Human Trafficking in [China Street Children in [China] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [China] [other countries] |
Human Trafficking & Modern-day Slavery In the first ten years of
the 21st Century - 2000 to 2009
The People’s Republic of China
(PRC) is a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and
children trafficked for the purposes of forced labor and sexual exploitation.
Although the majority of trafficking in the PRC occurs within the country’s
borders, there is also considerable trafficking of PRC citizens to Africa,
other parts of Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North
America. Women are lured through false promises of legitimate employment and
forced into commercial sexual exploitation largely in Taiwan, Thailand,
Malaysia, and Japan. Chinese women and men are smuggled throughout the world
at great personal financial cost and then forced into commercial sexual
exploitation or exploitative labor to repay debts to traffickers. Women and
children are trafficked to China from such countries as Mongolia, Burma,
North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Romania, and Ghana for purposes of forced
labor, marriage, and sexual slavery.
- U.S. State Dept Trafficking in Persons Report, June, 2009 [full country report] |
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CAUTION: The following links have been
culled from the web to illuminate the situation in the ***
FEATURED ARTICLES *** China
Arrests Nine for Human Trafficking Chinese police raided a human
trafficking ring and arrested nine people for kidnapping and selling children
in northwestern and central China, state media reported on Wednesday. The traffickers snatched more than
20 children and sold some in Hongtong county in the
northern province of Shanxi, where kidnapped
teenagers and children were found working as slaves in brick kilns in a
widely publicised scandal, the Xinhua
news agency said. Xinhua said two of the kidnappers, Wang Aizhong and Li Caimei, tricked
kids to get on to their motorcycle on their way to school or broke into
houses to snatch babies. The refugees forced to be sex slaves in China The women who flee North Korea
believe nothing could be worse than their dictatorship's famine and labor
camps. But many change their minds
after they cross the China
police crack human trafficking ring: report Police have arrested 18 people
suspected of kidnapping children and women in southwest China and trafficking
them across the country, state press reported Monday. Eight victims, including one child who was
kidnapped and sold only seven days after being born, were rescued, the
Beijing News said. Police began
investigating the crimes when several children in Yunnan
province began disappearing in May, the report said. Trafficking of women and children
remains a problem in China with many sociologists blaming the nation's
"one child" family planning policy for fuelling the crime. Under the policy, aimed at controlling the
world's largest population of over 1.3 billion, people who live in urban
areas are generally allowed one child, while rural families can have two if
the first is a girl. This has put a
premium on baby boys, while baby girls are often sold off as couples try for
a male heir. ***
ARCHIVES *** Bur of Democracy,
Human Rights & Labor - Country
Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005 TRAFFICKING
IN PERSONS – Internal
trafficking was a significant problem. Ministry of Public Security (MPS)
statistics show that during the first 10 months of the year, there were 1,949
cases of trafficking involving women and children. Over this same period,
there were 3,574 women and children rescued compared with 8,949 women and
children rescued in 2004. Some experts suggested that the
demand for abducted women was fueled by the shortage of marriageable brides,
especially in rural areas. The serious imbalance in the male-female sex ratio
at birth, the tendency for many village women to leave rural areas to seek
employment, and the cost of traditional betrothal gifts all made purchasing a
bride attractive to some poor rural men. Some men recruited brides from
poorer regions, while others sought help from criminal gangs. Criminal gangs
either kidnapped women and girls or tricked them with promises of jobs and
higher living standards, only to be transported far from their homes for
delivery to buyers. Once in their new "family," these women were
"married" and raped. Some accepted their fate and joined the new
community; others struggled and were punished; a few escaped. Kidnapping and the buying and
selling of children continued to occur, particularly in poorer rural areas.
There were no reliable estimates of the number of children trafficked.
