Brides from Vietnam up for Sale in China

“Don’t cry on Singles’ Day. Go to Vietnam and find yourself a bride!”

This was the unusual slogan used by group buying website 55tuan.com as part of a special promotion, which offered a free trip to Vietnam for one lucky person, provided he married a Vietnamese woman.

The online activity was launched on November 6, five days before Singles’ Day, which falls on November 11 every year (symbolized by its date, 11.11). On this day, young Chinese mockingly celebrate their single status.

The offer to “group buy” a Vietnamese bride struck a chord with single men in China, as the cost of marrying a Chinese woman continues to grow and bachelors lament their dwindling chances to find a mate. Nearly 30,000 people had participated in the lottery.

Central government departments also took note, but for other reasons entirely. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Public Security both issued warnings about the risks of finding Vietnamese wives through matchmakers, which is the most common method for Chinese men to find a Vietnamese bride.

The risks go both ways. Buyers may end up swindled out of money or with an unwilling wife, and the women involved in these schemes risk being swallowed by people-smuggling and prostitution rackets.

These illegal matchmaking services have long existed in China and a lack of action from authorities against agents has resulted in the expansion of the industry, which now ranges from relatively above board, all the way to the bowels of organized crime.

High Cost of Marriage

A representative surnamed Xu from 55yuan.com told the Global Times that the website was not cooperating with matchmaking brokers, and simply offered the winner reimbursement of trip costs as long as he provided an authentic marriage certificate with a Vietnamese woman.

The move was obviously a clever publicity stunt, but it did demonstrate that there is a strong market in China for marriages with Vietnamese women, and that despite warnings from international anti-trafficking agencies that high demand from China creates a market for people-smuggling, there isn’t a stigma attached.

The lottery described Vietnamese women as “virtuous” and “traditional” and said they were not as materialistic as their Chinese counterparts. That is also what Ren Xuan (pseudonym), a 30-year-old man preparing to travel to Vietnam, thinks. After several frustrating blind dates and increasing pressure from his family to get married, Ren made the decision to find a Vietnamese wife. “Young women in China just gave me the cold shoulder as they were disappointed with my economic situation. I don’t think I stand a chance of finding a wife here,” said Ren, who works at a private company in Xiangyang, Central China’s Hubei Province.

He said that after reading media reports that described marriage to Vietnamese women as “bliss,” he began saving.

A report released in September by a domestic dating website, which polled 90 million of its members about their views on marriage, showed that 68 percent of single women care about the wealth of their prospective spouses.

Legal Gray Zone

The practice of finding Vietnamese women isn’t new, but previously the market was largely confined to migrant workers or farmers from poor villages. But as with most markets in China, things have changed.

“We have all kinds of customers, from farmers, white-collar workers, and even people who have returned from overseas,” said a staff member surnamed Qiu from a Guangzhou-based matchmaking agency, which specializes in blind dates between Chinese men and Vietnamese women.

These matchmaking brokers charge each customer 30,000 to 60,000 yuan ($4,900 to $9,850), which covers costs such as a dowry, a wedding feast and visas. In addition, traveling expenses and other fees can reach up to 15,000 yuan, and 2,000 to 5,000 yuan is expected to be given to the bride’s parents. Chinese men usually travel in a group with an agent and pick out a Vietnamese girl they like.

But this seemingly cozy arrangement is not without risks. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement on November 9, stating that Chinese citizens are often cheated in these schemes.

Chen Shiqu, director of the Ministry of Public Security’s anti-human trafficking office, claimed on November 11 that Chinese marriage agencies are not allowed to source spouses from other countries and it is illegal for individuals to engage in international matchmaking for profit. As it is also illegal in Vietnam, people involved in the trade have nowhere to turn in the event of a dispute.

However, brokers remain unfazed. “We know the service is not allowed on the Chinese mainland, but it’s not clearly forbidden. If it was, there is no way that our service would have reliably sustained itself for nine years,” Qiu said, implying that the authorities tacitly consent to the service.

