China has stepped up its fight against child trafficking by sentencing to death Huang Qingheng, a Vietnamese ringleader who led a group that kidnapped and sold 23 Vietnamese infants to famililies in China.

Twenty three other members of the group, most of them also Vietnamese or have unconfirmed Vietnamese citizenships, were meted sentences ranging from 22 months of imprisonment to life sentences.

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The Guangxi Zhuang court, which handed down the verdict on the group's child trafficking activities Friday, also ordered the group members' properties confiscated as fines for their crimes.

Based on court records, the group illegally transported the Vietnamese infants to the border town of Dongxing, Guangxi and sold them to Chinese families in Guangdong province.

The cross-border child trafficking happened between 2010 and July 2011, and involved 23 infants who were just a few days old, according to court records.

Apart from transporting infants past the border, the child trafficking group also smuggled pregnant Vietnamese women to China where their new-born infants were then put up for sale.

A court official said the cross-border child trafficking crime took more than a year of trial to arrive at the death sentence for the group's leader and jail terms for the members because the case involved a collaboration between neighbor-countries, specifically Vietnam and China.

Nearly half of the Vietnamese infants who were kidnapped, smuggled and sold in China were rescued and returned to Vietnam during the course of the investigations in 2013, court spokeman Huang Qiong added.

Huang said all the effort that Chinese and Vietnamese police poured into solving the case and netting the group of Huang Qingheng was well worth it because it sends a strong message to other child traffickers that their activities will be severely punished.

China's Ministry of Public Security lauded the effort saying it has gained good ground in protecting women, children and families from the child trafficking menace.
China has had a 10-year standing agreement with its neighbor-countries in Southeast Asia to help one another in the fight against human trafficking.

TagsVietnam, child-trafficking, cross-border human trafficking