China's Human Trafficking

She Thought She’d Married a Rich Chinese Farmer. She Hadn’t.

By Salman Masood and Amy Qin

Rabia Kanwal and Zhang Shuchen were married in Islamabad in January. Eight days after they went to his home in China, she left to return to Pakistan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Rabia Kanwal’s parents were sure her marriage to a wealthy Chinese Muslim she had just met would give her a comfortable future, far from the hardships of their lives in Pakistan. 

But she had a premonition.
“I was not excited,” said Ms. Kanwal, 22, who lives in a poor neighborhood in the city of Gujranwala, in the eastern province of Punjab. 

“I felt something bad was going to happen.”
Arranged marriages are common in Pakistan, but this one was unusual. 

The groom, who said he was a rich poultry farmer, met Ms. Kanwal’s family during a monthslong stay on a tourist visa. 

He had to use a Chinese-Urdu translation app to communicate with them, but over all, he made a favorable impression.
Ms. Kanwal went through with the wedding. 

But upon moving to China with her new husband in February, she said, she was disappointed by what she found: He was a poor farmer, not a wealthy one. 

Far worse, he was not a Muslim. 

Within days, with the help of the Pakistani Embassy, she was back home and pursuing a divorce.
Hers was a relatively happy ending, though. 

In recent weeks, Pakistan has been rocked by charges that at least 150 women were brought to China as brides under false pretenses — not only lied to, but in some cases forced into prostitution. 

Others said they were made to work in bars and clubs, an unacceptable practice in Pakistan’s conservative Muslim culture.
At the same time, Ms. Kanwal’s story is not uncommon in China.
China has one of the most heavily skewed gender ratios in the world, with 106.3 men for every 100 women as of 2017, according to the World Bank. 

That tilt is a product of nearly three decades of strict enforcement of China’s one-child policy and a preference for boys over girls — a combination that caused an untold number of forced abortions and female infanticides.
But the long-term human costs of this gender imbalance have only recently come into view — and they are having an impact far beyond China’s borders.
As the boys of the one-child policy era have begun to reach marriage age, the demand for foreign brides like Ms. Kanwal has surged, even as the Chinese government has loosened birth restrictions.
The allegations of trafficking are a disturbing aspect of China’s growing presence in Pakistan, a longtime ally drawn closer lately by expanding economic ties — including China’s Belt and Road infrastructure project.
More Chinese are coming to Pakistan as laborers and investors. 

In the capital, Islamabad, shops and other businesses have begun catering specifically to them.
The Pakistani government has cracked down on brokers said to have arranged the marriages, arresting at least two dozen Chinese citizens and Pakistanis and charging them with human trafficking.

The Chinese Embassy denied that Pakistani brides were being mistreated in China.
But Human Rights Watch said last month that the trafficking allegations were “disturbingly similar” to past patterns in which women from other poor Asian countries — North Korea, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam — were brought to China as brides and subjected to abuse.
“Both Pakistan and China should take seriously increasing evidence that Pakistani women and girls are at risk of sexual slavery,” the rights group’s China director, Sophie Richardson, wrote on its website.
Pakistani investigators said men in China paid the brokers to arrange marriages with local women, staying in rented houses in Pakistan until the weddings were performed. 

The men covered the costs of the ceremonies, and in some cases they paid the women’s families the equivalent of thousands of dollars, investigators said.
None of that is illegal in Pakistan. 

The human trafficking charges come from the allegations that women were forced into prostitution or brought to China under false pretenses. 

In some cases, investigators say, the men were provided with forged documents indicating that they were Muslim.
Other men sought out wives from Pakistan’s Christian minority, many of whom are impoverished and subjected to discrimination, investigators said. 

But virtually all of the women, Christian and Muslim alike, were drawn by the hope of better economic prospects.

Chinese men arriving at a courthouse this month in Islamabad, after being charged with trafficking women to China.

“My parents said that our neighbor’s girls were happy in China, so I would be, too,” Ms. Kanwal said.
She said she met her husband at the marriage broker’s office in Islamabad, where there were many other Chinese men and Pakistani women. 

