A father is suing an adoption center in Jiangsu Province to help him contact his lost son adopted by an American family through the agency in 1995.

Li Xuwen, 47, a resident of Wuhu city in Anhui Province, has been looking for Li Xiang for 19 years since the 6-year-old went missing in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province in May 1992.

"He was with his mother having breakfast on a Nanjing street but disappeared inside five minutes when his mother went to buy water for him," Li told the Yangtze Evening Post on Tuesday.

Then in 2007 Li found a record at a Nanjing police station that his son had been sent to Nanjing Children's Welfare Center two months after losing contact with his parents.

He was later informed that an American family adopted his boy in 1995.

To protect the adoptive family's privacy, the center is refusing to tell Li his son's new location or contact information, the Yangtze Evening Post reported. "We strongly urge the service center to release the name of Li Xiang's US contacts to his birth parents as it deprived those parents of their right to information about the adoption as is enshrined under the law," Li Xuwen's attorney, Deng Peng, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

"We're aware the welfare center notified Nanjing newspapers with Li Xiang's information," Deng said, "but that's just not good enough as his parents in Anhui Province couldn't read the information back in the 1990s, when communications between regions weren't efficient enough."

Through Deng's contacts, Li has found out that his son is a graduate now and believes his parents had abandoned him 19 years ago.

"We're not asking the boy to come back to China," Deng said. "We just want to tell him his parents didn't abandon him and they want to meet him and explain this to him."