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A missing persons initiative in China has been hailed as a success after almost all those reported missing were located. Photo: Getty

Missing children alert system set up in China has a 98 per cent success rate

  • The system partners with popular apps such as social media platforms to send alerts about missing children to hundreds of millions of users
  • Police have also used the system to crack down on child trafficking in China

A national missing children alert system has managed to find 4,707 children five years after its roll-out, China’s public security authority has said.

The system called Tuan Yuan, or Reunion, has sent out alerts relating to 4,801 missing children since it was set up on May 15 2016 and 98 per cent of these were located, including 58 who had been murdered, according to a statement by the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security on Sunday.

More than 25 popular Apps, such as Xinhua News, Weibo, AutoNavi, Taobao, Alipay, Baidu and Tencent QQ, have been connected to the system so that users of these Apps that are in the areas where a child has been reported missing can receive alerts and help local police with any information they might have.

The Tuan Yuan system has proved with excellent results that it is not only a successful example of the internet working well with anti-trafficking, but also a good story of cooperation between police and enterprises
China’s public security authority

The first case that put the system to test was a two-year-old girl who was reported missing in 2015 at a railway station in Hengshui city in northern Hebei province. Police officers had identified a male suspect after checking video footage and pushed an alert through social media platform Weibo and navigation software AutoNavi.

A taxi driver who saw the alert called local police and provided vital information. The girl was rescued in Zhengzhou a day after the alert was sent.

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“The Tuan Yuan system has proved with excellent results that it is not only a successful example of the internet working well with anti-trafficking, but also a good story of cooperation between police and enterprises,” China’s public security authority said in a statement.

“Over the past five years, with the support of 900 million moving users and caring internet users nationwide, missing children clues have been reported quickly and many of them have been found and sent to police stations,” the statement said.

In another case, a six-year-old girl Lu Wenqi was abducted on July 31 2016 but the trafficker feared he might be recognised after receiving the alert for Lu’s disappearance and arranged another person to take the child to a nearby police station, but the child was soon spotted and police were called.

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The reasons for disappearances ranged from 62 per cent running away from home with 33 per cent becoming lost, went to play or had a family dispute, there were 243 killed in accidents. Police rescued 59 children but still cannot find 94 of those reported missing.

According to a report on children’s welfare released last year, China cracked 413 cases of children trafficking in 2019, a 45.4 per cent of drop in cases from 2015.

Mainland police have also set up a separate initiative called Operation Reunion which finds children trafficked in the past four decades and reunites them with their biological parents using a DNA database set up in 2009.

The database has helped 7,500 abducted children find their parents. The operation has also located 784 missing children and detained 91 suspects in child trafficking cases.

The ministry set up the Tuan Yuan platform to tackle children trafficking in 2016 by working with Alibaba Group on a police collaboration system based on Alibaba Group’s office mobile app Ding Ding. Alibaba also owns the South China Morning Post.

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