Qiu has a point. Online searches for media reports of these kinds of matchmaking agents being arrested yield a curious lack of results. “The punishment for such matchmaking brokers is just confiscating their business income and the Criminal Law doesn’t clearly define the conduct,” Hu Zhouxiong, a lawyer specializing in marriage cases involving foreigners with the Guangdong Bohao Law firm, told the Global Times, noting that the light punishment had resulted in the proliferation of these matchmakers.

He noted that the huge demand for the service is also a reason why the agents are not strictly punished. But that isn’t to say the industry isn’t causing arrests.

Dark Trade

The Ho Chi Minh-based newspaper Thanh Nien reported in September that two Chinese and seven Vietnamese nationals were arrested by Vietnamese police for trafficking women to China and selling them into marriage.

Media reports in recent years have also revealed that a number of Vietnamese brides had fled their Chinese husbands and were later caught and resold to other husbands, indicating they had been kidnapped.

“The agents were engaging in human trafficking when the Vietnamese women ‘changed hands,’ but Chinese men have no way of knowing whether the girls were smuggled into the country or not,” said Hu.

China is the largest market for people smugglers sourcing brides from Vietnam. According to a 2011 report on the trafficking of women and children from Vietnam, compiled by the British Embassy in Hanoi, “between 2005 and 2009 approximately 6,000 women and children were identified as being trafficked from Vietnam … Some 3,190 were trafficked to China for the purposes of forced marriage, or to be sexually exploited in brothels.”

But this number is not the total. The same report acknowledged the difficulty of calculating exact numbers, and pointed out that “victims have been forced to phone their families to reassure them they are well and have legal work, so that relatives do not report family members missing and alert the authorities.”

Ren, however, is eschewing the help of agents and is attempting it on his own. While this avoids supporting the people-smuggling trade, it poses its own challenges as he doesn’t know the language. “I have no other way, but I guess I can just give it a try,” Ren said.

Chinese Police Rescue 92 Kidnapped Children in Human Trafficking Ring

Sleeping tablets were used to render captives unconscious.

Adrian Wan

Police have rescued 92 abducted children and held 301 suspects in connection with the bust of one of the biggest cross-country child-trafficking networks on the mainland in years.

The suspects are said to have sedated the children, many of whom were under the age of two, including some newborns, with sleeping pills to render them docile while they were transported to sellers.

Police in Henan province began to investigate the ring in March and started to detain people on September 11, state media reported on Friday, citing the Ministry of Public Security. Suspects have been held in 11 provinces.

Members are believed to have collected children in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces by either purchasing them or deceiving the parents. Deliverymen would take them to sellers elsewhere on the mainland in a highly organised operation, the ministry said.

“The ring members took buses or the train to go to places like Henan, where some of the children were sold, while others would be taken to Shandong or Hebei ,” said the leading police officer in the bust, Chen Shiqu. “The children are very little, and were fed a lot of sleeping pills. It must have wrecked them mentally and physically,” Chen said.

One woman suspected of delivering the captives said feeding the babies sleeping pills “spared a lot of potential trouble” because they would be sound asleep for a day or two. She said she got 4,500 yuan (HK$5,680) for smuggling each child. A notebook owned by one of the suspected ringleaders showed the details of each transaction. Most babies were sold for about 20,000 yuan each.

The ministry said it was drafting a law in co-operation with the judiciary and the prosecutor general to impose harsher punishments on traffickers and buyers, and that parents who sold their children would also be sentenced severely.

But Beijing-based lawyer Zhang Zhitong, of Jingrun and Partners, was doubtful whether the heavier punishments would stop the practice, as long as the demand for other people’s children existed.

“Those who sell and buy children are usually in inland, poorer areas, and people know little about the law. They see the economic incentive – from thousands to tens of thousands of yuan – and think it’s a good deal,” he said.

The total number of children that the gang has kidnapped is unknown

Zhang said the market was fuelled in part by the adoption law. Rather than navigating the bureaucracy that was involved, adults would sometimes turn to traffickers instead, he said.

A month ago, it was revealed that a maternity doctor in Fuping county in Shaanxi province sold over 20 newborns after lying to parents that the babies had died or had serious birth defects.

In 2011, 178 abducted children were rescued in an operation that saw more than 600 people detained across 10 provinces.