Domestically, most trafficked children were sold to couples unable to have
children; in particular, boys were trafficked to couples unable to have a
son. In 2004 media reported arrests in the case of 76 baby boys sold in Concluding
Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2005 DATA
COLLECTION - The
Committee regrets the limited statistical data on sexual exploitation and
cross-border trafficking included in the State party’s report, both with
regard to mainland Three
Chinese jailed for human trafficking www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=164179 Summing up its judgment, the court
noted that the prosecution had been able to prove its case beyond reasonable
doubt. It held that James and Sam engaged in human trafficking by obtaining
tickets and other travelling documents for the
victims and through deceits, lured them to Ghana to work in a restaurant,
which never existed. According to the court the victims
on their arrival had their passports and other travelling
documents confiscated by James who in turn threatened, deceived and exploited
their vulnerability. According to the court proceeds of the sex trade were
used to purchase contraceptives, douches and other materials to facilitate
their trade. It dismissed claims by the convicts that the victims and other
Chinese nationals meet at the restaurants to sing. "During the singing
that was when the men selected the victims for sex," the court noted. It therefore concluded that the
convicts through their intentions induced the victims into sex trade and
declined to give them their travelling documents as
well as proceed from the sex trade. China
Vows Action on Trafficking www.rfa.org/english/news/china/chinatrafficking-05212009114049.html
China says it has rescued more
than 400 kidnapped women and children from human-trafficking gangs during a
crackdown last month, but parents of missing children say government efforts
have barely scratched the surface of a growing social problem. But parents in the southern city
of Nanning said 200 children were still missing in
their region, and police had prevented parents from staging a public protest
to draw attention to the problem. DEMAND FOR CHILDREN - She said boys were often sold
to people as sons, while the girls ended up filling a traditional rural role,
that of daughters-in-law who are raised in the same household before marriage
to one of the family's sons. NK
Defectors Describe Horrors of Human Trafficking english.donga.com/srv/service.php3?bicode=060000&biid=2009050137348
Bang Mi-sun, who came to the South
in 2004, spoke first. She said she fled the North to feed her two children
after her husband starved to death in 2002. “I thought that if I went to
China, I could eat heartily and lead a better life than in North Korea. What
waited for me was a wretched life,” she said. “I was sold to a disabled Chinese man for
585 dollars at a human trafficking market and resold to another man.” Bang was caught by Chinese police
and repatriated to North Korea. There, she was subjected to severe corporal
punishment and forced labor. “I was
put in a detention camp and flogged. I was battered so badly that I cannot
walk well now,” she said. Trafficking
victims try to remake lives www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/04/13/0413trafficking.html
Like dozens of other workers from
Vietnam and China, Tiep Ngo had been lured to the Daewoosa clothing factory in American Samoa by hollow
promises of good pay. She left behind her child, her husband and her parents
and paid $5,000 for her job contract, only to be starved, beaten and cheated
of wages. For nearly two years, Ngo
labored in the stifling, overcrowded factory, subsisting on meager portions
of rice and cabbage and longing for her family. Human trafficker sentenced to death in China www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24817125-5005961,00.html The traffickers had promised their
victims jobs packaging tea and sunflower seeds, even taking them to "a
fake factory where the ring members pretended to be managers and
workers", Xinhua said. The victims were then sent to other
provinces on the pretence of purchasing raw materials, but were sold as
"wives" to local people, the agency added. Officials
crack down on human trafficking ring www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2008/10/10/2003425457
The National Immigration Agency
(NIA) recently cracked down on a Taiwanese human trafficking ring that was
smuggling children from China to the US using passports purchased from
Taiwanese parents. In its investigation, the agency
discovered that the crime ring had bought the identity of Taiwanese children
from parents who were in financial difficulty. The parents sold their children’s
IDs for NT$90,000 each, the agency said.
The investigators had discovered that the crime ring employed the
strategy seven times in the first half of this year, smuggling 18 children to
the US. Police
foil human trafficking in Golden Triangle www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2008-12/12/content_7297128.htm
The migrants, hailing from
villages near Liaoning province's Chaoyang and Dandong - the main
border between China and North Korea - were discovered in Xishaungbanna,
a part of southwestern Yunnan province close to the
porous borders with Myanmar and Laos. The migrants, who have now been
sent back to their villages, were brought to Yunnan
with promises of jobs but were being tricked to cross the border by casino
operators in Myanmar, where they would be forced to construct roads, an
unnamed official was quoted as saying. www.mizzima.com/news/inside-burma/1208-burmese-brides-for-sale.html
Wah Wah was
one of the women that Ma Phyu and her gang had sold
into slavery. Wah
Wah was sold to a Chinese man living in Sandong, near Beijing, at the price tag of Chinese RMB
20,000 (approximately US$ 2,900). A few weeks later, Wah
Wah managed to flee from the clutches of her buyer
and made her way back to Ruili earlier this
month. The hapless young lady had nowhere
else to go but to return back to her perpetrators, and Ma Phyu
was happy when her commodity arrived back in her hands for resale. However,
when she tried to sell her to another Chinese man, Wah
Wah vehemently refused. But the traffickers, having already struck
a deal and received some advance money, tried to force Wah
Wah to accept her newest companion. As dusk fell over Ruili
on that fateful day, Wah Wah
was taken by taxi along the road to Namkhan, Burma,
a few miles away. Accompanying her in the vehicle were several members of the
human trafficker's family. Eventually,
they stopped the taxi next to a paddy field beside the highway in the
vicinity of Man Heiro, still in Burmese territory
and about 20 miles from Ruili. "Before leaving Ruili,
they were drunk with beer. She was taken to a paddy field near the highway.
Then Kyaw Swa started
raping her. After that, Bo Bo stabbed her
repeatedly. She died from five stab wounds. Then her corpse was left in the
nearby drainage," recalls a source from the Chinese police investigation
team of the incident. www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/03/china.olympicgames2008
At the bottom of the heap are the
street children. At a residential school, I met some of the children plucked
from the streets. An 11-year-old boy who preferred that I call him by his
English name, Nicholas, told me that he had lived with his younger brother
and older sister in Henan. His father was
frequently in trouble and a mother was both pitifully poor and unable to cope
with her uncontrollable children. One day the boss of a beggar gang arrived
scouting for children. He offered the mother 3 yuan
(20p) per day per child if she would allow him to take them away to beg,
which she did. He said he would hand over this money in a lump sum once a
year at Chinese New Year. During the months that followed,
Nicholas said, he earned between 100 and 600 yuan
per day (between £7 and £40) for his boss. Nicholas kept trying to run away.
