A husband and wife who spent the past 24 years searching for their abducted son have been reunited with him this week.
Per Al Jazeera, Guo Gangtang's son Guo Xinzhen was abducted from his home in eastern Shandong province in China by human traffickers when he was just two years old way back in 1997.
Since then, Gangtang has been traveling up and down China, riding more than 300,000 combined miles on his motorcycle, in a desperate bid to find his missing boy.
Take a look at the incredibly powerful footage of the tearful reunion in the video below:Despite suffering numerous injuries in traffic accidents, and a number of other setbacks, such as begging for money, highway robbers, and periods of homelessness, Gantang's determination helped to gain him significant media attention.
In 2012, thanks to his ubiquitous social media presence, Gangtang helped set up a website that assists other Chinese families in looking for their missing children, and his story was even made into a movie starring Andy Lau back in 2015.
The Guardian reports that he finally met his son again on Tuesday, July 13, after identifying 27-year-old Xinzhen - who now works as a teacher - through DNA testing.
Per Al Jazeera, a video released by the state-run China News Service shows Gangtang sobbing into his hands after meeting Xinzhen, stating: "Now that the child has been found, everything can only be happy from now on."
He added that he would regard the couple who raised him in the interim as family members, and pledged to continue to help reunite other fractured families.
Meanwhile, state media reports that two suspects linked to the case have been arrested, while police have not released any information about the parents who raised Xinzhen.
China's infamous one-child state policy, which was mandated in a bid to curb the communist nation's booming population, inadvertently fuelled a spree of child abductions in the eighties and nineties.
This was motivated by a cultural precedent that meant that male babies were seen as more desirable than female babies, thus prompting the kidnapping of boys throughout the country.
