After traveling 500,000 kilometers through China on a motorcycle, Geo Gangtang finds his missing son in Henan Province.
A Chinese man was reunited with his kidnapped son after a 24-year search that saw him travel half a million kilometers around China on a motorcycle, chasing information about the boy’s possible whereabouts.
Guo Gangtang’s son was only two years and five months old when he was abducted in front of the family home in eastern Shandong Province, where he played neglected.
Traffickers snatched the boy and sold him to a family in central China, the public safety ministry said on Tuesday.
Kidnapping and child trafficking became widespread in China in the 1980s, when the draconian rule on one child was applied, and the cultural obsession with children fueled the demand for abducted boys.
After years of searches, police told Guo on Sunday that a DNA test confirmed that a 26-year-old teacher living in central Henan Province was his missing son.
Meeting
Guo is seen crying on his hands as his wife hugs her son, Guo Zhen, during a reunion ceremony in a photo posted Tuesday by the Ministry of Public Security.
“Now that the child has been found, everything can only be happy from now on,” Guo said through tears in a video released by the state-run China News Service.
After the abduction of his son in 1997, Guo, 27, left work and crossed the country on a motorbike with large flags carrying his son’s photo tied around his back.
His 500,000-mile (310,000-mile) crusade, which included fighting road robbers, sleeping under bridges and even asking for a petition when the money ran out, inspired the 2014 Chinese blockbuster, Lost and Love.
Over the years, Guo has helped seven other families find their lost children and raised awareness about child trafficking, a topic still taboo in China.
Guo told reporters that he previously visited the city where his son grew up to help another father find his abducted child.
Arrests
Two suspects related to the case have been arrested, the state-run Global Times reported. Police did not provide details about the family that bought Guo’s son.
The news of the high-profile meeting sparked an outpouring of excitement on social media with more than nine million views.
“Parents never give up their children! Guo’s struggle shows the depth of a father’s love, ”a user wrote on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform.
Since the launch of a DNA database of missing family members in 2016, police said it helped more than 2,600 abducted individuals as children (some more than 60 years ago) find their parents biological.