According to Ms. Kanwal, he told her family that he was Muslim and recited the first tenet of the Muslim faith, which every follower must know: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
But Ms. Kanwal never saw him pray, even when they visited the famous Faisal Mosque in Islamabad.
In February after the wedding, they flew to Urumqi, capital of the East Turkestan colony in western China. 

After a brief stopover there, they flew on to Henan Province in central China.
Then, after a four-hour drive past fields of wheat and corn, they arrived at Dongzhang village in Shandong Province, where she saw her husband’s duck farm. 

It was not the sprawling operation of a wealthy man that she had envisioned, but a modest family farm where he lived with his parents and two brothers.
“They were not even Muslim and he had faked it all along,” she said. 

“There weren’t even proper washrooms in their house. I got agitated and started crying.”
Her husband, Zhang Shuchen, 33, tells a different story.
Over a meal of cold-tossed pig liver and stir-fried tomato and egg near his family home in Dongzhang, the boyish farmer acknowledged that he had traveled to Pakistan late last year and paid around $14,500 to a Chinese broker in the hopes of bringing home a Pakistani bride.
It was his first visit to Pakistan, he said, and the poverty there reminded him of China in the 1980s and ’90s. 

When he first met Ms. Kanwal, he said, he liked her. 

But he said he was upfront with her that while he had converted to Islam on paper, he was not a true believer.
“I told her I wasn’t a Muslim,” Mr. Zhang said in an interview. 

He added that Ms. Kanwal had taught him the first principle of the Muslim faith.

Ms. Kanwal back in Gujranwala, her hometown. She said her stay in China was “horrible and beyond words.”

Ms. Kanwal later stood by her insistence that she did not know Mr. Zhang was not Muslim, and denied she had taught him the first principle.
Previously a logistics warehouse worker in southern China, Mr. Zhang said he now earned about $2,900 a month farming ducks, far more than the $180 or so that the average Chinese farmer made per month in 2018, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
The New York Times was unable to independently verify Mr. Zhang’s income. 

But on a recent visit to the Zhang family home, a Times reporter found a newly built housing compound with multiple bedrooms and shiny tile floors.
Outside the family home, Mr. Zhang’s mother, who is in her 60s, recalled being puzzled by Ms. Kanwal’s reactions.
“She is religious, so when she came here I went out of my way not to give her any pork,” she said, as a small guard dog barked nearby. 

“I stir-fried chicken and made egg omelets for her. But no matter what I served her, she just refused to eat.”
Ms. Kanwal said the family locked her in a room for two days, trying to pressure her to stay. (Mr. Zhang denied the accusation.) 

She managed to email the Pakistani Embassy, whose staff connected her through to the Chinese police, who took her away and made arrangements with the embassy for her return to Pakistan.
Her stay in China lasted eight days. 

She said it was “horrible and beyond words.”
“I prayed daily for hours, asking God to take me safely back to my country, to my people,” Ms. Kanwal said. 

This month, she filed for divorce at a family court in Gujranwala, saying in her application that Mr. Zhang forced her into “immoral activities” and that she “would prefer to die instead of living with him.”
After news outlets in Pakistan reported the raids and the trafficking charges, the Chinese Embassy there said it supported the government’s efforts to combat crime. 

But it denied that Pakistani wives in China had been forced into prostitution or that their organs had been harvested.
Around the same time that Ms. Kanwal returned to Pakistan, the local marriage agency that many local men in the Dongzhang area had consulted for help in finding Pakistani wives was shuttered. 

But according to Mr. Zhang and other villagers in Dongzhang, there are still a number of Pakistani women in the area. 

Two Pakistani wives in a neighboring village are said to be pregnant.
“There are no girls here,” said Mr. Zhang’s mother, when asked why so many local men had gone to Pakistan to find wives. 

“We weren’t allowed to have more children, so everyone wanted boys.”

