As China Reopens Borders, Trafficking of Women and Girls Resumes

Covid-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.

Last month, a seven-passenger sport-utility vehicle crammed with 14 people flipped over a cliff at Jingxi, a small Chinese town on the border with Vietnam, killing 11. Vietnamese media said the victims were all Vietnamese, and rights groups said they were women likely trafficked to China. Local authorities in Jingxi said they are investigating the case as human smuggling.

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. 

In previous decades, trafficked brides often came from poor regions of China. In recent years, more brides have come from outside China, including Vietnam, Myanmar and North Korea, according to Chinese police, court documents and human-rights organizations. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, heightened scrutiny at Chinese border crossings smothered most trafficking activities into China.

In the northern areas where China borders North Korea, aid groups say many of those fleeing the Pyongyang regime are women sold into prostitution or marriage with Chinese men. Many of these women, along with other North Korean escapees, eventually get rounded up by authorities and sent to detention centers as they are considered by China to be in the country illegally. Nearly 2,000 North Koreans are held at detention centers near the China-North Korea border, rights watchers estimate. Beijing is expected to start repatriating North Koreans once Pyongyang lifts Covid-related border controls. 

Even North Korean women married to Chinese men may be repatriated, potentially facing execution or shipment to prison camps, rights groups say.

“What China can do now is to offer protections to the many [North Korean] women…who are wives to their own citizens and now mothers of their youth,” said Hanna Song, a director at the Seoul-based Database Center for North Korean Human Rights.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said anyone who violates China’s border rules will be held responsible.

Earlier this month, a woman and her daughter who both fled North Korea in 2012 were among a group of North Koreans crossing the Mekong River from China into Thailand, according to Tim Peters, a Christian activist and founder of aid group Helping Hands Korea. The woman had been sold as a bride to a man in northeast China, according to Peters, who said that after running away from the man in 2019, she and her daughter had been hiding out in Hebei province, unable to find work without proper identification and waiting for an opportunity to leave China.

Meanwhile, on the border with Vietnam, Chinese authorities have started repatriating some trafficked women after a three-year hiatus. 

Police at the southern Chinese city of Dongxing, which borders Móng Cái in Vietnam, said they have been handing over Vietnamese women rescued in China to police in Vietnam. Police officials on both sides of the border pledged to jointly tackle trafficking at a meeting in May. 

Authorities rely heavily on nonprofit organizations to do the legwork of rescuing women and helping them resettle in Vietnam, said Robertson of Human Rights Watch.

As the border wall and China’s Covid restrictions hampered trafficking into China, trafficking hot spots popped up elsewhere, including other parts of Southeast Asia, where authorities are contending with organized cybercrime and an increase in the trafficking of workers, rights watchers say.

The 12-foot-high wall that winds along China’s border with Vietnam has increased the cost for traffickers even after China reopened its border, people involved in rescue operations say, but traffickers can still find ways to smuggle people into China.

One factor contributing to the resumption of trafficking is a widespread perception among younger Vietnamese that life in China is a lot better as it emerges from the pandemic, leaving many Vietnamese women vulnerable to being lured by fake job offers.

Vietnam has been struggling with high unemployment among its youth for years. What many young Vietnamese don’t know is that their Chinese counterparts also are struggling to find jobs amid a slow economic recovery from Covid.

Traffickers nonetheless describe a postpandemic boom with plenty of job opportunities in China, said Diep Vuong, president and co-founder of Pacific Links Foundation, a nonprofit group that has been assisting trafficked Vietnamese women.

“We certainly have seen an increase in trafficked women returning to Vietnam,” Vuong said. “There has been an increase on the outgoing [end] as well.

Write to Liyan Qi at [email protected]