“Attention, passengers: the train is arriving at Hengshui Station.” The conductor’s announcement awoke the parents of a two-year-old Jisi Mechizuo. The family, members of the Yi minority, were so exhausted by the long journey that they had fallen asleep. But when the couple woke up they were struck with terror; their daughter had vanished.
“Jisi Mechizuo, Jisi Mechizuo…” the couple desperately called their daughter’s name but got no answer in the crowded carriage. The parents soon called the police.
After reviewing surveillance footage from the carriage, the Hebei police confirmed that the girl had been snatched by a man, and entered the details of the missing girl and potential suspect on a software system called Tuanyuan.
Smartphone users within one kilometer of Hengshui Station received a notification about the missing girl, pushed to the leading mobile navigation app Amap and the Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo.
Thanks to an important clue from a taxi driver, the police found Jisi Mechizuo 385 kilometers away as the crow flies, in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province early in morning of 15 May 2016. The rescue took place within 32 hours. On the same day, the Tuanyuan system was officially launched. The Yi girl, whose name seems unusual to most Han Chinese, became the first child recovered with the help of the software.
Tuanyuan, or “reunion” in Chinese, is a software system and mobile app developed by six programmers of the massive e-commerce company Alibaba Group. It resembles the US AMBER Alert (nominally America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response, but actually named after a missing girl), but with notifications being pushed to individuals’ smartphones rather than being broadcast by local media. When a child is reported missing in a certain area, smartphone users within a certain radius will automatically receive notifications, including photos and descriptions, within some of the most popular apps that know a user’s location, meaning smartphone users do not even need to have a special app to receive the alerts.
According to statistics from the Public Security Ministry, by 31 December 2016, in the seven months since the program was launched, police released the details of 648 children through the system, 611 of whom have been found.
In a country where child trafficking is rampant, employing mobile Internet technology to fight the crime is a welcome move. But in the eyes of Han Xujie, the leading programmer of the team that developed Tuanyuan, “Completely getting rid of trafficking is still just a hope.”
“Reunion”
On the early morning of May 15, 2016, when the news came that Jisi Mechizuo was found, Han Xujie, 40, was about to participate in the launch event for Tuanyuan.
Han told NewsChina how he had told his own mother: “The girl was rescued via the app we designed.” The 70-year-old was taken aback and said, “I thought your job was only about e-commerce.”
As the coordinator of the six-person team, Han and his colleagues gave up their evenings and weekends for six months as volunteers to help the Ministry of Public Security design the anti-trafficking system. Han had never mentioned it to his mother.
The two-year-old Jisi Mechizuo reminded Han’s mother of an incident forty years ago.
Han himself was abducted when he was only one year old. He was born in Zhengyang County of Zhumadian City, Henan Province, an area where child abduction was extremely common.
One day in 1977, when Han’s father was out at work and his mother ill in bed, he crawled to the backyard and played alone. After a while, Han’s mother couldn’t hear the sound of her son from the yard. She managed to get up to take a look to find that the toddler was missing. A terrible idea dawned on her: her son had been abducted.
She asked he neighbors in desperation if they knew where her son was. Eventually an old man, a quiet Alzheimer’s sufferer who had never spoke a word to her before, told her that the boy had been snatched by a man and pointed in the direction of where the trafficker had run.
Fortunately, following the direction, Han’s father eventually found his son and the abductor in a house, and also found a train ticket to Wuhan for the next day on the man.
“If they had got there one day later, I probably wouldn’t have seen my parents again,” said Han.
“It was God who spoke through the old man’s mouth and let me know where you were,” Han’s mother always said when recounting this accident to him afterwards.
Now every time Han meets his mother, she asks about the missing children on the Tuanyuan platform. “I haven’t lost children myself. Perhaps it is those who have a similar experience like my mother who can really understand the anxious parents of abducted children,” Han told NewsChina.
In the past, Han was involved in several public welfare projects arranged by the Alibaba Group: he had donated books and clothes to children in poverty-stricken areas and also participated in a project in Sichuan Province to rebuild a city after an earthquake. But this time, having a good heart was not enough. Designing a system like Tuanyuan requires people with solid technological skills.
“Doing good for the public doesn’t just mean collecting trash besides the West Lake [the famous scenic spot in Hangzhou where Alibaba is based]. Taking advantage of our profession and skills to contribute something to society is fulfilling,” Lu Yining, a programmer in Han’s team, told NewsChina.
Internet Against Trafficking
The idea of Tuanyuan came from a talk between Meng Qingtian, the deputy director of the anti-abduction and trafficking office of the Public Security Ministry, and Liu Zhenfei, the chief risk officer of the Alibaba Group.
According to Meng, the Public Security Ministry hoped to establish an Internet platform aimed at combating trafficking. Liu was very supportive of Meng’s idea. Born and raised in Henan Province, Liu was also nearly abducted when he was young. His mother even had his name tattooed on his arm in case he was taken again.
Liu appointed Han Xujie, one of the company’s most experienced programmers, to work on the design.
Internal communications among public security staff was the first problem that Han’s team needed to deal with. As Han explains, it only takes a few hours for traffickers to transfer children to another province, and so traditionally the process of inputting the case information, faxing it, and reporting the case to layers of authorities had burnt through the most crucial time period for finding the missing children.
