A Chinese kidnapped as a child managed to find his biological parents after 32 years of separation, after police used face recognition technology to help track him down.
Mao Yin was two years old when he was kidnapped outside a hotel in Xi'an, Shanxi Province in 1988, and he was sold to a married couple without children in the neighboring Sichuan Province who raised him as their son, according to the Xi'an Public Security Bureau said in a statement.
According to the state-run CCTV station, the police changed his features to increase his life by using an image of Mao as a child and using the model to scan the national database and find close matches.
The police were moving on the basis of information that a person in a certain area of Sichuan bought a child in the late 1980s.
Yesterday, Mao, now 34, met his parents who had never stopped searching for their missing child, and Li Jingxi, Mao's mother, stated that after his abduction, she quit her job and sent over 100,000 leaflets to officials and appeared on several TV channels to demand his return.
Over the past three decades, Lee has tracked 300 false information about her missing son. But in late April, Xi'an police were notified that a man in Sichuan Province bought a child from Shanxi in the late 1980s, according to a statement issued by Xi'an officials.
The police tracked down Mao and later confirmed he was Li Jingxi's son after DNA testing.
Mao's adoptive parents renamed him Gu Ningning and grew up without any knowledge of his parents or that he was kidnapped. During the reunion organized by the Xi'an Police, Mao went out from a side door to a meeting room and ran to his mother's arms.
She said to me while holding her son's hand: "I don't want him to leave me anymore. I will not let him leave me anymore."
"Mao," who runs a home decoration company in Sichuan, told the TV station that he would move to Xi'an to live with his biological parents.
There are no official statistics on the number of children who disappear every year in China, but a system was created in 2016 to send alerts about missing children through social media and phone messages.
According to the Xinhua news agency, the police have helped more than 6,300 families find their kidnapped children during the past decade through the DNA matching system.
Kidnappings and child trafficking have become widespread in China since the 1980s, when the One Child Law was implemented, especially in light of the dominance of a culture that favors male children over females.