Chinese police have rescued 33 children and 25 women kidnapped in Guangdong Province this year, the local public security authority announced Thursday.

They were rescued in 46 cases, during a Guangdong police crackdown on increasing crime partly triggered by the global economic downturn since the end of last year, said Liu Ancheng, vice director of the provincial public security administration.

Police broke up 55 criminal gangs, cracked 28 illegal gun trafficking cases, detained 4,457 suspected drug smugglers, and uncovered 724 homicide cases, said Liu.

But he did not offer more information about the kidnappings.

Late last month, police in Jiangmen city, Guangdong, announced that they had arrested 10 alleged gang members and rescued 11 children sold to people in the region and in neighbouring Fujian Province.

The children, all boys aged 3 to 8, had been abducted from July last year to January. They were returned to their parents.

The alleged head of the gang, a 35-year-old woman, was arrested in a cement factory in Zhuhai, a city on the border of Macao where she worked temporarily as a mill operator.

Chinese police launched a nationwide campaign against the trafficking of children and women in early April, which will run through this year.

According to China's Ministry of Public Security, police rescued 196 children and 214 women and broke up 72 human trafficking rings from April 9 to May 4.

Most of these crimes occurred in Guizhou, Jiangsu, Guangdong, Shandong, Henan and Shanxi Provinces.

(Xinhua News Agency June 5, 2009)