China's Human Trafficking

North Korean women forced into sex slavery in China
BBC News

The trade of North Korean women in China is said to be worth $100m a year for criminal organisations

Thousands of North Korean women and girls are being forced to work in the sex trade in China, according to a new report by a London-based rights group.
They are often abducted and sold as prostitutes, or compelled to marry Chinese men, says the Korea Future Initiative.
The trade is worth $100m (£79m) a year for criminal organisations, it says.
The women are often trapped because China repatriates North Koreans, who then face torture at home, it says.
"Victims are prostituted for as little as 30 Chinese yuan ($4.30; £3.40), sold as wives for just 1,000 yuan, and trafficked into cybersex dens for exploitation by a global online audience," the report's author Yoon Hee-soon said.
The girls and women in question are usually aged between 12 and 29, but can sometimes be younger, the report said.
They are coerced, sold, or abducted in China or trafficked directly from North Korea. 

Many are sold more than once and are forced into at least one form of sexual slavery within a year of leaving their homeland, it adds.
Many are enslaved in brothels in districts in north-east China with large migrant worker populations.
The girls -- some as young as nine -- and women working in the cybersex industry are forced to perform sex acts and are sexually assaulted in front of webcams. 

Many of the subscribers are thought to be South Korean.
Women forced into marriage were mostly sold in rural areas for 1,000 to 50,000 yuan, and were raped and abused by their husbands.
The group collected its information from victims in China and exiled survivors in South Korea.
One woman, named as Ms Pyon from Chongjin City, North Korea, is quoted as saying in the report:
"I was sold [to a brothel] with six other North Korean women at a hotel. We were not given much food and were treated badly... After eight months, half of us were sold again. The broker did bad things to me."

"When I arrived [at the new brothel] I had bruises on my body. [The broker] was beaten then stabbed in the legs by some members of the gang."
Another, Ms Kim, said: "There are many South Koreans [in Dalian, China]... We put advertising cards under their doors [in hotels]... The cards are in the Korean-language and advertise what we offer... We are mostly taken to bars [by the pimp].
"South Korean companies want [North Korean prostitutes] for their businessmen... Prostitution was my first experience of meeting a South Korean person."

China's human trafficking

The Pakistani women being trafficked to China
By Saher Baloch
Sophia (right) married a Chinese man after her pastor made introductions

The marriage between a local Christian woman and a Chinese Christian man six months ago in the eastern Pakistani city of Faisalabad had all the signs of a perfect match.
She was 19, he was 21.

She was a trained beautician, he a businessman selling cosmetics.
Her family didn't have much money but the groom generously offered to pay all the wedding expenses.
The proceedings took place in strict accordance with Pakistani customs. 

This pleased her parents, who felt that their daughter's new Chinese husband respected local traditions.
There was a formal proposal, followed by a henna ceremony, and finally the "baraat", where a procession arrives at the bride's house, vows are exchanged and the bride leaves to start a new life with her husband.
But within a month, the woman, who only wants to be known as Sophia to protect her identity, would be back at her parents' home. 

She escaped what she now believes was a racket to traffic Pakistani women into a life of sexual servitude in China.
Saleem Iqbal, a Christian human rights activist who has been tracking such marriages, said he believed at least 700 women, mostly Christian, had wed Chinese men in just over a year. 

What happens to many of these women is unknown but Human Rights Watch says they are "at risk of sexual slavery".
In recent weeks, more than two dozen Chinese nationals and local Pakistani middlemen, including at least one Catholic priest, were arrested in connection with sham marriages.
Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) told the BBC that "gangs of Chinese criminals are trafficking Pakistani women in the garb of marriage into the sex trade". 

It said one gang posed as engineers working on a power project while arranging weddings and sending women to China for fees ranging from $12,000 to $25,000 per woman.
Christian women -- who come from a mostly poor and marginalised community -- are seen to be particularly targeted by traffickers, who pay their parents hundreds or thousands of dollars.There are about 2.5 million Christians in Pakistan -- less than 2% of the population

China has denied that Pakistani women are being trafficked into prostitution.
But it admitted this week that there had been a surge in Pakistani brides applying for visas this year -- with 140 applications in the year to date, a similar amount to all of 2018. 

A official from the Chinese embassy in Islamabad told local media it had blocked at least 90 applications.

'Imbalanced society'
A rise in cases of suspected bride trafficking from Pakistan to China has come amid an unprecedented influx of tens of thousands of Chinese nationals into the country. 

