Kidnapped at the age of four, a Chinese man reunites with his family thanks to a card drawn from memory

It was the best Christmas present he could hope for.

On December 24, Li Jingwei, who was kidnapped by a network of child kidnappers at the age of four, to be sold to another Chinese family, asked for help on Douyin (the network's Chinese name social TikTok).

The man had reconstructed, using only his memory, the map of the village of his childhood, where he had been the victim of an abduction thirty-three years earlier.

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Thanks to this map drawn with a pen and accompanied by some explanations scribbled by Li Jingwei according to his memories (to indicate the presence of a school, a bridge, a bamboo forest ...), the police officers have could crosscheck this fragmented information with that at their disposal, and identified a small village near Zhaotong, in the province of Yunnan, where a woman had declared the abduction of her son in 1989. After DNA tests, this one s 'turned out to be Li Jingwei's biological mother, so he was able to find her and hug her on Saturday, January 1, just days after posting her video.

Li Jingwei's reunion with his biological mother.

YouTuve screenshot - 大象 新闻

Li Jingwei, who grew up in southern China's Guangdong Province, 1,800 kilometers from his home village, had previously exhausted all other means at his disposal to track down his birth mother.

Neither information from her adoptive parents nor her research in the DNA databases around the country has enabled her to trace her back to her.

“

” Li Jingwei posted on Douyin shortly before reuniting with his mother.

In a video widely relayed since on social networks, we see him hugging his mother after having carefully removed his mask to finally see his face.

“

” he says in the same video.

As the BBC reminds us, child abductions are not uncommon in China: they are mainly young boys, kidnapped at a very young age and then sold to other families.

A 2015 study estimated the number of children abducted in the country at around twenty thousand each year.

This child trafficking has flourished since the 1980s, in the wake of the application of the so-called “

” policy.

Already this summer, a father had reunited with his son after having resigned to travel the country on a motorcycle, on which large flags with the photo of his son had been attached.

He had traveled 500,000 kilometers across China, sometimes being forced to sleep under bridges or beg.

A journey that even inspired a film.

Since the launch of a dedicated DNA database in 2016, police have helped more than 2,600 kidnapped children find their biological parents, according to the Department of Public Security.