Chinese Barbarity

Kachin women from Myanmar raped until they get pregnant in China

By Emma Graham-Harrison

Refugees in Myitkyina, Kachin state, northern Myanmar. 

Burmese and Chinese authorities are turning a blind eye to a growing trade in women from Myanmar’s Kachin minority, who are taken across the border, sold as wives to Chinese men and raped until they become pregnant.
Some of the women are allowed to return home after they have given birth, but are forced to leave their children, according to an investigation by Human Rights Watch, titled Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go.
One survivor said: “I gave birth, and after one year the Chinese men gave me a choice of what to do. I got permission to go back home, but not with the baby.”
China is grappling with a severe gender imbalance; the percentage of the population who are women has fallen every year since 1987. 

Researchers estimate that factors including sex-selective abortion, infanticide and neglect of female babies mean that there are 30 to 40 million “missing women” in China, who should be alive today but aren’t.
That means millions of men are now unable to find a wife, and there has been a rise in trafficking across the borders of neighbouring, poorer nations.
Many of the Kachin women are trafficked out of Myanmar by their relatives, friends or people they trust; in one case a woman was betrayed by someone from her bible study class. 

They are often promised jobs across the border in China, and discover only after they cross over that they have been sold into sexual slavery.
“My broker was my auntie, she persuaded me,” a woman who was trafficked aged 17 or 18 told Human Rights Watch. 

Over three years, HRW spoke to nearly 40 victims who had escaped, or been allowed to leave but without their children, many still struggling to deal with the emotional impact.
All came from, and had returned to, Myanmar’s northern Kachin state or neighbouring Shan state, where the ethnic Kachin have been fighting the government for decades. 

A 17-year ceasefire ended in 2011, and the renewed conflict has displaced more than 100,000 people and left many struggling to survive.
With men taking part in the fighting, women often become the only breadwinners for the families, and with jobs badly paid and hard to find, many feel that they have no choice but to pursue work in China where wages are higher even for illegal migrants.
“Myanmar and Chinese authorities are looking away while unscrupulous traffickers are selling Kachin women and girls into captivity and unspeakable abuse,” said Heather Barr, women’s rights co-director at Human Rights Watch.
“The dearth [of work or legal] protections have made these women easy prey for traffickers, who have little reason to fear law enforcement on either side of the border.”
Myanmar’s government reported 226 cases of trafficking in 2017, but experts told Human Rights Watch they believe that the real number is much higher.
There are few incentives for trafficked women or their relatives to seek official help.

Families seeking police aid to track missing daughters, sisters and wives were turned away in Myanmar, or were asked for money, HRW found.
Many of the areas where the women are trafficked from are controlled not by authorities in the capital, Yangon, but by the opposition Kachin Independence Organisation, so the government has no record of what is happening there.
In China, when some survivors tried to seek help from security forces, they were jailed for immigration violations not supported as crime victims.
Those who were repatriated were often simply dumped at the border, stranded far from their community, the report found. 

And if they do make it back, they face social stigma, and little chance of getting justice, even if they tried to seek it.
“When Myanmar authorities did make arrests, they usually targeted only the initial brokers in Myanmar and not the rest of the networks in China,” the report found. 

“Police in China never arrested people that knowingly bought trafficked ‘brides’ and abused them.”

North Korea Offers China Sex For Money

North Korean women help to meet the shortage of brides in China's male-dominated society.

By Steven W. Mosher 

Why are an estimated 85 percent of the North Koreans who manage to make their way to freedom in South Korea women?
And why do nearly all come by way of China, rather than across the heavily guarded DMZ, and have sad stories of sexual abuse to tell?
The backward North Korean economy produces very little that the world wants. 

But Big Brother China, however, is hungry for the two things Pyongyang does have in relative abundance: coal and women. 

The coal keeps the fires burning in energy-poor China. 

The women help to meet the shortage of brides in China's male-dominated society.
China's one-child policy has devastated the female population. 

Over the past three-and-a-half decades that the policy has been in place, tens of millions of girls have disappeared from the population. 

They were killed in utero by sex-selection abortions, at birth by female infanticide, or after birth by simple neglect.
Sex-selection abortion is the biggest offender. 

Almost ten million such abortions were carried out between the years 2000 and 2014. 

That works out to 1800 unborn girls eliminated every day, 640,000 eliminated each year, and six and half million each decade.
This targeting of unborn baby girls has so skewed the sex ratio at birth that there are now at least 115 boys born for every 100 girls.
The result is that women of marriageable age are in short supply. 

There are now an estimated 33 million men in China who cannot find brides -- at least inside of China. 

And so they look abroad.
The State Department's 2013 "Trafficking in Persons Report" acknowledged the connection, stating that "the Chinese government's birth control policy and a cultural preference for sons, create a skewed sex-ration of 118 boys to 100 girls in China, which served as a key source of demand for the trafficking of foreign women as brides for Chinese men and for forced prostitution."
One place that Chinese men look for brides is the other side of the Yalu River, for in North Korea there are lots of hungry young women longing for a better life. 

