Yu Huaying's first victim was her own son, whom she sold to a family for 5,000 yuan, which is approximately 660 euros at the exchange rate. That happened in 1993 in the Guizhou province, southwest China. Over the next 10 years, Yu dedicated herself to kidnapping children. She would then sell them to other families or directly to orphanages at a time when China was the global epicenter of international adoptions.
This Friday, 61-year-old Yu was executed. The news became a trend on Chinese social media. In October of last year, a court sentenced her to death for kidnapping and trafficking 17 minors between 1993 and 2003.
Yu was arrested in 2022 thanks to a report from one of her victims, Yang Ninhua, who was kidnapped in 1995 at the age of five and sold for less than 500 euros to a deaf-mute man in northern China. Yang's biological parents were neighbors of Yu in Guizhou. When Yang shared her story on social media, hoping to find her family, and it went viral on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), the police launched an investigation that led to the trafficker.
"My adoptive family often beat me and when I turned 13, they made me start working in a factory. I never understood why my biological parents never came to find me," Yang recounted in one of her videos.
In China, there is a large database with thousands of DNA samples from families of missing children over the past six decades. Thanks to this DNA, Yang was able to reunite with her sister (their parents had passed away), who revealed that she had been a stolen child. The police then managed to track down the intermediary who facilitated the sale, who pointed to Yu. The trafficker had kidnapped her victims in the southern regions of Guizhou, Yunnan, and Chongqing, and sold them to buyers in Hebei province in the north.
"Yu's crimes devastated many families, some of whom spent years searching for their children, while others fell into depression," reads the ruling of the Higher People's Court of Guizhou, which imposed the death penalty executed this Friday. "Yu Huaying treated children as commodities to buy and sell, severely damaging their dignity and personal freedom."
China, which upholds the death penalty for 46 crimes beyond murder, such as drug trafficking and corruption, executes more people annually than the rest of the world combined. However, the exact number is never disclosed. It is considered a state secret.
In the Asian giant, when the death penalty is imposed by provincial courts, the Supreme Court must always review the case before giving approval and setting a date for lethal injection or execution by firing squad.
Amnesty International explained to this newspaper that every year, as part of their annual report on the death penalty, they try to review all judicial records to document executions in China. However, the opacity of these records is such that they have to exclude the world's second-largest economy from their annual report due to lack of information.
In January, the perpetrator of the worst massacre in the past decade in the Asian country was executed: a 62-year-old driver, Fan Weiqiu, enraged by his divorce settlement, rammed his SUV into 78 people in November. There were 35 deaths and 43 injuries, mostly retirees strolling at night.
In December, the execution of an official from the Inner Mongolia region convicted of a bribery case involving over 400 million euros was also made public.