China is investing billions of dollars in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a network of ports, roads, railways and energy projects.
The two countries are close allies and a visa-on-arrival policy for Chinese nationals has also encouraged entrepreneurs and professionals not directly linked to CPEC to flood into Pakistan.
Some are making the journey to find a bride. 

The legacy of China's decades-long one-child policy and accompanying social preference for boys has been to create an imbalanced society where millions of men are unable to find wives.
For years this has fuelled bride trafficking from several poor Asian countries, including Vietnam, Myanmar and Cambodia -- where activists say many women are promised jobs in China but then sold into marriage. 

Easy access to Pakistan has created a new trafficking hotspot.More than two dozen Chinese nationals accused of luring girls into fake marriages have recently been arrested

The FIA's investigations and BBC interviews with activists and victims suggest that some Pakistani clergy are playing a role in identifying local brides and certifying the religious credentials of the Chinese suitors.
After the weddings, the couples take up residence in a number of bungalows rented by suspected traffickers in Lahore and other cities. 

From there, they are sent to China.

A house in Lahore
Sophia began to feel uncomfortable about her marriage before it had even happened. 

She was made to undergo medical tests ahead of the formal proposal and the broker then pushed for the wedding to happen immediately.
"My family felt uncomfortable with this haste, but he said the Chinese would pay for all of our wedding expenses," she says. 

The family gave in.Sophia only managed to escape after her parents came to Lahore to rescue her

A week later she found herself at a house in Lahore with several other newly-wed couples who were waiting for their travel documents to be processed. 

The Pakistani women spent most of their time learning Chinese.
It was at this point she learned that her husband was not a Christian, nor was he interested in committing himself to her. 

They could barely communicate due to the language barrier but he repeatedly demanded sex.
She decided to leave after speaking to a friend who had moved to China for marriage. 

She told Sophia she was being forced to have sex with her husband's friends.
But when Sophia confided in the marriage broker, he was furious. 

He said her parents would have to pay back the cost of the wedding, including fees paid to a local pastor for arranging the match and conducting the ceremony.
Her parents refused to pay and travelled to Lahore to rescue her. 

Her handler eventually relented.Chinese companies are investing billions in Pakistan - and thousands of workers have arrived in recent years

Although recent police raids have focused attention on the trafficking of poor Christian girls, the BBC has found that Muslim communities are also affected.
A Muslim woman from a poor Lahore neighbourhood who went to China with her husband in March says she had to put up with repeated physical abuse because she refused to sleep with his "drunk visitors".
"My family is quite religious, so they had agreed to the proposal because it was brought by the cleric of a seminary which is located in our neighbourhood," the woman, who wanted to be known as Meena, said.
"But once in China, I discovered that my husband was not a Muslim. In fact he did not adhere to any religion. He made fun of me when I prayed."
When she refused to have sex with men on his orders, she was beaten up and threatened.
"He said he had bought me with money and I had no choice but to do what he asked me to do; and that if I didn't do it, then he would kill me and sell my organs to recover his money."

Meena was rescued in early May by Chinese authorities on the request of Pakistan embassy officials who had been alerted by her family.
A senior FIA official in Faisalabad, Jameel Ahmed Mayo, told the BBC that women deemed not "good enough" for the sex trade were at risk of organ harvesting.

China's human trafficking

China's bachelors saving cash with Vietnamese brides
AFPIncreasing numbers of woman - and teenage girls - are kidnapped, tricked or forced into marriage in China from neighbouring countries. 

Many unions quickly lurch into crisis with women disappointed at swapping village poverty in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar for life in rural China. 