When the boss beat his younger brother for not earning enough, Nicholas swore
at his boss. Because of this, when the boss took the children home at spring
festival, he gave Nicholas' mother only 30 yuan
(£2) for her son's labour. - htsc Birth
Controlled: China's Stolen Children Reviewed The film investigates human
trafficking panoramically, following everyone from the traffickers themselves
(both reformed and active), parents searching for their kidnapped son,
parents trying to sell their daughter, a boy who himself was kidnapped, and
the detective who's working a seven month old case with few clues, no
witnesses, and no leads. But the most pervasive of any facet of the trade is
the furtive Chinese government, which does everything in its (far-reaching,
for sure) power to silence the families of over 70,000 children a year who are
being "snatched from the streets." China
police crack human trafficking ring: report Police have arrested 18 people
suspected of kidnapping children and women in southwest China and trafficking
them across the country, state press reported Monday. Eight victims, including one child who was
kidnapped and sold only seven days after being born, were rescued, the
Beijing News said. Police began
investigating the crimes when several children in Yunnan
province began disappearing in May, the report said. Trafficking of women and children
remains a problem in China with many sociologists blaming the nation's
"one child" family planning policy for fuelling the crime. Under the policy, aimed at controlling the
world's largest population of over 1.3 billion, people who live in urban
areas are generally allowed one child, while rural families can have two if
the first is a girl. This has put a premium
on baby boys, while baby girls are often sold off as couples try for a male
heir. Ashton Shurson - The Daily Iowan media.www.dailyiowan.com/media/storage/paper599/news/2008/03/25/Metro/Talk-Outlines.Risks.In.International.Adopting-3281430.shtml At one time this article had been
archived and may possibly still be accessible [here]
In November 2005, police in Organ
trafficking: a fast-expanding black market China,
India, Pakistan, Egypt, Brazil, the Philippines, Moldova, and Romania are
among the world's leading providers of trafficked organs. If China is known
for harvesting and selling organs from executed prisoners, the other
countries have been dealing essentially with living donors, becoming
stakeholders in the fast-growing human trafficking web. Children
rescued from human-trafficking gang "The gang members had
abducted nine children, all boys between two and eight years old, since April,
and sold them to rural families," said Wang Jianmin,
Nanyang Municipal Commission of Politics and Law
secretary. He told Xinhua
the family gang was led by Ye Zengxi, 55, his son
and daughter-in-law. Also involved was Ye's brother
Ye Xiaolin. The gang used Ye's
12-year-old nephew to lure other children away from their parents' view with
toys or food, and then whisked them away by motorbike. Eight of the children were sold to rural
families who wanted boys, while another was held captive awaiting a buyer
before the police rescue. Action
plan to fight human trafficking finalized Ministry figures show that about
2,000 to 3,000 cases of women and children being sold are reported to police
across the country every year. The International Labor Organization estimates
the number of trafficking victims in China ranges from 10,000 to 20,000 a
year. Those trafficked are usually
victims of sexual and labor exploitation; and the issue received particular
attention after the exposure of a brick kiln slave labor scandal in Shanxi Province this summer. Official figures in August showed
that 1,340 people, about 400 of whom were children or mentally handicapped,
had been rescued from forced labor since June, many of them in Shanxi. Du Wednesday reiterated that there
would be zero tolerance for the crime and called for more cooperation among
neighboring countries as trafficking is an international issue. Last year, 209 people who were
trafficked to China were repatriated to Vietnam and Myanmar, according to the
ministry. Girls and women in Yunnan Province and
the Guangxi Zhuang
Autonomous Region also face the risk of being abducted to neighboring
countries such as Thailand for sex exploitation. China
claims progress fighting human trafficking There has been a rise in
trafficking cases involving Myanmar women in China in particular in recent
years. The women are mostly smuggled
through the porous border into the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan and then taken to central and north China, where
poverty and a skewed sex ratio means many farmers cannot find wives. Late last year, China jailed six Myanmar
nationals for selling 23 Myanmar girls to Chinese peasants as wives. Trafficking in China www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/rm/07/94466.htm At one time this article had been
archived and may possibly still be accessible [here]
Early this summer reports emerged
of over one thousand farmers, teenagers and children, including some who were
mentally handicapped, forced to work for little or no pay in scorching brick
kilns, enduring beatings and confinement in worse than prison-like
conditions. This was a form of modern day slavery that shocked not only the
international community, but prompted an outcry among Chinese citizens and a
forceful reaction from the authorities. The trade of women and girls for
sexual exploitation is another clear trafficking challenge for the Chinese
government. Although prostitution is illegal, the burgeoning illicit sex
industry creates a vulnerability for sex trafficking. Women and children are
trafficked into the country from North Korea, Vietnam, Burma, Mongolia, and
Thailand. Chinese women are also trafficked abroad for sexual exploitation.
