CHINA • Peng WENLE, 3 (2008) ~ Shenzhen

Millions of bloggers help find missing boy
February 19, 2011


Chinese man Peng Gaofeng (L) holds his son Peng Wenle, who had been missing for three years after being kidnapped,
as they arrive in Shenzhen on February 10, 2011

A Chinese father harnessed the power of the Internet and millions of micro-bloggers to track down his son abducted three years ago.

In the hunt for Wenle, now six years old, Peng Gaofeng also had to battle local police, who were unable to find the boy and advised him to halt his quest in the interests of "social harmony."

There was no doubt what happened. Footage from a security camera near Mr. Peng's cellphone store in Shenzhen shows a man in a leather jacket walking down a crowded street carrying a small child. He looks over his shoulder cautiously.

He puts the boy down, rests for a few seconds, then picks him up and continues out of the camera's view.

But that was not the end of the story. Unlike thousands of other children abducted in China every year, Wenle was reunited with his family on Feb. 8, thanks to social media and his father's refusal to give up.

Mr. Peng, 33, turned his shop into a search centre, plastering it with photos of his son. He offered a reward of 100,000 yuan ($15,000) for information leading him to his child.

The grainy video footage was not enough to help local police find the boy. In fact, Mr. Peng told the BBC that as his efforts grew more public with poster campaigns and television appearances, the more authorities pressured him to quiet down. Their message: You are disturbing the peace.

"By campaigning openly we undermine the image the government wants to project that this is a harmonious society," Mr. Peng told Damian Grammaticas, the BBC reporter.

He would not even meet Mr. Grammaticas in a public space, trying to keep out of the gaze of police who he said had been monitoring him.

The turning point in the campaign came after Deng Fei, a journalist at Phoenix Weekly magazine, took up Mr. Peng's cause. He posted Wenle's photo on Sina Weibo, a website similar to Twitter, where he had about two million followers, many of whom "retweeted" the photo.

A student at Jiangsu University, 1,200 kilometres away from Wenle's home, thought he spotted a familiar face in the photo -- a boy he had seen in Pizhou, a village in Jiangsu province.

He took photos of the boy and sent them to Mr. Peng, who found himself looking at his son for the first time in three years.

Mr. Peng travelled to Jiangsu with police from Shenzhen and waited at the local station as officers investigated. When they returned, they brought Wenle, known to his family as Lele.

A video shot by Mr. Deng shows a tearful reunion. Mr. Peng clutches his son, sobbing into a phone as he calls his wife and parents, repeating over and over, "It's our child. It's our child." A DNA test later confirmed it was their son.

"I knew it was him immediately, though he didn't recognize me at first," Mr. Peng told The Wall Street Journal.

"When I heard Lele was found it was a mixture of emotions," the boy's mother, Xiong Yili, told the BBC. "All the unjust treatment we'd suffered, all the sadness came up. But I was excited and happy too that we'd finally found him.

"I know he was aware he didn't belong with that family. I think he's coping very well, better than I imagined," she added.

The man who abducted Wenle died of cancer last year. Mr. Peng said the family had treated the boy well and sent him to school.

"I will let Lele stay in touch with the mother," he said, referring to the woman who had "adopted" his son.

"I really hate her, but I have determined to give up the right to sue her, because I see my boy is really attached to her. I do not want him to hate me in the future. The only thing I want is his health, both physically and mentally," he said, according to Xinhua.

A 2007 report estimated 20,000 children go missing every year in China. Wenle's story isn't unique only because so few abducted children make it back home, but because of how it happened.

Internet use in China is censored by the Golden Shield Project, often called the Great Firewall of China. Social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogging services like Blogspot and a few news websites have been targeted. But with homegrown services like Weibo, citizens are reclaiming their voices, and in some cases trying to reunite abducted children with their families.

Yu Jianrong, a scholar in rural studies with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, started a micro-blogging campaign asking people to upload photos of child beggars to compare with pictures of missing children. He says he has been contacted by many families who have seen photos that resemble their lost children.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/world/Millions+bloggers+help+find+missing/4313985/story.html