A young Chinese man who claimed to have been sold as a child by his parents and abandoned by them a second time following a recent reunion committed suicide on Monday in the southern province of Hainan, in a case that has shocked the country.
The young man, 17 years old and surnamed Liu, published a farewell letter early Monday on the Weibo social network (Chinese version of Twitter) in which he explained how his biological parents had sold him as a baby to another couple, whose members died when Liu He was four years old, the China Daily newspaper collects today.
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The minor also stated that he suffered mistreatment and abuse at his high school in Hebei province (north).
The last December, Liu recorded a video in which he expressed his desire to be reunited with his biological parents following seeing a case similar to his on the news. in which a boy kidnapped 14 years ago had been reunited with his biological parents.
Liu He explained that he had been born between 2004 and 2006 in Datong, in the province of Shanxi (center), and that he had been sold at three months of age.
Shortly following, the Datong police, Thanks to DNA tests, he managed to find his biological parents and organized an event to celebrate their reunion.
But nevertheless, the parents, already divorced, wanted nothing to do with him following the meeting, Liu said.
Liu explained on Weibo that he told his biological parents that he wanted “a home” and “a dwelling,” which it was interpreted by the mother as pressure that led her to block her son on the Wechat instant messaging application.
Relatives of the adoptive parents explained to Chinese media on Monday that the couple paid 27,000 yuan (4,260 dollars, 3,770 euros) for the baby and the Datong police announced that they will investigate it.
“The abandonment and trafficking of children can be prosecuted and, if the police find sufficient evidence, the biological parents might be formally charged”explained Zhou Zhaocheng, a lawyer from Beijing quoted by China Daily.
The case has caused a stir in the Asian country: Liu He had to face criticism on the social network from Internet users who accused him of having undertaken the search for his biological parents out of mere interest.
The tag on Weibo regarding the event accumulates more than 240 million views this Tuesday and numerous users criticize the behavior of the media and Internet users in the story.
Chinese police located 10,932 missing children in 2021, of which 23% had been missing for more than 20 years, authorities reported in early January.
The resolved cases were part of the “Tuanyuan” (“meeting” in Chinese) campaign launched by the public security agencies of the Asian country in 2016 to resolve cases that had sometimes been stuck for decades.
This campaign has made use of technologies such as DNA analysis or facial recognition and citizen collaboration in networks to unravel pending cases.
The kidnapping of children has been a persistent social problem for decades in the Asian country.
Specialists emphasize that suicide deaths never have a single trigger, but are the result of psychological, biological and social factors that have treatment. People with suicidal behavior and their relatives have at their disposal health services and emergency telephone numbers where they can receive help.
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