Chinese man reunited with his parents 32 years after he was abducted as a toddler

Mao Yin was just two years old when he was abducted while walking home from nursery with his father, Mao Zhenjing, back in 1988.

Mao Zhenjing last saw his son outside the entrance of a hotel in Xi'an they stopped at to get some water. 

In the aftermath of his disappearance, Mao’s mother, Li Jingzhi quit her job to begin a three-decades-long search to find her son. 

It was a crusade that saw Li become one of the most famous people in China, appearing on numerous TV shows and sending out over 100,000 flyers to try and find Mao. 

Starting in the villages and counties around their home city of Xi’an, at one point Li headed to Sichuan after getting a tip about an abducted boy called Mao, though he ultimately ended up being a different missing child. 

 

The campaign yielded results for other families too, with as many as 29 ending up reunited with their own missing children as a result of Li’s efforts. 

Despite more than 30 years of searching, Li never gave up hope of finding Mao.

Hope is what motivates me, she told one interview earlier this year. I believe that someday I will find my son.

The breakthrough came in April when, according to state media, police received information about a boy from Xi’an who had been sold to a family some 600km (370 miles) away, for 6,000 yuan, three decades earlier. 

Facial recognition technology was also used to assist in the search, with authorities creating a possible photofit of the adult Mao, using toddler photos, with the resulting image cross-checked against a national database.