The population of Kim Jong Un's socialist paradise subsists in near famine conditions, with two in five North Koreans undernourished and more than two-thirds on food aid.
The latest United Nations report, published in March 2017, paints a grim picture: Out of a population of 24 million, "an estimated 18 million people are dependent on Government food rations while 10.5 million people are believed to be undernourished. A lack of access to basic services including water and sanitation, as well as a weak health infrastructure further threaten the well-being of the population, particularly young children and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
Even members of Kim's highly touted "one-million man army" are starving; witness the sick and malnourished defector who recently crawled across the DMZ to freedom.
As a result of this widespread and continuing food shortage, starving North Korea peasants are often happy to sell a teenaged daughter -- whom they would have trouble feeding in any event -- to agents who claim that they are recruiting workers for Chinese companies. 

"Your daughter will be given a job in a factory or restaurant," they promise the parents. 

"She will finally have enough to eat."
Older women are also lured across the border on the same promise.
But these "hiring agents" are actually sex traffickers, and what awaits the North Korean girls and women in China is not a real job but either forced marriage or out-and-out sexual slavery. 

Young girls, especially if they are virgins, are sold to the highest bidder as brides. 

Older women are generally sold to brothels where they are kept under lock and key and forced to work as prostitutes.
It is no wonder that many of them take flight at the first opportunity, paying "snakeheads"--illegal guides -- to lead them safely across China's southern border to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. 

From there they can easily travel to South Korea and freedom.
“Historically, the largest influence in female migration from North Korea to China has been sex trafficking and marriages,” said Sokeel Park, the Seoul-based director of research and strategy for Liberty in North Korea, an organization that helps rescue North Korean refugees hiding in China.
Having found their way to freedom, few of these woman will go on record saying that they were forced into prostitution or sold as wives in China. 

But nearly all, as vulnerable women in a country with a superabundance of often predatory males, were sexually abused in some way.

Self-Genocide with Chinese Characteristics

Female infanticide: the dark side of China’s obsession with luck
South China Morning Post

BEIJING -- Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line, “How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” rings sadly true in many families. 

From time immemorial, wayward children the world over have set many an exasperated parent ranting like King Lear on the heath, and China is no exception.
Across the Western world, the advance of scientific thought has meant most people now realise a secure early environment in a family with adequate resources, combined with abundant love and affection – “nurture”, in short – profoundly influences what kind of adult emerges from the chrysalis of childhood and adolescence. 

Blaming “nature” for unfortunate outcomes – “bad seed” – simply passes the buck of responsibility on to the cosmos.
In traditional Chinese society, however, the concept that one’s upbringing could be a cause for waywardness was dismissed, both by parents and other family members, as deeply unfilial. 

To acknowledge – much less accept – the key role that nurture plays implies inadequate parenting skills or dysfunctional family relationships. 

Any poor fit that developed between child and family, therefore, must have been the fault of both child – as a soul reborn – and the universe; the actions and temperaments of adults connected to a child could not possibly have had any bearing on how they turned out.
In traditional Chinese society, however, the concept that one’s upbringing could be a cause for waywardness was dismissed, both by parents and other family members, as deeply unfilial. 

To acknowledge – much less accept – the key role that nurture plays implies inadequate parenting skills or dysfunctional family relationships. 

Any poor fit that developed between child and family, therefore, must have been the fault of both child – as a soul reborn – and the universe; the actions and temperaments of adults connected to a child could not possibly have had any bearing on how they turned out.
Chinese attitudes to fate’s  work­ings also come into play. 

From the horos­copes of both parents, soothsayers can determine that a particular date would be inauspicious for a child’s birth, and that such a child would be the cause of untold grief and suffering later on.
Proper consultation of horoscopes for expectant parents and the divining of aus­picious dates for birth remain important in China. 

The local maternity hospital industry still astutely caters for – or, some would suggest, profit­ably panders to – traditional mindsets. 

Caesarean sections can be easily arranged to coincide with the most lucky date and time around natural term – for the usual fees, of course. 

In China in 2016, modern medical tech­nology ensures that age-old customs can still be accommodated.
Physical manifestations of supposed future parent-child incompatibility were traditionally detected by midwives. 

If an infant defecated at birth, the belief was that the child would be at odds with its father; if it urinated, it would be unharmo­nious to the mother.
Cul­turally accept­able solutions existed for kids likely to bring bad luck on their families. 

A child could be officially given away to a relative to whom it was unlikely to cause future problems because of more com­patible horoscopes. 

Better still, such adjust­ments might well have been a positive force in the lives and prosperity of all concerned. 

The newborn would become a shared child, who growing up referred to the adoptive parents as “father” and “mother” and the natural parents as “auntie” and “uncle”, the child’s primary care remaining within the family circle.
Given their future labour potential, infant boys could always be given away if no willing relative existed, or even sold if they were robust enough, but girls – repositories of Yin’s dark, nebulous void – were imme­diately disposed of, to prevent any further harm. 

This would be on the mother-in-law’s explicit instructions, given either at the time of birth or when her daughter-in-law went into labour. 

Midwives knew exactly how to manage this – baby’s necks are easily broken – and if anyone asked what had happened, well, babies often died at birth, didn’t they. 

It was simply the child’s unhappy fate not to live in this family, in this particular reincarnation.