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

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.

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.