China's Stolen Children

Watch clips | Watch on 4oD | Have Your Say | Helplines

Ten years after the powerful film The Dying Rooms, about the neglect of abandoned babies in Chinese orphanages, Dispatches returns to a very different China where the infamous 'One Child' policy has had the horrific side effect of a boom in stolen children.

It is estimated that 70,000 children are kidnapped there every year and traded on the black market.

Featuring extraordinary access to those directly involved including: devastated parents desperately searching for their stolen son; a man who brokers the deals and has sold his own offspring and prospective parents grappling with giving up their soon-to-be-born daughter.

Beautiful, haunting and deeply tragic, this film takes us into the heart of modern China - a place where girl babies are being sold for as little as £200.

Detectives specialise in finding kidnapped children and child traffickers are so relaxed about the trade they ply, they allow the film-makers to record them buying and selling tiny human lives. 

This film provides an intimate portrait of the crisis this stringent government policy has created among China's poorest people.

The Dying Rooms
In 1995 Brian Woods and Kate Blewett uncovered the systematic neglect of abandoned babies in orphanages in China. Watch The Dying Rooms

Help find Chen Jie and other missing children in China

Share this article

Send this article to a friend »