Twenty Years and 380 Kilometres Home: a Trafficked Man's Second Mid-Autumn in His Village
Zhong Bin, abducted at eighteen months and sold through 'Aunt Mei's' trafficking network, was found by police the day before Mid-Autumn 2024. This week he marked his second festival back in Jiangxi — livestreaming poultry sales with his brother, twenty kilograms heavier, and demanding 100 yuan from the woman who sold him.
When Zhong Bin was found by police in September 2024, it was the day before Mid-Autumn Festival, the festival built on homecomings. He had been on the other side of one of China's longest-running agonies — a child abducted at eighteen months old and sold through the network of "Aunt Mei," the country's most notorious child trafficker — for twenty years. This week, Red Star News checked in on his second Mid-Autumn Festival back in Jiangxi: he has gained twenty kilograms, sells chickens and ducks with his younger brother on livestream, and says he wants to erase Aunt Mei from his life as quickly as possible (Red Star's report).
The geography tells the story. From Heyuan in Guangdong, where the buyers' family raised him, to his ancestral home in Ganzhou, Jiangxi, is 380 kilometres on a map. On his life it took two decades (the distance, in Red Star's telling). He was taken on the last day of 2004 in Huizhou, Guangdong; his father, Zhong Dingyou, then began the search that consumes so many parents of missing children in China, years of it documented on the missing-children hangtags that now ride supermarket shelves.
Aunt Mei herself has dominated the case's headlines. Indicted for child trafficking last year, she was disowned by her own family in court filings, and police finally attached a real face — a 2010 ID photograph — to the woman whose silhouette haunted China's root-seeking community for decades (the indictment, and her family's repudiation). Zhong Bin was one of the children sold through her network, and his homecoming climbed Baidu's trending board over the festival.
The reckoning continues on other fronts: Sun Haiyang, whose decade-long search for his son became the template for these reunions, is bracing for his son's kidnapper to walk free. Against that backdrop, the smallness of Zhong Bin's current life is the point. His demands are correspondingly modest — he is claiming 100 yuan in bus fare from Aunt Mei, a figure chosen for its symbolism rather than its sum — and his ambitions are domestic: the poultry livestream, the weight gained, the meals with the family he does not remember losing.
Twenty years after a one-year-old was carried out of Huizhou, the country's DNA databases and volunteer networks delivered him back one day before a festival about exactly that. What his father spent two decades searching for, and what his son is still learning to live in, is the same thing: a home that Mid-Autumn, at last, can mean.