Film Illustrates Tragedy of China’s Child Abductions

Liu Liqin revisits the alley in Taiyuan where his son, Jingjun, was playing when he disappeared three years ago.

– Lilian Lin. Follow her on Twitter @LilianLinyigu

In a country where many families are allowed only one child, the notion that one’s son or daughter could be abducted and sold feels almost impossibly horrible. And yet, as a new documentary makes clear, it happens in China with stunning frequency.

“Most of foreigners don’t know this is happening at all,” says Charlie Custer, a blogger who co-produced and directed the film, “Living With Dead Hearts,” with his wife Leia Li. “Chinese don’t know it is happening or they know it is happening but don’t know it is happening in this scale.”

Simultaneously compelling and hard to watch, Mr. Custer’s film, released online last week, is the result of roughly two years of shooting, funded in part by $7,500 in donations solicited through social media. The blogger-turned-filmmaker was motivated to make the film, he says, because child abduction is a long-running problem in China – and because it’s an issue that transcends political divisions inside the country.

“I thought about doing a piece on censorship in China, or political dissent, but the government and those who defend it have a rationale behind it,” said Charlie. “Kidnapping of children is one of the China social issues that everybody, at least from moral perspective, agrees should not happen.”

The market for stolen children is growing, according to state media reports, which put the price for an abducted child at between 30,000 and 80,000 yuan ($4,900 to $13,000). Some are sold into families, some into prostitution or marriage and some into begging gangs.

Authorities disagree over just how many children are abducted in China. In June, state broadcaster China National Radio estimated 200,000 children are abducted in the country every year (in Chinese) – a number that was rejected a few days later by a senior police official. The film puts the number at around 70,000.

“The statistics are terrifying, but they’re just statistics, especially for people outside China,” Mr. Custer said.” We want to do a film that puts people in front of you and puts a more human face on the statistics.”

The first-time director got started by making cold calls to families that had reported losing children. He ended up with three families, whose stories form the backbone of the film. One is the family of Liu Liqin, a worker in the industrial central China city of Taiyuan whose son was abducted while playing in an alleyway with two other children in April 2010. “For a month after we lost him, she and I couldn’t even tell day from night,” he says, referring to his wife, who was sterilized on orders of planning officials in their home village after the birth of their son because he was their second child.

Mr. Custer notes that a number of documentaries have been made about the subject, but says many take a simplistic approach. “They blame one-child policy for the whole problem,” he says. “Certainly it is one of the reasons, but if you abolish one-child policy tomorrow, kidnapping will not disappear.”

When he was in the northeastern city of Harbin during his first year in China, Mr. Custer says, he noticed children begging on the streets and mentioned it a to friend who was a former local policeman. The friend told him it was likely some of the kids had been kidnapped and sold. That’s when he started to follow the issue, taking notes on kidnapped kids wherever he travelled to China.

“It is happening everywhere,” he says.

One of the great barriers to solving the problem is the complicity of local officials. In some cases, Mr. Custer says, police are in the trafficker’s pocket. In other cases, family planning officials themselves are engaged in trafficking.

“Some officials take the kids (from more-than-one-kid family) and sell them to orphanage for 500 bucks a pop, and there are a thousand kids,” he said. “That is a lot of money.”

Parents of stolen children are often poor and uneducated, and often don’t know what their rights are, he said.

Another barrier to dealing with the issue is cooperation and persistence necessary to find a lost child, and the low chances of success, which together discourage police from dedicating themselves to the task.

“Our main goal was to make [the film] emotionally affecting enough to create some more consciousness,” Mr. Custer says. “Hopefully, the more people get to think about it and engage with it, the better the chance that more solutions may come up.”

He says one of the best solutions currently being tried is a national DNA database set up by the Ministry of Public Security that theoretically allows for testing of children to determine whether they have been abducted (in Chinese). The problem is few parents know about or are willing to register their children in the database, and in some cases police have illegally charged parents money for tests. It’s also not clear, he adds, whether the government is willing to do wide-scale DNA testing of children in orphanages and on the streets.

The film now can be watched online for free, though there are options to buy it on DVD or in a downloadable version with deleted scenes and director’s commentary. Mr. Custer says a Chinese version is roughly a week away from being uploaded to Chinese video sites.