HONG KONG -- Divorced, in his 40s and fearing a solitary future, Zhou Xinsen went online like thousands of other Chinese men to find an affordable and fast solution to bachelordom -- a Vietnamese bride.
He was among millions of his gender struggling on the sidelines of China's ultra competitive marriage market, where a decades-long one-child policy and sex-selective abortions of daughters has resulted in a massive gender gap.
"It's very hard for people my age to find a Chinese wife," 41-year-old Zhou says.
Single men, many in remote rural villages, are known as "bare branches", a pejorative term in a country where pressure to marry and extend the family tree is sharp.
Running out of time, Zhou forked out nearly US$20,000 to find his second wife -- a 26-year-old from Vietnam who he relocated to Jiangsu province.
"For people my age, time is bought with money."
Having fixed his romantic quandary, Zhou then opened his own match-making business, taking a small slice from China's multi-million-dollar annual trade in overseas brides.
He charges around 120,000 yuan (US$17,400) to connect Chinese men with Vietnamese brides via his website, which shows photos of women aged 20-35 "waiting to be married".
It's "profitable", he says, remaining coy on the amount of money he has made.
A portion of the money from matches is meant to be funneled back to families in poor Mekong area countries.
While some unions flourish, others quickly lurch into crisis with women disappointed at swapping village poverty in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar for life in rural China.
China's single men are often older, divorced, disabled or too poor to pay the traditional "bride price" -- a dowry in gifts or cash -- for a Chinese wife.
Those costs rose to between US$22,000 to US$29,000 in parts of the country last year, according to state media.
Problems start when the brides feel duped about what they are getting into, says Zhou, who sends a monthly remittance to his wife's family of US$175 as a show of goodwill.
"This is nothing to us, but for them it's lifesaving," he adds.

FAMILY BUSINESS
Chinese men face a barrage of economic, psychological and cultural pressures to find a wife, says Jiang Quanbao, a Professor at Xi'an Jiaotong University's Institute for Population and Development Studies.
"Marriage is not only a personal matter, it concerns an entire family ... especially the parents," Jiang told AFP.
As women -- especially in the cities -- push back marriage while they work, study and enjoy single life, China's villages are fast losing their female population.
Sons left unmarried become an issue of family "face" in tight village communities, says Jiang.
That crushing social expectation has driven a grim trade in brides.
Increasing numbers of woman -- and teenage girls -- from neighbouring countries are kidnapped, tricked or forced into marriage, according to several rescue groups across the Mekong who spoke to AFP.
"Buying a woman who has been kidnapped becomes a kind of hopeless choice," Jiang adds.
Last year Chinese police rescued women sold into forced marriages in Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces, as the buy-a-bride trade billows out to the eastern provinces.

CRIMES AND DECEPTION
Under Chinese law, the abduction and trafficking of women or children is punishable by five to ten years jail.
But critics say the law needs updating as the trade surges.
Millions of men struggle on the sidelines of China's ultra competitive marriage market, where a decades-long one-child policy and sex-selective abortions of daughters has resulted in a massive gender gap. 

"It's extremely profitable and there's no incentive at all for traffickers to stop," Mimi Vu of the Vietnam-based Pacific Links Foundation, which works to prevent human trafficking.
"The demand is there and the money, the profit is there to be made."
Beijing switched from a one-child to a two-child policy in 2016, but experts say it may take decades to see a rise in the number of women of marriage age.
That means the bride trade is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon.
Zhou describes his work as "a public service" in a country where there are 33 million fewer women than men.
But the outcomes for Chinese men are often far from perfect, with money warping motives throughout the system.
Cautionary tales -- of dodgy brokers, trafficked women and brides pocketing money then fleeing -- abound on Chinese social media as the market widens.
"It is an industry, and many of them (marriages) are fraudulent," one Weibo user wrote recently. 

"It's time the government takes care of this business."
Another man in Hubei told state media he paid a broker US$8,700 to meet a young Vietnamese woman who left him after three months, later aborting their baby as she went on the lookout for another husband.
"Now I have neither a wife nor the money," he told the Chutian Metropolis Daily. 

"I'm a laughing stock in the village."

China's Human Trafficking

'Sold by my brother': the Mekong women forced into marriage in China

AFP

Poverty and the promise that their families will get money forces many Cambodian women to consider a paid-for marriage. 

