Guo Gangtang's son was kidnapped at the age of two by human traffickers in front of their home in Shandong in 1997.

Longing Father reunited with abducted son after 24 years of relentless search

Incredible Story of Stunned Parents Who Never Stopped Searching Reunite With Son Abducted 24 Years Ago .Guo Gangtang’s cross-country, decades-long search for his son inspired a movie. What he endured is beyond belief. 

By Edward Era Barbacena

A Chinese family has spared no effort  over 24 years to find their son, who was kidnapped as a baby.

Guo Gangtang's son was just two years and five months old when he was abducted from in front of the family home, where he was playing unattended.

Guo Gangtang's son was just two years and five months old when he was abducted from in front of the family home, where he was playing unattended.

Traffickers snatched the boy and sold him to a family in central China.

Gangtang, Guo Xinzhen's father, spent years cruising the country on his motorcycle, displaying banners with the boy's face, hoping to find his whereabouts.

Guo Gangtang,, began searching for his then 2-year-old son after he was kidnapped in 1997 from their home in a village in the eastern province of Shandong using his motorcycle 

"Guo Gangtang, never stopped looking, either. After his son went missing, he embarked on a search across China, riding a motorbike through nearly all of the vast country's provinces, covering 500,000 kilometers."

He carried little with him except a bag full of fliers, and a flag emblazoned with a picture of his son.

He carried little with him except a bag full of fliers, and a flag emblazoned with a picture of his son. He used up all his savings and racked up staggering debts, burning through 10 motorcycles on his long journey, Xinhua reported.

Anyway, this week, after nearly two and a half decades of searching, Guo was finally located: father and mother have found their son, now 26, after police traced his DNA , with the help of the Ministry of Public Security in China.

According to The New York Times, Guo Xinzhen disappeared on September 21, 1997, while playing outside his house while his mother cooked indoors.

The family, helped by neighbors and friends, spread around the region looking for the boy, but there was no success. That's when the father decided to look for the son on his own.

His journey across the huge mainland China made Gangtang something of a national hero: so much so that he even won a film inspired by his story in 2015.

In 2012, Guo founded an organization to help other parents find their missing children, and said he supported dozens of other families, even as his own search continued to be unsuccessful.

In June of this year, things started to change: the Ministry of Public Security identified, through facial recognition technology, a teacher in Shandong who could be Guo Gangtang.

Police in Liaocheng City, Shandong province, said Monday they had found Guo, now an adult living in neighboring Henan province -- and had reunited him with his parents. Video footage of the reunion on Sunday, released by police, shows the family in tears and embracing tightly, crying out, "We found you, you've come back."

A DNA test confirmed the identity. In a matter of weeks, authorities said they had arrested a woman surnamed Tang and a man surnamed Hu.

According to a state-run newspaper, Tang kidnapped the boy and handed him over to Hu, who sold him. Both confessed to the crime.

Guo Xinzhen  embraces his family at a reunion in Liaocheng, China, on July 11.

The reunion between father and son then became just a matter of time and it couldn't have been more exciting!

Now Xinzhen has said that he would continue to live with the family that raised him, but that he would visit his birth parents frequently. GangTang, the father, said he has no resentment towards the couple who raised his son. “ Our son was found. From now on, only happiness remains ”.

Longstanding problem

Child abduction and trafficking has long been a rampant problem in China, with many parents never finding their missing children. Activists and experts say the problem was exacerbated by China's one-child policy, which has been relaxed in recent years. In May, the government announced it would begin allowing couples to have up to three children.

couples to desire a boy -- driving a black market for trafficked infant boys, while girls are often sold to foreign adoptive parents, falsely labeled as orphans.

It's not clear how many children go missing in China every year, though estimates go up to tens of thousands. China is ranked Tier 3 by the US State Department's anti-trafficking agency -- the lowest level, meaning the government "does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking."

Since the turn of the century, the government has stepped up efforts to curb the problem, including launching a national DNA database in 2009 and an online anti-trafficking platform in 2016. These have helped authorities track down more than 4,700 missing children in the past five years.