Temple fair tickets help trace missing children in C. China

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During the Spring Festival, a temple fair in Kaifeng, central China’s Henan province, has gained online thumbs-up after its organizer printed details of 300 missing children along with entrance tickets and encouraged visitors to help spread the information on social media.

The missing children are reported to have not been seen by their families for years. Their names, photos, disappearance dates as well as parents’ contact numbers are printed on paper attached to the back of the tickets, which are issued to tourists at Han Yuan, a famous cultural park in the city.

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Staff of the fair came up with this idea one month before the Spring Festival holiday. They worked with missing children’s websites like “Baby Coming Home” and local NGOs to gather information. To verify the information from the sources, they called the parents one after another before printing out the tickets.

“There are easily over a million visits here for the temple gathering during the Spring Festival and we thought we might take the chance to do something,” a staff surnamed Yang told the Beijing Youth Daily.

Apart from the admission ticket supplements, a 110-square-meter bulletin board with relevant information has been set up in the park to attract public attention. The board, along with the tickets, cost nearly 10,000 yuan (about 1,570 US dollars).

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As of Monday, the temple fair has been carried out for four days and more than 10,000 special tickets have been distributed. The park planned to print more before the Lantern Festival next Friday, which is expected to attract large crowds as well.

With many visitors uploading pictures of the tickets online, netizens are touched by this “little thought.”

“It’s so warm that it should be promoted nationwide,” Weibo user @Zhiyuliangbao wrote.

Another user @Luolinzhifeng said, “It’s heart-wrenching just looking at them. One’s retweeting may save a family.”

Xie Liuming, who hails from Hunan province, has tried many ways to find his son who went missing at the age of six in 2013. “I feel grateful for people’s help, including the ticket method. My wife and I will never change our contact numbers. We are waiting for good news,” the father said.

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Child abduction has been a serious problem for decades in China. However, the painful search process gains more momentum these years, with the rising awareness of the whole society and the power of new media.

In 2016, Chinese police launched a mobile app to encourage witnesses to report the whereabouts of missing or trafficked children. Police cooperates with various social media platforms to encourage the public to engage more in anti-trafficking work.

Last January, China's e-commerce giant Alibaba said that the system it developed for the Ministry of Public Security, “Tuanyuan,” or reunion, had helped find more than 600 missing children in 2016.