The government's main challenges in this area include their punishment of
victims, poor victim protection services, and lack of transparency in
criminal law enforcement by not fully disclosing what the government is doing
to enforce laws against TIP. Human trafficking documentary premieres in Beijing www.humantrafficking.org/updates/715 www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20070921-0345-china-trafficking-.html In China, where the 30-minute
documentary will be shown several times on MTV China's channel in October and
November, human trafficking cases involving sex and forced labor are increasing,
officials have said. Chinese police
detained 47 people accused of trafficking babies earlier in the month and
rescued dozens of infants being traded because of rural families' desire for
children in a country that strictly enforces population control. This followed a scandal earlier in the year
involving hundreds of farmers, teenagers and children being kidnapped, beaten
and forced to work in brick kilns. Goff said one of the most
important underlying causes for human trafficking was 'demand'. 'The demand that we all represent for
cheaper and cheaper consumer products and labor and the demand for paid sex,'
he said. Gang
trafficking over 60 babies cracked Lang also confessed that they
usually buy a baby girl at 1,500 yuan (US$200) but
sell it for 8,000 yuan, while a baby boy usually
costs them 8,000 yuan and can fetch 20,000 yuan for them. Investigations found that the gang
of human traders headed by Shen and Lang have
bought 27 newborn babies in Yunnan during 16 trips
and then sold them in Shandong. Forty
out of more than 60 babies who were trafficked by the gang have been rescued
by police so far, while police were trying to find the others. Cases of forced labor and sexual
exploitation have been on the rise, posing a threat to social stability and
our nation's welfare. In a worst
scenario, hundreds of migrant workers and under-age people were found in June
having been trafficked to work in illegal brick kilns in Shanxi
and Henan provinces. The plight of those victims drew much
concern from the government and the society, and triggered a massive national
crackdown on illegal brick kilns. Panel
set to target human trafficking The government plans to set up the
first national mechanism for combating trafficking to protect women and
children from forced labor and prostitution.
The joint effort by 21 ministries - including the ministries of public
security, labor and social security, education and supervision - aims to
provide sustainable and long-term solutions to human trafficking. It will be led by a leading group reporting
directly to the State Council, Yin Jianzhong, a
senior official of the anti-human trafficking office of the Ministry of
Public Security, said. Meanwhile, the
National Plan of Action on Anti-trafficking of Women and Children (2008-12),
which is being drafted, will be unveiled by the end of this year, Yin said. More
forced into prostitution, labor Forced labor and sexual exploitation
have increased as the trend in human trafficking in China has taken a turn
for the worst. The number of forced laborers and
the sexually exploited has risen partly because of the loopholes in the legal
and labor systems, he added. The
Criminal Law on human trafficking protects women and children only and leaves
out grown-up and teen males. It doesn't have provisions for punishing those
trafficking people for forced labor or prostitution, Yin said. China
Arrests Nine for Human Trafficking Chinese police raided a human
trafficking ring and arrested nine people for kidnapping and selling children
in northwestern and central China, state media reported on Wednesday. The traffickers snatched more than
20 children and sold some in Hongtong county in the
northern province of Shanxi, where kidnapped
teenagers and children were found working as slaves in brick kilns in a
widely publicised scandal, the Xinhua
news agency said. Xinhua said two of the kidnappers, Wang Aizhong and Li Caimei, tricked
kids to get on to their motorcycle on their way to school or broke into
houses to snatch babies. 'Alarming'
Trade in Human Organ Trafficking The International Organization for
Migration (IOM) expressed alarm on Thursday over rising cases of trade in
human organs in Asia, and said globalization had increased risks of human trafficking. Reed said many trafficking cases
in Asia "end up in situations of forced begging, delinquency, adoption,
false marriage, or most recently, as victims of the thriving trade in human
organs". He said trafficking for
organs was on the rise in China and in many impoverished states in Southeast
Asia, like Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, the Philippines and Vietnam. Group
works to rescue victims of human trafficking “Currently, we are trying to
rescue three women who disappeared after being lured to jobs in China,” Ja Awng told The Irrawaddy on Friday. According to Ja
Awng, 26-year-old Maran Hkawn, a mother of three children, and 37-year-old Ma Lum, a mother of four children, who both lived in the
village of Mung Baw, Namdu Township, northern Shan State, were lured by a job
offer from a Chinese national to work in a restaurant somewhere near the
border and left for China in June 2006. Since then the two have disappeared
and neither of their families know their whereabouts. Another 23-year-old Kachin woman, Mun Ja of Kutkhai Township, who
worked at a Chinese restaurant in a village near Rulli
in Yunnan Province, disappeared in early January
this year along with the owners of the restaurant. Vendors reportedly said
the owner had taken the woman to another location in China. Ja Awng
said many human trafficking cases take place on the China-Burma border. She
said the KWA rescued two victims last year. The KWA and the KIO gave 8,000 yuan (US $1,032) to Chinese police to rescue a 3-year-old
