The government is employing online crowd-based technology to search for the hundreds of thousands of elderly people that go missing in China every year. Due to the social stigma over living in a nursing home, many senior citizens with dementia and other problems are not receiving adequate care at home, adding to this problem.
In the past three months, 65-year-old Beijinger Lu Lian, who has Alzheimer's disease, has gone missing twice.
She last went AWOL at 1 p.m. on August 3 near the city's central Chaoyangmen area. Lu was on an outing with her husband, but when he went into a pharmacy to pick up medication, she disappeared.
Three months ago, she had a similar experience. Back then, family members and police spent three days trying to find her. She was later spotted by a man patrolling a mountainous part of Beijing's suburban Fangshan district.
In October, the Zhongmin Social Assistance Institute, an NGO under the Ministry of Civil Affairs, and media company Toutiao co-released a report which revealed that every year around 300,000 elderly people get lost in China. The figure means that every day about 1,370 go astray.
"The dramatic increase in the number of elderly people getting lost is the direct result of the country's increasingly severe aging phenomenon," Liu Hongchen, deputy director of the Zhongmin Social Assistance Institute, told the Southern Weekly.
Due to the tradition that seniors are cared for at home and the limitations of this concept when applied to modern families who are often strapped for cash, many seniors are receiving insufficient attention. To help them find their way home, the government and NGOs are now trying to harness the power of the Internet.
It all depends on luck
During Spring Festival 2016, two stories of elderly people getting lost aroused widespread attention online.
One incident happened in Lanxi, Zhejiang Province. On February 17, when people were still enjoying the festive atmosphere, 79-year-old Lu Xianyu didn't return home after taking a stroll in the afternoon.
The Lanxi government deployed more than 1,000 people to find him. About 68 hours later, he was found by volunteers in a haystack in a rural area.
Another case happened in Yanjiao, Hebei Province. In this case, Toutiao's newly founded charitable group which is dedicated to finding missing elderly people spread the missing grandmother's information online to all Toutiao users in the area. Toutiao is a leading news application for smartphones and has millions of users in China.
"About 282,000 users received the information," said Zheng Hua, the head of the missing persons team. Five hours after posting the information, a user reported they had found the woman.
But not everybody is so lucky. Over the past seven years, Cheng Maofeng in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, has done all he can to look for his mother Peng Rongying, but she is still missing.
Cheng got Peng to move to Shenzhen in 2005 so he could take care of his elderly mother after his father died. But one day in 2009, Peng never returned from running some errands.
Cheng has since joined dozens of groups in his search for his mother and also contacted several media outlets for help, but his efforts have come to nothing.
He doesn't dare move house in case his mother comes back one day. Whenever he eats dinner, he thinks, "Has she eaten?"
