rice grains.
He noticed that there were a large number of "Missing Person Notices" in the newspaper, especially in the middle of the newspaper, many of which were students who had run away from home.
Zhang Dayong collected these missing persons notices one by one and made 3 photo albums. He planned to hold an exhibition in the future to advise students not to run away from home.
In 1998, Zhang Dayong learned from Xinhua News Agency reports that the National Center for Missing Children in the United States established a website for tracing people.
Therefore, he wanted to create a Chinese tracing website to update the tracing information he collected in the middle of the newspaper for his relatives to find people.
The person who assisted Zhang Dayong to build the website was his younger brother Zhang Xiaoyong.
The elder brother provides the idea and the younger brother executes it.
At that time, it happened that his younger brother Zhang Xiaoyong was laid off and had time to do this.
Zhang Xiaoyong spent more than a year in the bookstore and learned the technology of website production, and also consulted local college teachers in Luoyang. Finally, in 2001, Zhang Xiaoyong spent a few nights in an Internet cafe near the Luoyang Library and produced it according to his brother's idea. People tracing website.
It is not new to make a website or app now, but considering that it was 2001, the two brothers are actually very advanced.
At that time, the Internet had just entered China for only five years, with fewer than 20 million Internet users.
Two years ago, Jack Ma founded Alibaba in an apartment in Hangzhou, and it would take another two years for Ma Huateng to start Tencent.
After the website was created, Zhang Dayong, based on his usual newspaper reading experience, felt that "Luoyang TV News" might report the matter.
He asked his brother Zhang Xiaoyong to call the newspaper to break the news.
Soon, the newspaper published a report on "China's first tracing website", and some media reported that this tracing website made a sensation in Luoyang in 2001.
Since then, the number of people coming and going in Zhang Dayong's house has suddenly increased, and a large number of family seekers have gathered here.
Over the past few years, Zhang Dayong's tracing website has helped more than 300 families find missing relatives.
During Zhang Dayong’s first 10 years in bed, he was accompanied by newspapers and family members every day. “On the surface, I was lying in the metropolis of Luoyang, but in fact, I was lying on an isolated island. No one was seen and no one spoke.” Zhang Dayong said. "China News Weekly" said that after the website was established, everything changed.
The island began to connect with the mainland, and he also received funding for two operations.
After the second operation, he could walk on crutches to the terrace outside the bedroom, bask in the sun, breathe outdoor air, look at distant buildings and vehicles on the road, and feel the roar of sirens and flying dust.
(Interns Cao Yuyue and Xu Ying also contributed to this article)
China News Weekly, Issue 4, 2021
Statement: The publication of "China News Weekly" manuscript is authorized in writing