By Muzi Li
The warning did not come from officials or state media, but from an anxious man in an ordinary social-media video—one that spread quickly across China.
“Adults are disappearing more and more often,” he said, voice strained. “Not only children. Human traffickers don’t just want kids. What are they taking adults for? People are terrified. Try not to go out late. After 9 p.m., don’t go out at all. And if your neighborhood isn’t brightly lit, stay home after 7. The situation isn’t good… everyone must pay attention.”
The clip ricocheted across platforms because it echoed a growing, uneasy sentiment: something is changing. Disappearances, once discussed mostly in the context of children, now seem increasingly tied to adults as well. And then came the images—scattered across Douyin, Weibo, and local groups—of piles of discarded ID cards and private paperwork showing up in mountains, riverbanks, and garbage piles.
Each new find intensified the same question: Where did these people go?
A string of disappearances, and families left searching
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In late November, missing-person alerts surged across Chinese social networks.
On Nov. 25, blogger Liu Honghai posted about Wang Lifeng, a 39-year-old woman from Ankang, Shaanxi. She vanished near the entrance of a railway tunnel on Nov. 8. Multiple searches turned up nothing.
One day earlier, he posted another case: 18-year-old university freshman Yang Chao, missing for four months after being invited to Guangxi’s Dongxing during summer break. His mother appeared in the video in tears: “Please help us… save my child.”
On Nov. 23, Liu reported yet another disappearance: 18-year-old Cao Xuan, from Chongqing’s Liangping District, who disappeared on Sept. 14 at a beach in Fangchenggang, Guangxi. His single mother said she thought about him “day and night.”
The cases began to blur into each other—young, old, rural, urban—linked by the same agonizing uncertainty.
The blogger behind many of these alerts, Liu Honghai, is not a professional investigator. He runs a hardware shop in Hangzhou and volunteers his time. Since 2020, he has produced thousands of missing-person videos, gathering more than 200,000 followers.
His feed, filled with pleas from parents and relatives, reads like a nationwide cross-section of grief.
A scene that chills the imagination
Amid the rising number of missing-person posts, new images surfaced—piles of identity documents uncovered far from their home cities.
In one widely shared video, a Douyin user with an IP address in Henan walked through a remote hillside and found two large heaps of partially burned ID cards and personal documents. The caption asked simply: “Who can explain this?”
In another video from 2024, a fisherman in Hubei opened a large yellow plastic bag snagged on his fishing line. Inside were dozens of ID cards and other discarded records—dumped, intact and unclaimed.
Further south in Guangxi, another blogger filmed dozens of ID cards scattered under a bridge, some embedded in dirt. In Shanghai, a passerby found multiple ID cards tossed into a garbage bin.
Even state-linked outlets have reported similar cases. In January 2023, Xiaoxiang Morning News wrote about a pile of ID cards, health-insurance books, bank cards, and driver’s licenses found on a roadside in Ningbo. Police retrieved the documents, but no public explanation followed.
Each discovery landed like a new piece of an unsettling puzzle.
Nine days, seventy-nine missing people
On Nov. 22, the Douyin blogger “Hongchen Search Aid” published a “partial missing-person list” covering only nine days—Nov. 11 to 19.
The tally: 79 people missing, including:
- a 2-year-old child
- two mother-daughter pairs (from Anhui and Hebei)
- three boys from Sichuan’s Liangshan region who disappeared together on Nov. 11
The list circulated widely. Many users commented on how quickly it filled, how young many of them were, and how the number kept climbing.
The fear that had once existed in the background now felt suddenly and painfully visible.
A climate shaped by darker suspicions
The rising number of disappearances and the discovery of abandoned ID cards came at a moment when other stories were stirring public anxiety.
At China’s “9·3” military parade this year, international speculation about “organ transplants” and “living to 150” involving senior political figures drew global attention. Online discussions about celebrities appearing suddenly rejuvenated, claims of “young blood transfusion” treatments for elites, and the unresolved case of actor Yu Menglong’s death have all added to public concern.
Within that atmosphere, more Chinese citizens began revisiting allegations first raised by Falun Gong practitioners—claims that large-scale organ harvesting had occurred in China for years.
Whether connected or not, the effect was the same: Every new missing-person alert now carried a heavier weight.
A country on edge
Scrolling through the videos and comments, one sees not panic but a slow, steady accumulation of fear—a sense that the familiar boundaries of safety have shifted, that the night feels different than it did a few years ago.
Families post daily updates. Bloggers film riverbanks, hilltops, and underpasses. ID cards appear in places where no one should find them. Parents tell their children not to walk home alone. Adults warn each other to stay indoors after dark.
None of these things, taken alone, explain what is happening. But taken together, they have created a nationwide unease—a feeling that something is wrong, and that the government’s silence adds to the sense of uncertainty.
For now, the questions remain unanswered.
And the piles of missing documents—unburned, untouched, unclaimed—sit quietly in the background, asking again— Where did all these people go?