To facilitate internal communication, Han and his colleagues closely studied the AMBER Alerts system used in the United States. His team introduced the Alibaba-developed Ding Ding, an enterprise-focused chat app for workplace communication, to the public security system.
Ding Ding has now replaced walkie-talkies to become the main communications tool for more than 6,000 anti-trafficking police officers in China. Notifications of arrests needed are now announced first through Ding Ding, greatly shortening the time for internal police communications and better utilizing the critical period for finding the perpetrators and children.
Another issue that needed to be tackled was the spreading of fake missing child messages while trying to push out verified information to the public. Too much information concerning missing children swirling around social media platforms such as Sina Weibo and WeChat was proving false, and was wasting too much police time.
Information on the Tuanyuan system has already been verified by the Public Security Ministry. Meng told NewsChina that the biggest advantage of Tuanyuan is that from the outset it can distribute correct information to people in the location where a child has disappeared.
In the first hour after a child is reported missing, Tuanyuan will send a push notification to smartphone users within one kilometer of the location of the disappearance; in the second hour, if the child is still not found, the range will extend to users within two kilometers; in the third hour, it will be three kilometers.
“These three hours are the golden time in which the public can play a key role,” Meng told NewsChina.
For the Ministry of Public Security, the power of the public has proved far beyond expectations. Many vital clues are being provided by people who have received the notifications. Owners of internet cafes or convenience stores sometimes find the missing children in their own stores and persuade them to go back home. Public participation in the anti-trafficking campaign, Meng added, “was almost impossible to imagine before Tuanyuan.”
On November 16, 2016, an updated version of Tuanyuan was released, which links to 14 of the most commonly used mobile apps as well as the initial partners Sina Weibo and Amap. The new slew includes Alibaba’s Alipay and its online shopping website Taobao, the search engine Baidu, Tencent’s instant messaging software QQ and mobile ride-sharing platform Didi Chuxing.
The recovery rate is as high as 94.2 percent with 611 of the 648 children whose data has been entered into Tuanyuan being found. 72 of them had been abducted, while 358 were runaway kids. The fastest rescue took less than seven hours.
Hope
Child abduction and trafficking in China is a serious problem, but no public statistics are available to show how many children are abducted or sold each year.
Li Chunlei, an associate professor of the criminology department of the Chinese People’s Public Security University, has conducted research into the current situation of child trafficking in China, by closely surveying 133 open abduction cases in 2015.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs acknowledges that there are approximately 1 to 1.5 million child beggars in China, many of whom, as Li points out, are trafficked children.
China’s one-child policy has fuelled demand for children, especially boys, who are typically seen as the main support for a family and heir to any family property. The gender imbalance has created criminal demand for abducted or sold baby boys.
According to Li’s research, the majority of victims are under six years old, often boys, most sold to families. However, girls between 14 and 18 are another age group targeted by traffickers, with most sold into the sex trade.
The authorities have conducted several crackdowns over the past two decades. From 2009 to 2013, as the statistics of the Ministry of Public Security show, more than 11,000 trafficking gangs were“smashed” and over 54,000 children rescued.
In December 2016, police brought down a major human trafficking ring, which spanned seven provinces and municipalities across China. More than 157 suspects connected to the ring were arrested and 36 children rescued.
A more complex problem, as Li points out, is that more than half of all cases of children who are sold involve the consent of their own families. Wang Xizhang, a police officer at the Public Security Department of Fujian Province, has studied all the solved child trafficking cases in Fujian from 2009 to 2014, and found that more than 70 percent of children had been sold by their own parents.
The supply of children has shrunk with the deepening of the authorities’ crackdown, which in turn results in a price hike of the children being sold. In 2009, infants were sold for around 20,000 to 30,000 yuan (US$2,900 to $4,400), while now the price has risen to 80,000 to 100,000 yuan ($11,600 to $14,500). Some boy infants sell for as much as 150,000 yuan ($21,800).
As Wang Xizhang points out, selling one’s own children has become a way to make a profit for locals in poor areas of provinces such as Shanxi, Sichuan, Guangxi and Yunnan. In Xinzhou, Shanxi Province, even folk songs are spreading the message “Get Pregnant, Get Rich.” Such “sold by parents” cases are difficult to solve since neither side – sellers nor buyers – see it as a crime and so neither are reporting cases to the police.
Combining mobile Internet technology and anti-trafficking, is a bold and creative move for the Ministry of Public Security. “In fact, making an Internet+ anti-trafficking project [Internet+ refers to recent policy drives] a reality is rather difficult, considering the authorities are not clear about how to combine criminal investigation with the Internet,” Han Xujie told our reporter. “But luckily they are very supportive and willing to try something creative. If they had been a little bit more conservative at the beginning, our plan would not have worked out so nicely,” Han told our reporter.
Talking with frontline anti-trafficking police has made Han realize that living in a world free of trafficking is still a distant hope. “There was an extremely poor family in Shaanxi Province with six sons and one daughter. Although the family is too poor to have enough room to sleep, they still want another boy so badly. I can’t understand it at all. But the case makes me realize that the anti-trafficking campaign cannot be won overnight,” said Han.
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