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

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."

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.

Sick men of Asia

Sex Dolls Are Replacing China’s Missing Women
The country's gender gap has left young men desperate for plastic alternatives.
BY MEI FONG

China’s sharing economy took a new turn recently, as a new app, its symbol a single yellow banana, briefly brought rentable sex doll to Chinese phones. 

Called Ta Qu, to resemble the English word “Touch,” the app enables users to rent the life-sized dolls, which come in various models, for $45 a day — with a $1,200 deposit. 

The operators assured users that they would be washed between rentals.
But Ta Qu climaxed all too soon, and it was rapidly shut down by the authorities after the story went viral on the Chinese internet. 

But they’re only the tip of a massive and growing market in Chinese society for sex dolls, as the country grapples with a growing shortage of women.
Thanks to a long-held cultural preference for sons, coupled with over three decades of restrictive population planning policies, China is forecast to have over 30 million surplus men by 2030. 

This preference for boys has slowly dwindled, especially in the cities, but the country still faces a critical gap for the next few decades.
To help alleviate this and other demographic woes, Beijing in 2015 announced a switch to a nationwide two-child policy, but the damage to this generation’s sexual relationships has already been done. 

Chinese authorities cannot magic up a Canadian-sized population of women to be the wives, mothers, and caregivers the country desperately needs now.
This has led the nation in search of solutions, ranging from the improbable — proposals to revive wife-sharing — to the unspeakable, such as a rise in sex trafficking.
It has also led to a dramatic rise in the popularity of sex toys for lonely men.

While reliable industrywide numbers are unavailable, sales of sex toys on online platforms such as Alibaba and Taobao surged an average of 50 percent year-on-year in the last five years, according to a report by Global Times. 

The lifestyle news site StartUp Living China reported last year that Singles Day — China’s biggest online shopping event — saw a surge in the sale of sex dolls, with one seller offloading 500 units with an average of one sale per minute. 

Over 65 percent of sex toys sold online were to males between the ages of 18 to 29, according to the report.
I didn’t anticipate this explosion in 2013, when I visited a sex doll factory in Dongguan, southern China. 

I was researching my book on the consequences of the one-child policy and was curious about where a nationwide absence of women might lead. 

But I was operating more on hunch than certainty that demand for sex dolls would escalate. 

Even the company I profiled, Hitdoll, was hinging their business model on a mix of domestic and global sales. 

Proprietor Vincent He wasn’t sure China’s burgeoning market of bachelors would be their best customer base, saying, “Thirty-year-old single men tend not to spend the money on dolls. They can go for real women.”
That said, sex toy usage — though not dolls — was already being normalized in China to a degree that was not the case in the West, in part propelled by a vast, and mostly male, migrant population separated from their families. 

I knew from my reporting that the shopping areas they frequented sold products such as artificial vaginas. 

There seemed to be less social stigma around the idea than in the West, judged both by the prominence with which they were displayed in the ubiquitous corner sex stores and the open discussion of the virtues and flaws of different devices in male-dominated forums online.
Aside from demographics, China has a demonstrated manufacturing capacity to bring prices down and tip sex dolls from niche to mainstream, a combustible mix.
With this in mind, in 2013 I set out to Dongguan, the pulsing heart of China’s manufacturing belt in the south. 

Clad in a leather jacket and jeans, He, an affable man in his early 50s, met me at his workshop. 

His company used to make office furniture for export, but rising labor costs had pushed profits down, so they began casting around for a new product.

Manufacturer Vincent He demonstrates the features of his sex dolls in his Dongguan factory during a 2013 visit. 

The workshop was small, churning out some 10-12 customizable life-sized models shipped out in coffin-like crates every month. 

Scantily clad buxom models lounged in chairs; some, like the Venus de Milo, missing limbs. 

He and his employees showed me around the premises with a matter-of-fact air, cupping rubbery teats and parting silicone thighs with as much sangfroid as if they were still making office chairs. “The nipples — they are very tough,” said He, tugging vigorously. 

“Normal ones,” he said, “could never withstand such treatment.” 

At this point all major companies making high-end dolls were overseas. 

China was better known for cheaper blow-up dolls that could be easily transported. 

Leading companies such as California-based Abyss Creations crafted customizable models capable of limited speech and body warmth costing about $8,000 to $10,000. 

Hitdoll, in time-honored Chinese manufacturing tradition, was looking to replicate this with fewer features and a much lower price point.
For three years, Hitdoll experimented with different prototypes at a test facility in Guangzhou’s university district. 

They used college students as testers, advertising with flyers that said things like, “Fake Dolls, Real Love.”
To my surprise, these testers formed a group that met regularly to eat and sing karaoke. 

They even had a name, the Kawaii Club — using a Japanese term for cuteness, especially as applied to young women, adopted into Chinese. 

Feng Wengguang, a former Guangdong University of Technology student, was a member. 

His description of his experiences sounded like a perverse telling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Early on, the Kawaii Club members complained the prototypes were too stiff, too cold, too unreal. (The manager, He, remembered receiving feedback such as, “Your doll is so cold, like a dead body.”)
Hitdoll’s makers experimented with materials (silicone and TPE, or thermoplastic elastomers, found in bottle-cap liners and dental guards) breast size (C to EE) hair (synthetic, animal, human) and ethnicity (African, Asian, Caucasian).

Feng , then 24, viewed all this as playful experimentation. 

He never saw himself as part of Hitdoll’s audience demographic.

