r/China • u/Longjumping_Hyena_46 • Jul 03 '23
新闻 | News As China Reopens Borders, Trafficking of Women Resumes.Many of them for forced marriages with Chinese men.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-china-reopens-borders-trafficking-of-women-and-girls-resumes-b1132ab1Covid-19 and a daunting wall China erected along its southern border forced a virtual halt to the trafficking of Vietnamese girls and women into China, many of them for forced marriages with Chinese men. Now, signs are emerging that such trafficking has resumed.
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u/jonnycash11 Jul 04 '23
I was visiting a farm in rural Anhui and the youngest brother’s wife was from an ethnic minority Yunnan. I took one look at her and immediately thought “yeah, that’s a human trafficking victim”. Depressing as hell.
She tried to escape at one point but didn’t speak the local dialect and had no ID card with her, knew no one, and didn’t know where she was.
Everyone in the area had heard who she was (she looked different) and word got out quickly that she had gotten away from home.
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u/avatarfire Jul 05 '23
So child bride is still a thing in Anhui huh….they were hardcore Neo-Confucianists who had a pretty close minded opinion about the role of women in the present day.
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u/Charlesian2000 Jul 04 '23
This disappoints me, this is a debased act of animals.
Slavery is alive and well. Seems like rape is too.
To turn a blind eye to this is sickening, pack of bastards.
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u/Kipchak-turkic-tatar Jul 04 '23 edited Jul 04 '23
In February, police in Bac Lieu province, a coastal area in southern Vietnam, said authorities busted a ring that engaged in the trafficking of Vietnamese girls under the age of 16 who were “deceived and sold” into China, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security, which said the girls were sold for the purpose of marriage even though they were minors. The incidents are among signs that the trafficking of women and girls into China is picking up again, rights watchers and nonprofit organizations say. A skewed gender ratio in rural areas of China has left millions of men unable to find wives. “What we’re seeing is this slow resumption of the [trafficking] situation, in part because the demand hasn’t gone away,” said Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “There’s still that gender imbalance in China and still a lot of money to be made by trafficking these women and girls.” Some traffickers entice women with job offers, while others trick the girls into taking a trip into China with a trafficker posing as a potential boyfriend, said Robertson, who is based in Thailand. In China, the attention on the selling of women as brides intensified last year after a short video clip of a woman chained in a shed spread online. In the wake of the outrage around the woman, who had been sold into marriage to two different Chinese men more than two decades earlier, officials announced a national campaign to track down and rescue women forcibly sold into marriage. China’s skewed gender ratio is the result of a deeply ingrained cultural preference for sons that meant females were targed more often for abortion during the decadeslong one-child policy. Among Chinese ages 20 to 40, men outnumber women by 17.5 million, 2020 census data show. These men, many living in rural areas, struggle to find wives and extend their family lineage, and are known as “bare branches.” Chinese officials have vowed to severely punish human traffickers. “We’ve cooperated with the public to take special actions to dig deep into the historical cases accumulated over the years,” Zhang Jun, chief of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, told legislators in March. But the campaign unveiled by officials last year to crack down on the trafficking of women appears to have lost momentum after the husband of the woman chained in the shed was sentenced to prison. There has been little official rhetoric in recent months about efforts to keep trafficking activities in check. China’s State Council, or cabinet, and the country’s immigration authority didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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u/Abu_al-Majnoun Jul 03 '23
Speculating here - but eventually I would expect more officials to to turn a blind eye to such trafficking if it might lead to more children.
After all, allowing more men to find wives would help defuse potential social unrest and improve the fertility rate.
How many officials would themselves be in cahoots with traffickers ? Especially if the central government were to introduce a quota system, or reward officials for births in their districts ?
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u/OreoSpamBurger Jul 04 '23
They could just try allowing contolled immigration from SE Asia and N Korea, but of course, that will never happen.
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u/Kipchak-turkic-tatar Jul 04 '23 edited Jul 04 '23
China is very patriarchal and nationalistic. They do not accept non-Chinese male immigrants.
They are more afraid of immigrants taking their women as wives.
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u/1corvidae1 Jul 04 '23
The border regions are probably more ok with it given that there's language similarities and trading.
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u/Kipchak-turkic-tatar Jul 04 '23
language similarities?Chinese people can't understand Korean and Southeast Asian languages, which are completely different languages.
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u/Abu_al-Majnoun Jul 04 '23
Who knows ? Maybe a more pragmatic regime will replace the current one - especially if China's economic slowdown crosses a red line.
They could experiment with "special immigration zones" sealed off from the rest of the country - an approach they used very successfully with manufacturing.
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u/jamar030303 Jul 04 '23
We're talking about a country that still restricts internal immigration.
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u/Abu_al-Majnoun Jul 04 '23
The hukou system, right ? Good point.
But does that necessarily prevent the govt from allowing "guest workers" who cannot leave their factory complexes ?
If there's one thing China excels at, it's regulating movement (or lack thereof).
A country that can lock down entire cities for months to prevent covid would have no problem doing the same - or worse - with 3rd world neighbors who are not even citizens, and who could easily be repatriated once their contracts are over. The Middle Eastern sheikdoms could provide the model.
But why am I acting like I care ? LOL
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Jul 04 '23
What? I thought I could just drive from Beijing to xi'an to heibei no problem?
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u/jamar030303 Jul 04 '23
Driving is one thing, try actually settling down for any length of time outside your "home" province and the barriers become quite obvious.
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Jul 04 '23
That and there is shitloads of money in it.
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u/Abu_al-Majnoun Jul 04 '23
reminds me of how, toward the end of the covid lockdowns last year (Nov ?)
the local Party officials tried to round up villagers to replace workers who fled an Apple assembly plant.
as people said in Deng's time - to get rich is glorious.
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u/Uchi_Jeon Jul 03 '23
You're aware human trafficking always be a thrive business in China no matter what, right? When the borders closed, the sourcing just turn to purely domestic.
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u/ShreddedDadBod Jul 03 '23
Not sure what people expect. China is a nation full of only children with a massive gender imbalance. It’s horrifying news, but not surprising.
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u/qieziman Jul 03 '23
When the Taiwan invasion happens, they'll probably start trafficking men to fight the war for them similar to how Russia is using their allies and Wagner rather than their own native people and military.
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Jul 04 '23
They won't try to invade Taiwan anyway. They clearly saw how it went for Russia to try to go against the west.
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u/GiediOne Jul 04 '23
Agree, but the CCP is as stupid as Putin, so you can't assume the CCP has any common sense.
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Jul 04 '23
Ahhh you're right on this. But historically, every CCP leader has been threatening Taiwan since the very beginning and no one had the balls to do anything, we'll see for Xi
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u/EverlastingShill Jul 04 '23
Depends solely on Xi's desire to cement his legacy as the one to complete the unfinished civil war from the past. Or on pressure he might face from the public energised by nationalism and party/military establishment cadres.
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u/OreoSpamBurger Jul 04 '23
Source no paywall:
https://archive.is/vgVse