In China, the human trafficking industry is booming thanks to China’s brutal one-child policy, which has taken the lives of 400 million unborn children since it took effect 34 years ago. In a recent article in World Magazine, author Gaye Clark explains that the U.S. government upped China from a Tier three status to a Tier two watch list on its 2014 Trafficking In Persons (TIP) report because they tweaked their policy to allow families to have two children instead of one.
The TIP report said the following about the change: “The PRC government maintained efforts to prevent trafficking in persons. In November 2013, the government modified its birth limitation policy to allow families with one single-child parent to have a second child, a change that may affect future demand for prostitution and for foreign women as brides for Chinese men – both of which may be procured by force or coercion.”
However, despite the modified policy, men are paying outrageous prices to marriage brokers to trick women into coming to China so they can take them as wives. Additionally, Clark explains that some experts don’t see this changing any time soon. In fact, epidemiologist Terrance Hull believes that by 2020, males with outnumber females in China by at least 30 million.
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As LifeNews previously reported, in 2013, Adam Minter, a writer for Bloomberg View, said that the Chinese government reported that 117.6 boys were born for every 100 girls. The normal ratio is 103 to 106 boys per 100 girls. Minter also mentioned that men who live in the country are more inclined to take “foreign-born brides” since many young women move to the city.
Minter explains, “In China, daughters are expected to marry up — and in a country where men far outnumber women, the opportunities to do so are excellent, especially in the cities to which so many of China’s rural women move. The result is that bride prices — essentially dowries paid to the families of daughters — are rising, especially in the countryside. One 2011 study on bride prices found that they’d increased 70-fold between the 1960s and 1990s in just one representative, rural hamlet.”
With the supply of available brides dwindling, coupled with an ever-increasing bride price for those remaining, a rise in unsavory alternatives seemed predictable. According to the Beijing News, the low incomes of men in rural China lead many bachelors to illegal marriage brokers. Desperate farmers pay as much as $18,500 for an imported wife, complete with a money-back guarantee in case she flees.
The Diplomat reported nearly 90 percent of North Korean defectors are coerced into the sex industry or forced marriages. Most end up in China. According to the 2014 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report, when the Chinese authorities catch these victims, they send them back to North Korea where they face “concentration camps for forced labor or the death penalty.”
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security reported the majority of the more than 5,000 women who have been trafficked across its borders in recent years also ended up in China. Last year, more than 100 Vietnamese brides in a rural Chinese community disappeared in what appears to have been a scam to extract bride prices from desperate bachelors.
Another consequence of China’s gender gap is an increase in sex trafficking and brothels. One study revealed 14.7 percent of unmarried Chinese men admitted having paid for sex in 2000—about double the rate for married men. These men feed a growing market for female trafficking. An estimated 4 to 6 million sex workers live in China. Women from the Philippines, Mongolia, and North Korea, come to China in search of jobs but find themselves coerced into prostitution instead.
