Chinese Man Sells His 5 Kids For $28,000; Gets 10 Years In Prison

A Chinese man who sold his children between 2012 and 2020 has been sentenced to prison.

The man, who was identified by his surname of Yang, was sentenced to ten years in prison after he sold his five children for a total of 180,000 Chinese yuan ($28,250), Insider reported, citing documents released by the court of Yu County in China's Hebei province.

He and his wife, surnamed Yuan, had the children with the intention of selling them off to whoever wanted to buy them, investigators said.

The couple's two sons and three daughters were sold for prices ranging from 20,000 Chinese yuan ($3,140) up to 80,000 Chinese yuan ($12,560) each.

Among the five children, four were sold to a middleman, identified by the court as Li, and his daughter-in-law, Duan. Li reportedly received 3,600 Chinese yuan ($565) for facilitating the transactions.

The remaining child was sold to a woman who was in the maternity ward with Yuan when she gave birth to the boy.

Li was sentenced to seven years in prison for his role in the transactions, while Duan, who posed as the mother of two of the children to meet potential buyers, received a jail term of 21 months.

"Children who should have been cared for and allowed to grow up in a loving environment were exploited and treated like goods by their parents and perceived as money-making tools by greedy traffickers. Yang has betrayed his children, and his immoral conduct has been punished to the full extent of the law," a portion of the Yu County documents read. "The sale of children by their guardians not only infringes the rights of minors but also supports the existence and expansion of the illegal trade."

The number of abduction and child trafficking cases in China, which were rampant in the 1980s and 1990s following the country's adoption of a one-child policy, has declined in the past decades due to intensified crackdowns by authorities, a report by the South China Morning Post said.

Chinese police received 6,000 child abduction cases in 2012, but the number dropped to 666 last year, the country's Ministry of Public Security said in September.