'Aunt Mei' Indicted for Child Trafficking — and Her Own Family Disowns Her
As prosecutors ready the child-trafficking case against Xie Jiamei — the 'Aunt Mei' of Chinese criminal legend — her first husband, son and relatives have come forward to disown her, sketching a biography of abandonment that readers are debating as character evidence, not excuse.
For years 'Aunt Mei' existed to most Chinese as a police sketch: a heavyset, scowling older woman said to have coordinated the trafficking of nine children. Now, with the 65-year-old suspect — real name Xie Jiamei — indicted and headed for trial, the country is meeting the person behind the drawing, and the portrait emerging from her own family is chillingly consistent. Her first husband, her son and her relatives have all given interviews this week disowning her.
Prosecutors have filed the case (as the site reported when the indictment landed), and the run-up to trial has become an exercise in national character study. On Wednesday the Red Star News reporter found Zhang Yu'an, her first husband, now 72, in Beihai, Guangxi. Xie, he said, walked out forty years ago when their younger son was two — a child she refused to feed even as he cried for milk. In four decades she came back twice: once to collect a land-requisition payment, leaving the same day; once for a son's housewarming, where her presence frightened a grandson into hospital. She never sent a fen of child support, and Zhang learned only now, from reporters, what she had done.
Her son, abandoned at three, was blunter when a reporter reached him: "She abandoned us — aren't we victims too?" (她抛弃我们，那我们不是受害者吗?). He said merely hearing her name makes him angry, and that he grew up taunted as the boy with "a mother who bore him but didn't raise him." Other relatives say she last came home a decade ago — they pooled money for her bus fare, and after she moved to Guangdong she changed her phone number. They say they hold no affection for her and worry the case will stain them.
The interviews add a dimension the court file will not carry, and they are being read in China as character evidence in the loosest sense. Xie spent years as the country's most wanted trafficking suspect — the "Aunt Mei" of the Zhang Weiping abduction ring, the figure victims' families and internet sleuths chased through a fog of rumor, fake photos and fake WeChat moments until her 2010 ID photo was finally published this week (our story on the face reveal). She was caught in 2025 in a Guangzhou urban village, in a ten-square-metre room rented for 550 yuan a month, selling cut mango from a tricycle (our account of her years in hiding).
What her biography does not do, most posters insist, is explain her. "Her cruelty to her own children was the answer all along — but no hardship excuses trafficking other people's children," one widely shared post put it. The distinction matters as the trial approaches: China's trafficking cases are usually told through the victims' decades-long searches, and Shen Junliang, whose son was among those trafficked, told a briefing this week that the woman he has pursued for years was finally within reach of a courtroom.
What the trial will settle is the legend's accuracy — whether the sketch devolved into folklore exaggerated her role, or barely contained it. What the family interviews have already settled is that the woman in the 2010 photo left nothing behind her worth reclaiming: the last person she visited was frightened by her, and the family that gave her bus fare hopes the case will pass them by.