PHNOM PENH -- Everyone did well from Nary's marriage to a Chinese man, except the young Cambodian bride herself, who returned home from the six-year ordeal destitute, humiliated and with little prospect of seeing her son again.
Her brother ran away with US$3,000 after cajoling the then 17-year-old to leave Cambodia to marry. Brokers split the remaining US$7,000 paid by her Chinese husband, who got himself a longed-for heir.
But her wedding to a stranger thousands of miles from home, in a language she could not understand, was ill-fated from the start.
"It was not a special day for me," Nary told AFP.
She is one of tens of thousands of young Cambodian, Vietnamese, Laos and Myanmar women -- and girls -- who marry Chinese men each year, plugging a gender gap incubated by Beijing's three-decade-long one-child policy.
While the policy has ended, a shortfall of around 33 million women has left the same number of men facing life on the shelf.
Poverty drives many women from the Mekong region to gamble on marriage in China, double-locked by low education levels and a social expectation to provide for parents.
Others move for work but end up forced into marriage. 

The worst cases involve kidnapping and trafficking across porous borders.
New domestic realities frequently unravel, leaving women at risk of abuse, detention under Chinese immigration law or 'resale' into prostitution.
Nary -- whose name has been changed on her request -- spoke to a Cambodian marriage broker on her older brother's advice.
"I trusted him," Nary said in a whisper, as rain drove through holes in the tin roof of her family's roadside shack outside Phnom Penh.
"My family is poor and I was expected to help them by marrying a Chinese man. So I went."
But her brother stole the dowry that was meant to help the whole family and has since vanished.

LIES AND POVERTY
Buying a wife in China costs between US$10,000 and US$15,000, a sum paid to brokers who give a couple of thousand to overseas associates for recruiting the brides.
A 'dowry' of between US$1,000 and US$3,000 is dangled in front of the bride's family, while the young woman herself is last in the money chain, if she receives anything at all.
"Families are now looking to their daughters to see the 'interest' they can return to them," says Chou Bun Eng, vice-chair of Cambodia's National Committee for Counter Trafficking, referring to the money motive that prevails in some homes.
The marriage trade is big business -- official figures say 10,000 Cambodian women alone are registered in the southern provinces of Guangdong, Guizhou and Yunnan.
Brides are often 'warehoused' on arrival and their photos touted on WeChat and dating websites to would-be husbands.
The younger and prettier they are, the more expensive.
Nary travelled legally on a tourist visa to China but on arrival in Shanghai, she discovered the man who paid for her hand was a construction worker living in a village, not the "wealthy doctor" she had been promised.
Tens of thousands of women from Mekong countries travel each year to marry Chinese husbands, plugging a gender gap incubated by Beijing's three decade-long one-child policy. 

HUSH MONEY
A woman who is paid, bought or sold for marriage and taken across borders is classified as a trafficking victim by the United Nations.
In Cambodia, brokers and other third parties can be jailed for up to 15 years if caught, longer if the victim is a minor.
But convictions are rare, with brokers paying up to US$5,000 to buy victims' silence.
"The victims need the money," a leading trafficking prosecutor told AFP, requesting anonymity for safety reasons.
"And they are scared by these big, systematic trafficking networks."
China also has laws against the practice, but enforcement is patchy in a country where family matters are given a wide berth by the authorities.
To clean up the system, Cambodia urges prospective foreign husbands to marry under local law, providing proof of consent, age and a paper trail.
"Marriage to Chinese men is not bad by its nature," Chou Bun Eng said. 

"But problems start when it is done illegally through 'intermediaries'."

LONG WAY HOME
Nary's marriage imploded one month after she gave birth to a baby boy, when her mother-in-law abruptly stopped her breastfeeding the infant.
"She wouldn't let me see him or even hold him," she said.
The family pushed for divorce, but with an expired visa Nary knew that leaving the home would make her presence illegal in China.
Eventually she moved out and found a low-paid job for a few years in a nearby glass factory.
But her immigration status caught up with her and she was held in a detention centre for a year with scores of Vietnamese and Cambodian women, all with similar tales.

Nary was left with nothing when her marriage imploded. 

After her release, her mother reached out to a Cambodian charity who engineered her return in August this year.
Now she works for minimum wage in a garment factory, free from a bad marriage, but separated from her child.
"I know I will never see him again," she says.