Burmese girl from a Chinese house in a village near Rulli,
she said. Victims
of Human Trafficking Speak WOMEN WHO ARE SOLD INTO SLAVERY - Ms. G (age: 26), a former nurse
from the North who made it across the border to China in February was
appalled after she was sold to a family. She was the only woman in the house
with 62-year-old father, 32 year-old oldest son and other three men. Her
worst fears turned into reality when the father and four sons each demanded
her to share their bed every night. She was forced to go through this ordeal,
even when she was sick or had her period. She did not have anyone to turn to,
because there was not even a village nearby. She put up with this life for
about eight months. Protecting
young women from human trafficking in Viet Nam In 1991, Phuong was lured to
the border by traffickers and taken against her will to China, where she was
dragged to a house in a small town and sold to become an older man’s wife. “I didn’t know how old he was or
the name of the place we lived,” she said. “I lost my freedom. I had to go
everywhere with his family or else I was locked in a room. I had to work
hard. When I was tired or sick, they didn’t let me stop working. Vietnam,
China boost ties to combat human trafficking Trafficked young girls have been
forced into the sex trade or forced to marry older men. Vietnamese and Chinese police raided more
than 30 human trafficking gangs in July and August alone this year. Three
Women Arrested in Muse for Human Trafficking According to confirmed sources,
some human trafficking syndicates have been dispatching young women from
Burma to China, where they are sold for large sums of money. China
issues plan to combat human trafficking The Chinese government announced
Wednesday it has submitted for approving a plan to fight human trafficking to
meet its obligations to a 2004 agreement among six Asian countries. At a meeting in Beijing of the
Coordinated Mekong Ministerial Initiative Against Trafficking (COMMIT), Wan Yan, a member of the COMMIT China office, said, "We
have submitted the action plan and are awaiting approval. If passed, the plan
will help to clarify the responsibilities of all the relevant ministries in
combating human trafficking." The governments of China, Cambodia,
Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam adopted a comprehensive and strategic
Sub-regional Plan of Action to jointly combat human trafficking in 2004,
under which member states each devise a national plan of action. More
co-operation needed in war on human trafficking Reviewing the human trafficking
trend in the region, Thailand’s Susu Thatun, programme manager of
the United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking in the Greater
Mekong Sub-region reported that nearly one-third of the global trafficking
trade of about 200,000-225,000 women and children are trafficked annually
from Southeast Asia. While in the past women and
children have been reported as trafficked victims, Thatun
said that boys and men have also been identified as victims as well into the
sex trade, heavy labour, begging, marriage, and the
fishing industry. VN,
China battle human trafficking More than 550 Vietnamese women and
children were trafficked to China in the last two years, the Vietnamese
police said yesterday in a report released at a workshop held on cross-border
trafficking between the two countries. The police said the victims were
deceived by members of organised crime gangs in
both countries who promised them good jobs in big cities in Viet Nam or
abroad. But many of them ended up being sold to brothels in China. China for global cooperation to fight human trafficking China said today that human
trafficking cases within its borders have declined and that it is willing to
work together with other countries to do more to prevent women and girls from
being forced into prostitution, marriage or labour. Mekong
region govts to co-op against human trafficking Since the signing of the historic
COMMIT Memorandum of Understanding in Yangon, Myanmar in October 2004, by
Ministers of the six countries, the Governments have been active in laying
the foundation for a network of cooperation to stop traffickers and prosecute
them, protect victims of trafficking and assist them return safely home, and
launch efforts to prevent others from sharing the same fate. Secret Chinese
Concentration Camp Revealed The Epoch Times was granted an
in-depth interview with the journalist described in this report. A former
Chinese journalist that worked for an overseas television station has
revealed in an interview the existence of a secret concentration camp
dedicated to the persecution – and possibly organ-harvesting – of Falun Gong practitioners. As a survivor of 19 years’
imprisonment in a Chinese labour reform camp, a
mechanized system for physically, mentally and spiritually crushing human
beings, I feel compelled to investigate and decry them. History dictates that
all authoritarian regimes must maintain a mechanism to suppress political
dissent and consolidate control. In China today this is the Laogai – an institution of fear, control and modern-day
slavery. From the Mandarin, the word ‘Laogai’
translates literally as ‘reform through labour’ and
describes a system of forced-labour camps spanning
China from the highly industrialized prison-factories of the eastern coastal
cities to the isolated, fenceless farms of the west. Abraham
Lee - Testimony before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China III. REFUGEE VULNERABILITY - The combination of extreme
hunger, potential economic opportunity and easier access motivates refugees
to abandon family and risk their lives to enter China. It also provides human
traffickers the perfect opportunity to exploit this desperate situation.
