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Chinese Man Finds Biological Mother Again 33 Years (!) After His Abduction, Thanks to Drawing of His Native Village

And the problem of child kidnappings in China

Vidar
3 min readJan 15, 2022

A Chinese man, who was abducted as a child, was reunited with his parents on New Year’s Day after more than 30 years. And this is thanks to his exceptionally good memory and the power of social media. The man was abducted from his native village as a toddler but still managed to reconstruct and draw the ground plan of the place. An appeal on the Internet made the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

Li Jingwei was barely four years old when he was lured away by a gang of kidnappers in 1989 from a village in the city of Zhaotong, in China’s Yunnan province. He was sold as an adopted child and grew up in another family almost 2,000 kilometres away, in Henan province.

In recent years, he has searched for his origins through his adoptive parents and DNA databases, without success. So on 24 December, he will be doing something completely different. Li Jingwei posted a video via the Chinese app Douyin, the equivalent of TikTok. He tells the story of his abduction and shows the ground plan of his native village, which he drew with his hand, as he remembers it.

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Vidar
Vidar

Written by Vidar

Interested in almost everything but especially history, science and technology

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