The director of Xiangyang Hospital, located in China’s Hubei province, was arrested this week for allegedly selling false birth certificates and vaccination records for children to child trafficking networks operating in the country.
Ye Yu was detained due to an investigation by activist Shangguan Zhengyi, who reported on social media how he ‘infiltrated’ the hospital and, posing as an employee, obtained records linking the hospital director to the sales scheme. Fake documents on the black baby market.
According to activists, the birth certificates were sold for around 13 thousand euros each.
“The director cooperated with many intermediaries and used social networks. Customers only need to provide their personal details and pay the requested amount to receive a complete set of real records created by the hospital, including prenatal, hospitalization, delivery and discharge,” explains Shangguan Zhengyi, quoted by El Mundo.
Everything at the hospital “worked like a mafia” and there were other hospital staff involved in the scheme, receiving commissions to issue certificates to Chinese child trafficking networks.
These documents were distributed to child-selling networks across the country. “Usually, they buy them directly from the parents, although they have links with other hospitals that lie to the mothers and say that their babies are stillborn”, the activist clarified.
Last Monday, in addition to the director of the hospital, Chinese authorities arrested six other people linked to a child trafficking network with branches in more than 10 Chinese provinces. Police are also investigating the network’s links to an expanding market in ‘surrogate mothers’, a practice banned in China, which uses false documents to regulate the children’s illegal status.
China began to realize the problem of child trafficking in the 1980s, when the one-child-per-couple policy increased the supply of children sold on the street because parents could not afford the fines charged for additional children. or in cases of female births.
Networks went door-to-door to buy children, but with the growth of the market, children were stolen from their homes. The advent of the Internet and social networks has complicated the issue.
A few years ago, the Chinese newspaper Sixth Tone was able to talk to members of a trafficking network who sold children for 90 thousand yuan, about 12 thousand euros.
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