Although the numbers are difficult to quantify, reports indicate that as many
as 70%-80% of all North Korean women who enter China illegally are victims of
trafficking. John
R. Miller- Testimony before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China Ms. Cha went to look for work in China
when she could no longer feed her three children. Twice she was arrested by
Chinese authorities, forcibly repatriated, and sent to a North Korean
detention center. In China, her youngest daughter fell victim to traffickers
as well. Ms. Cha traveled from village to village in China looking for her
daughters, and eventually fell into debt bondage to a Korean-Chinese man who
“purchased” her younger daughter to return to live with them and forced them
both to labor on his farm. China’s One Child Policy Exacerbates Slavery, Panel Concludes The Chinese government is making progress
in combating human trafficking, but its one-child policy is still responsible
for a gender disparity that is encouraging Chinese men to purchase young
women from North Korea as wives, the Congressional-Executive Commission on
China reported Monday. The refugees forced to be sex slaves in China The women who flee North Korea
believe nothing could be worse than their dictatorship's famine and labor
camps. But many change their minds
after they cross the Trader arrested for alleged prostitution Barry said all the workers were
promised legitimate jobs with a pay rate of $7 per hour. When they arrived, though,
the defendant allegedly made them work as prostitutes. Although the women
wanted to leave, they were reportedly forced to stay, as the defendant told
them they have no way of settling their debts and purchasing airfares back to
Facing
the future with 40 million bachelors China faces a future of crime and
instability as a generation of 40 million men is left frustrated by a lack of
brides, thanks to the practice of selective abortion of female foetuses, a population official has warned. Men left on the shelf would resort to
prostitutes or pay huge prices for brides, while trafficking in women and
girls kidnapped from rural areas and other countries would increase. China already has a significant
problem in trafficking of women and girls, internally and from countries such
as Burma. Many North Korean women who flee to China are captured by gangs and
sold as brides to Chinese farmers.
Boys are also kidnapped and sold to families without male heirs for
adoption. Police said they had freed
42,215 kidnapped women and children in the past two years. Women and children are
increasingly the majority of refugees crossing the river into Border
police rescue 37 in anti-human trafficking drive The women were saved thanks to a
joint operation between Guangxi and Strong Effort Needed to Gain Chinese Worker Rights [scroll down] CECC Roundtable Panelists Discuss Issue Of Forced Labor In
China's Laogai www.laogai.org/news/newsdetail.php?id=2334 At one time this article had been
archived and may possibly still be accessible [here]
When a product is labeled
"Made in Activists decry brutal Chinese factories, WalMart, Nike sited The report, Made In China,
investigated 16 companies including Nike, the world’s largest retailer;
Wal-Mart; and Timberland. At a Qin Shi factory where Wal-Mart handbags were made,
undercover investigators found young women working up to 14 hours a day,
seven days a week for 3 cents an hour, and almost half were in debt to the
company because of deductions for board.
Most workers were young women, with a Nike contractor in a Lizhan factory advertising for females only, age 18-25.
Complaining about conditions or getting pregnant led to sackings. American partners are more than willing to
look the other way, Mr. Wu said. Program
Launched To Stem Kidnapping Of Girls A new program to prevent the
kidnapping of Chinese girls and young women with the purpose of exploitation
in labor has been inaugurated in China Stops Baby
Trafficking Ring The report says some of the babies had been abandoned by their parents, but increasing numbers of children are also being abducted - particularly from migrant worker families who cannot afford childcare. The
Protection Project - China [DOC] FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE
TRAFFICKING INFRASTRUCTURE - As a result of China’s one-child policy, unwanted female children
are prone to abandonment, trafficking, and even infanticide. Girls are also
disadvantaged in the areas of education and job opportunities. Such
discrimination increases girls’ vulnerability to trafficking. Girls are sold to rural families who
already have a son but want a daughter to help with the housework; others are
sold to be raised as child brides for farmers in remote regions. Because of
the selective abortion of girls in China, some researchers estimate there are
111 males for every 100 females in the country, making it difficult for poor
farmers to find wives. The lack of
Chinese women in turn fuels trafficking from Vietnam to China, as does the
reported lack of available Vietnamese men for Vietnamese women. www.iom.org.za/Reports/TraffickingReport3rdEd.pdf EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - The major findings may be summarized as follows: Triad-linked Chinese or Taiwanese agents recruit Chinese women by promising work in Chinese-owned businesses in South Africa, or the prospect of studying in English language schools. Women may even pay to be smuggled out of China. When recruited to work in Chinese-owned restaurants, clubs, or on fishing vessels in South Africa, they are forced into sex work indefinitely. If they come to South Africa to study English, they are often allowed to complete their courses before being told that they have a US$12 500 debt that they must repay by doing sex work. In either case, these Chinese women have no freedom of movement, and their traffickers take their earnings. Freedom
House Country Report - Political Rights: 7 Civil Liberties: 6 Status: Not Free Human Rights Overview by Human Rights Watch – Defending Human Rights Worldwide U.S. Library of Congress - Country Study China
executes 3 baby traffickers China has executed three baby
traffickers who sold 11 infants in nation where family planning rules allow
couples normally to have just one child.
