Child trafficker Yu Huaying receives the death penalty

A Chinese court has upheld the death sentence for a woman who trafficked more than a dozen children in the 1990s, in a case that has gripped the country, state media reported.

Yu Huaying was sentenced to death again on Friday after a new trial that considered additional evidence found that she sold 17 children, not 11 as the 2023 trial showed.

The case first came to light in 2022, when a woman she traded for 3,500 yuan ($491; £378) in 1995 reported her ordeal to police in Guiyang, southwestern China.

Yang Niuhua, who was already in her early thirties, was looking for her family and documented her search on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

Ms Yang was eventually reunited with her relatives after a DNA test, but was told that both her parents had died a few years after she was snatched in Guizhou province.

Ms Yang’s report led police to arrest Yu, who was in court during Friday’s sentencing.

The court also stripped Yu of all political rights for life and ordered the confiscation of all her assets.

“Yu Huaying’s subjective malice is extremely deep, her criminal behavior is particularly heinous, and the consequences of her actions are serious, which warrants severe punishment. Although she confessed, this is insufficient to justify a lighter sentence,” the court said.

According to state media reports, Yu’s first victim was her own son, whom she sold for 5,000 yuan when she was 20.

The boy’s father, Gong Xianliang, would eventually become Yu’s child trafficking cohort. Gong died after Yu was arrested.

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“The pain the traffickers have caused me is unspeakable, and the rift in my family can never be repaired,” she said last November, according to the English-language Global Times.

State media reported that some parents of Yu’s victims suffered from depression and that the ordeal had led to families breaking up.

According to the court, Yu has built a “complete criminal chain” of child trafficking, tracking children in Guizhou and Yunnan provinces and Chongqing municipality in the south and selling them in Hebei through middlemen in the north.

Yu was held for two months in 2000 for child kidnapping and in 2004 he was jailed for eight years for a similar crime.

Human trafficking has long been a concern in China and cases cause outrage when they come to light, such as when a woman trafficked before her marriage was found chained in Jiangsu province last year.

When China’s one-child policy was in effect, a cultural preference for male children led to the trade in unwanted girl babies.