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.

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.”