Wang began committing these crimes in October 2001
Authorities in China today announced the execution of a man identified only by his surname Wang, convicted of trafficking at least 11 children over a period of almost nine years.
In a statement, the country’s Supreme Court explained that Wang had started committing these crimes in October 2001 and that, on November 17, 2006, he had already been sentenced to three years in prison for kidnapping a child.
After being released in 2008, he continued committing child trafficking crimes in various locations until, in December 2015, he was again sentenced to 15 years in prison for trafficking three children.
During his incarceration, other cases of child trafficking committed by Wang were resolved and, on March 15, 2019, he was transferred from prison to be retried.
After the trial, the court concluded that, between October 2001 and May 2010, the accused kidnapped a total of 11 children under the age of six in the provinces of Hunan, Hubei and Sichuan (center), to sell them in the province of Guangzhou (southeast).
The sentence determined that Wang kidnapped and sold minors with the intention of selling them, making a profit of 199,000 yuan (around 25,057 euros).
The authorities concluded that Wang was “mainly responsible” for the crimes, that his acts were “extremely serious” and that he acted with “strong subjective malice” and “a high degree of social danger”, being a repeat offender, and therefore “should be severely punished in accordance with the law”.
After being detained, Wang “refused to truthfully confess to most of his crimes, did not cooperate with authorities in locating the abducted children and did not show remorse,” the court said.
For this reason, he was sentenced to the death penalty for the crime of trafficking in minors, to the deprivation of political rights for life and to the confiscation of all his personal property.
Human trafficking is a persistent problem in China, made worse by the former one-child policy and gender imbalance, which, according to the World Bank, led to there being 42 million more men than women in 2017.
More recently, technologies such as DNA analysis and facial recognition have helped solve cases that had gone unsolved for years.
Authorities did not specify when Wang’s execution was carried out or the method used.
A public statement from the human rights organization Amnesty International, dated October 2025, states that data on the use of the death penalty in China “remains shrouded in secrecy”.
Even so, their reports indicate that this penalty is applied continuously and estimate that “thousands of executions are carried out”.
