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.

Instead, a Sunday Times inquiry has found that police have refused to investigate cases and have harassed families who dared to complain. The official preoccupation with silencing publicity about the kidnappings may stem from embarrassment.

A United Nations report shows that three years ago the authorities were warned about the surge in boy abductions. They have done little, if anything, to curb it.

Last week as Sha Zukang, the Chinese ambassador in Geneva, was defending the country’s record on child protection before a UN committee, police in Kunming arrested parents who tried to contact this newspaper for help in searching for their missing sons.

Some were infants, some toddlers, some were taking their first rides on swings or in plastic cars before they were abducted. The Sunday Times has seen the names, photographs and other details in more than 60 cases. All remain unsolved.

Most of the victims were poor. They were the sons of impoverished migrant workers who exist at the bottom of the heap in China with neither the money nor the political connections needed to get help.

Most of the perpetrators, the people who buy the boys, are wealthy. They can pay up to £3,500 for a child. They are the shame-free rich class of post-revolutionary China.

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