He and the other Kawaii Club members were sure they could “find real woman.”
Weren’t they worried about hygiene issues? 

Vincent He showed me the disposable rubber vaginas they used. 

Each Kawaii member got to keep them after the trials, he said. 

It was a real perk, he assured me: such things typically retailed for about $15. 

All in all, the Kawaii Club soldiered through 100 prototypes before Hitdoll developed a model worthy of exhibiting at the Guangzhou Sex Culture Festival.
Most of that reporting trip didn’t find its way into my book. 

For one thing, I worried that a great deal of this was speculative. 

Nobody knew for sure how China’s gender gap would play out in the long run, and I didn’t want to overstate the importance of what might be a small-bore attempt to address a big problem.

The head of a sex doll made by the HitDoll factory in Dongguan, taken in 2013.

It also sounded unbelievable, especially to Western ears. 

A sex doll maker called “He,” pronounced “Her”? 

And his workshop was in Guangzhou’s university district, known in Chinese as Longdong? (I still remember firmly pressing the “delete” button on my computer after spelling it out.)
In retrospect, my visit to Dongguan was significant given China’s current gender chaos. 

The city, a manufacturing hub of the Chinese south, embodies skewed gender relations: it’s powered by female factory workers, yet ruled by men. 

In its heyday, visiting male executives spent several months there away from their wives, with extended off-work bacchanals at the numerous karaoke bars, clubs, and brothels that earned Dongguan the nickname “Eastern Amsterdam.” 

Like Silicon Valley, Dongguan owes its existence to globalization and expansiveness but is riddled with hidebound, intense sexism. 

There is perhaps no more apt place for birthing the instruments that could take China’s gender wars into its next phase.
Soon after my visit, the government launched a major crackdown on prostitution in Dongguan, turning the notorious red-light city a “deep pink.” 

The crackdown, which began on Valentine’s Day, proved so ruinous it wiped out an estimated $8 billion in takings, about one-tenth of the city’s total revenues, according to Lin Jiang, a finance professor at Sun Yat-sen University.
Dongguan never completely recovered its anything-goes air as China’s mecca of prostitution. 

But as trading of real women flagged, the market for fake women in China began to take off.
The increasing use of sex dolls has of course amplified concerns as to whether this sexually objectifies real women and encourages a Westworld-like rise in violence. 

“Men’s rights activists” online have long argued that widespread use of sex dolls will deprive women of their power over men.

Some supporters of sex dolls even argue it could actually decrease rape culture and reduce demand for sex trafficking.

The U.S. State Department this year named China one of the worst offenders in the global sex trade. 

It’s unclear exactly how many women are trafficked into China from neighboring countries, but numbers are definitely on the rise, spurred by the absence of young women from the marriage market, especially in rural areas. 

Vietnam alone had an estimated 4,500 women trafficked between 2011-2015, with 70 percent taken to China, where a Vietnamese “bride” could fetch about $18,500.
These arguments are of course echoed in other parts of the world where usage of sex robots are increasingly more popular, including even the opening of a sex doll brothel in Spain. 

But what might appear to be a whimsical desire in, say, Japan, looks expeditious in Jiangxi, where the gender ratio is 138 men to 100 women. (The average global ratio is 105 men for 100 women.)

Sex dolls on display at the 2016 Shanghai International Adult Toys and Reproductive Health Exhibition in Shanghai on April 14, 2016.

China’s gender gap is already contributing to a rise in violent crime, with China’s bachelors demonstrating lower self-esteem and higher rates of depression and aggression. 

The gains made by its educated female workforce are already sparking nostalgia for the past, including the rising popularity of lectures promoting subservient women. 

In my book, I described one such workshop, where the lecturer, Ding Xuan, said strong women are more cancer-prone because, “The gods are helping you, as you do not want to be a woman any more.”
Linda Pittwood, who studies the representation of women in Chinese art, said the dolls are “an extreme representation of women as submissive objects of fantasy, available to be borrowed around by a number of men.” 

She added, “These are all really damaging ideas, which I think will leak out from the sex doll-sharing service and reinforce where women are regarded in these ways in wider culture.”
The controversy is bound to intensify as sex dolls become more popular — and lifelike. 

Hitdoll’s competitors, the Dalian-based DS Doll and 2015 newcomer J-Suntech, are already rolling out models that can be programmed for limited speech and movements through smartphone apps. (The models on Ta Qu’s stymied doll-share app can be programmed to make moaning sounds.)
It’s ironic, but arguments that sex dolls are dehumanizing will only strengthen as the models become more realistic.

Ta Qu promised a variety of fantasy women, from “Wonder Women” to “Hong Kong Student.” 

But they all shared the same still, unnatural face, and fell squarely into the uncanny valley between human and machine. 

More realistic dolls, however, could blur the boundaries between real women and sex objects.

“Realistic” women are the aim of many Chinese robot-makers, even if most of them aren’t doing it for straight-up sexual purposes. 

Jia Jia, developed by the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, was able to conduct a stilted interview with Wired writer Kevin Kelly. 

A former Huawei computer engineer created a robot he found so realistic he “married” it in 2016. Fed up of being teased about his bachelor status, Zheng Jiajia held a faux marriage ceremony with robot Yingying, vowing to eventually upgrade the robot’s abilities until it can walk and do housework.
Still, a country desperately trying to raise birth rates and keep its economy churning might have bigger problems. 

As Pittwood pointed out, “That is one thing that the sex dolls can’t offer: babies.”