"I insist!!!" reads the text of an image that has spread like wildfire across Chinese social media. "That those who buy children get life imprisonment!! And death penalty to those who steal children."
Since Wednesday night, that image has spread from Shanghai to Beijing, Wuhan to Guangzhou, urging citizens to spread the message that the law should be revised to make the penalty for child trafficking harsher.
It later turned out that the petition (which had a link to a matchmaking site at the bottom) was reported to be the work of staffers at the site, which apologized. But by the time the truth came out, the image was everywhere and had people talking.
Sina News drafted an online poll on the issue, with the current results showing 80% of respondents favoring the idea of traffickers receiving the death penalty. Thousands of people are now debating the proposal in the comments and on Weibo.
"The fucking human traffickers, execute them all! They are too cruel! They beat children crippled, throw acid on them, and cut off their tongues!" writes a typical furious supporter, adding "execution is still too easy for them!"
Milder voices ask: "Who understands how painful it must be losing the child? Who understands how helpless and the fearful a child is, being brought away from the parents and sold like goods, deliberately beaten and crippled to be a child beggar?"
"No trade, no hurt. If we don't solve the problem from the root, we still can't prevent people from being lured and even more reckless," one of the Sina News commenters against the death penalty wrote.
There's no official data showing how many children go missing in China every year. The U.S. State Department estimated the number to be 20,000, while a widely quoted number from China's state-run China National Radio is 200,000.
As of now, human traffickers can be sentenced to a maximum of 10 years in prison, according to Chinese law. In extreme cases, which involve more than three victims, the criminals can be sentenced to life imprisonment or death.
According to China Daily, more than 13,000 abducted children were rescued, and some of the children had been sold to one of a growing number of childless families.
An Economist report shows that the price of an abducted boy could be as high as 90,000 yuan (or about $15,000).
"On the black market, the buyers can buy new identities for children," Deng Fei, a prominent Chinese anti-trafficking campaigner, told China Youth Daily, adding that the death penalty "is not the way to solve the problem."
Chinese legal experts are urging people to be rational. “If all child traffickers were sentenced to death, the criminals will turn to desperados and the abducted children will be in danger,” Jiang Xiaoyan, a legal scholar, told CCTV.
But even that is causing people to lash out. "It's unnecessary to use the authoritative experts' voices to prove that we are wrong," says one user. "We don't mean that we have to carry out the death penalty, we are just calling for heavier ones!"