The three were executed in Kunming in the
southwestern province of Yunnan, Xinhua news agency said.
"Many babies kidnapped by them are still missing and there is no
way to rescue them," a judge with the Kunming
Intermediate People's Court was quoted as saying. China, UNICEF Join Hands to Protect Girls A few hours after she was trapped
by human traffickers, Chen Jing was able to see
through their plot, sought help from police and escaped. The 15-year-old girl from Renshou county in the outback of the southwestern Sichuan
Province told Xinhua in an interview Tuesday that a
booklet had taught her how to tell devils from the kind-hearted and how to
help herself in case of emergency. The
booklet, which tells in simple words and vivid pictures how rural girls
should protect themselves from human traffickers, is compiled by the United
Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), All-China Women's Federation and the
Ministry of Public Security and is provided for free to country girls like
Chen Jing who want to find a job in cities. "I sensed danger when I was
escorted to a train with an unknown destination, and was told they would keep
my documents and money for me -- the booklet says human traffickers always do
that," said Chen. The alert girl
managed to borrow a cell phone from a stranger, reported to the police and
was saved before the train started.
"I just followed the instructions in the booklet, and was lucky
to survive," said Chen, who has just found a job as housemaid for an
urban family in Chengdu. Human
Trafficking an Increasing Problem in China Human trafficking of women and
children in China has increased to over 42,000 reported cases from 2001 to
2003, according to official statistics.
According to the Chinese Official Media, Xin
Hua News Agency, over a period of three years,
police in China has solved about 20,000 cases of illegal sales of women and
children. A total of 22,000 suspects have been arrested. Many young girls
from the rural areas have been sold to various areas and forced to marry or
become sex slaves. Young boys have been sold to childless families or
families with only one child due to the One Child Policy in China. More
Than 200 Children Missing in Kunming City Since 2001, almost 200 children,
mainly boys aged between one and six years old, have gone missing in Kunming City. Incidences of child trafficking and selling
have occurred at Kunming City’s Guandu
and Xishan areas. The rate of disappearances is
also on the rise. In 2001 23 children who went missing. This rose to 30 the
following year and 67 last year. As of April 3 this year 21 children have
been reported missing. - links to articles re: Forced
labor camps in China - Slave
Labor Experience at Forced Labor Camps I profess not to know a great deal
about either the Falun Movement, it's practices or
treatment by officialdom but I did find this first hand experience of a Falun Dafa practioner
inside Chinese jails rather an eye opener. Not because it demonstrates the
lack of rights afforded political prisoners as I think we all know that
exists but for the forced labour being used to
produce goods for "free world" companies. WHAT
I'M READING TODAY: State Department Report on Human Rights Practices 2003 Here's what I found out about what
is going on in China: The report mentions no less than 40 times by my count
(I may have missed some) the cheery sounding reeducation-through-labor camps
widely used in China (and it ain't talking about an
AFL-CIO activist training). Rather, Chinese citizens (some 250,000 of them)
were confined without judicial process and force to work "in facilities
directly connected with penal institutions...[or in some cases] they were
contracted to nonprison enterprises. Facilities and
their management profited from inmate labor." Who were these prisoners?
Activists for religious freedom, democratic reform, labor rights, women's
rights, people who fall out of favor of the party, people who protest to
demand back pay for wages that are withheld (more on this below), and
generally people who rake too much muck. Slavery,
Prostitution Effect of China's One-Child Policy "Such serious gender
disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable
growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social
problems as abduction of women and prostitution," Li said. His
predictions are already reality -- police there freed more than 42,000
kidnapped women and children in 2001 and 2002. Many were believed to be sold
for the purpose of prostitution or as slave wives. Chinese officials say they have no
intention of changing the one-child policy -- a measure put in place to ensure
the population remains below 1.6 billion until 2050. www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501030728/story.html www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,501030728-465845,00.html Hundreds of girls have been
kidnapped from Xupu in the past few years,
including more than a dozen from Hu's village of
barely 200. Some girls?lured into cars by promises
of candy or fancy clothes or merely a joyride to the city?are
never heard from again. Others, like Hu, eventually
find their way back home. But Hu was so traumatized
by what had happened that she refused to leave her house for more than a year
after her return, spending her days sequestered in a dark room filled with
piles of coal. Finally, she fled last year to the boomtown of Shenzhen, where
she now toils in an electronics sweatshop. Although the 16-hour shifts are
exhausting, they're nothing like the conditions at the brothel, where she was
forced to service a stream of men for no pay. How
China Hides Its Slave Labor From the Free World For years, he had been one of the
estimated 50 million blue uniformed “troublemakers” who had worked in the camps
