Chinese boy abducted at 3, who inspired child trafficking film, enters direct PhD programme

Peng Wenle, a young Chinese man who recently earned a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Technology from Wuhan University, will now pursue a doctoral program at the same institution. The 21-year-old was abducted at the age of three in 2008 from his parents' telephone service shop in Shenzhen's southern China. He was found three years later, after his parents tirelessly searched for him.

Wenle expressed his gratitude to his parents, stating that he might have lived a life of "farming and herding livestock in a village" had it not been for their relentless efforts. The abduction occurred when Wenle, playing with other children near the shop, was forcibly seized by an abductor and taken to a village in eastern China's Jiangsu province.

His father, Peng Gaofeng, later recalled the incident, where his son had been gone for just three minutes before the abductor carried the struggling boy onto a bus and vanished. Peng Gaofeng and his wife, Xiong Yini, relocated to Shenzhen in 2007 in hopes of improving their lives. After Wenle's rescue in 2011, they raised him and his younger brother in Qianjiang, where Peng continued his work while Xiong lost 10kg during the search.

Journalist Deng Fei helped Peng leverage social media to find his son, leading to his rescue. Wenle, now a computer science major at Wuhan University, acknowledges the role his parents and others played in his life and expressed his appreciation through social media, seeking to inspire others searching for their birth families.