The abduction of boys in China....

China doesn't like to talk about this...but boys are being abducted.

THE faces of China’s lost boys stare out from hundreds of pictures that once captured joy but now serve only to remind their parents of a cruel loss of innocence.

A plague of kidnapping has swept across Yunnan, a remote southwestern province, claiming hundreds of boys from the city of Kunming alone.

One vanished while his father bought sweets. Two more were led away in broad daylight from a busy market. The children have gone from poor townships and rural farms. They are the sons of China’s working class but their fate has been covered up on the orders of the Communist party.

“As of the end of 2004 there were more than 200 boys missing from Kunming city alone,” said Lu Youmin, a businessman, who has emerged as leader of a group of bereft parents fighting for action.

The motive is greed. Gangs of traffickers snatch the children to sell to childless couples in the prosperous cities of coastal China, where they will be passed off as “adopted”.

Lu is an exception. The kidnappers took his daughter Lu Shanni, then aged eight, in 2002. But 95% of the stolen children are boys, prized because they will carry on the family line.

It is a well organised trade that the state is plainly unable to stop. Official propaganda highlights the occasional police success. Yet there is no helpline, no nationwide appeal, no television broadcast with pictures of the missing.