under totally inhumane conditions. Some of them literally worked themselves
to death. The forced labor had turned
out for the American market such items as rubber-soled shoes, boots,
kitchenware, toys, tools, men’s and women’s clothing, and sporting goods. 'GETTING WISE' - A manager at Shanghai’s Laodong Machinery Plant, where hand tools were made,
boasted that because the U.S. Congress had recently made “quite a fuss” about
the prison camps, he and his bosses had devised a way to get around the
problem. “We always go through the
import-export company,” he said, meaning they set up companies to handle the
shipment of goods. That way, as Wu explains it, “nobody quite knows where the
goods came from. Chinese Police Rescue Nine Children from Traffickers MIGRANT WORKERS' CHILDREN TARGETED
BY KIDNAPPERS -
Police in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen said Thursday they had
rescued nine abducted children and arrested six suspects in connection with
what is believed to be one of the largest child trafficking rings the city
has seen. The crackdown came after 10
children aged between three and four years old were kidnapped in the city,
which is home to a large population of migrant workers, since the beginning
of the year, a police statement said. The tenth child has not yet been
accounted for. China Declares ‘Zero Tolerance’ on Human Trafficking Many of the women are bought by farmers
who cannot find wives in the normal way. But recently the trade has taken a
far more disturbing turn with women and children being sold into
prostitution, said UNICEF official and senior project coordinator, David
Parker. The so called "Elimination of
Trafficking: Zero Tolerance Plan," which is set to last four years, will
seek to find an effective working system to eliminate the "demand
market" of population marketing through education, case reports and
crackdowns, said Zhu Yantao, an official with the
Ministry of Public Security. Harsh
Chinese Reality Feeds a Black Market in Women When a man offered Feng Chenyun temporary work in
another city, she jumped at the chance. Barely literate and desperately poor,
Ms. Feng had two children, 10 and 16, and it was
nearly impossible to scrape together school fees from her small plot of rice
and rape seed. Her husband was working as a
migrant laborer 1,000 miles away, in Guangdong Province. At 37, she had never
left her county in Sichaun Province and was feeling
restless. "I went with him because he
was offering me work," she said, recounting from her small dark home the
start of a tale that still brings tears three years later. "I just wanted
to get out and earn a bit of money." Instead, Ms. Feng
was kidnapped, drugged, placed on a train and sold for about $1,500 as a
bride to a brick maker in faraway Xinjiang
Province—becoming one of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of poor
Chinese women who are sold on a black market each year. Girls, two-week-old bundles with
shocks of black hair, cost $25 each. Boys, traditionally favored, sell for
$50. The chicken trade, by contrast, brings in only $2 for the plumpest fowl.
In a mountainous region where drought has stymied farmers, the baby trade is
feeding citizens in a way that Yunnan province's
cracked red earth no longer can. Some mothers, who have no knowledge of birth
control, are giving up "extra" children that violate the nation's
family-planning policy. Others, from the most desperately poor villages, have
turned into full-time baby machines, squeezing out children-for-sale in the
shadows of their dirt-floor shacks. "Before, we made money by raising
pigs," says a 23-year-old woman who sold two children just days after
they were born. "But it takes a year to raise a pig and it's expensive
to feed. A baby takes only nine months and doesn't cost any money. Millions
Suffer in Sex Slavery Statistical estimates indicate
300,000 women have been sold into the sex trade in Western Europe in the last
10 years, and since 1990, 80,000 women and children from Myanmar (formerly
Burma), Cambodia, Laos and China
have been sold into Thailand's sex industry. China arrests
prostitution gang Police in China have arrested 79
gang members suspected of abducting women from rural areas and forcing them
into prostitution. Hundreds of young
women and girls are said to have been lured with promises of jobs in Chinese
cities. Some of the victims were as young as 12-years-old. Vietnamese
Women Are Kidnapped Jobless and destitute, Nguyen Thi Hoan felt her luck was
about to change. She had just arrived here one sultry June morning two years ago,
and almost at once a kindly woman offered her a job in a candy factory. It was a trap. Within hours, Miss Hoan was spirited across the Vietnam-China border at Lang
Son, 100 miles away, by one of the gangs that kidnap young women and sell
them to be brides in China. For several days, the 22-year-old
was trucked and traded around southern China, changing hands four times
before finally meeting the man who would be her husband. "I am writing
while wiping away tears," she told her family in a letter she mailed
secretly. "Please come here and save me." New
weapons against child trafficking in Asia In Asia, trafficking in children
both between and within various countries is on the increase. In recent
years, large numbers of children from Cambodia, China, Laos and Myanmar have
been forced to work as prostitutes in Thailand. Both girls and boys from poor
rural areas are lured by professional recruiters and traffickers with promises
of legitimate jobs in Thailand's booming economy. All material used herein
reproduced under the fair use exception of 17 USC § 107 for noncommercial,
nonprofit, and educational use |
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Human Trafficking in [China Street Children in [China] [other countries]Child Prostitution in [China] [other countries]