Human trafficking: China’s bought brides from Vietnam

Years after the end of the one-child policy, many Chinese men are unable to find wives. Human traffickers smuggle girls into the country from Vietnam and sell them there as brides. Few women find their way back.

Lan still remembers the Sunday when her mother just didn’t come back from the market – and disappeared. Lan hears from an uncle that her mother is in China. He promises to help the then 14-year-old.

Lan’s story is one of many in the mountains of North Vietnam, just a few kilometers from her village to the Chinese border. “It was already night when my uncle took me across the border,” says Lan. “There was a woman waiting there. She promised to take me to my mother. But when we got to the other side of the red river, my mother wasn’t there.”

Instead of meeting her mother, she is sold as a bride to a Chinese family. Illegal and without a marriage certificate, the teenager is now said to be serving as a reluctant wife. After months, she manages to escape in an unobserved moment. Passers-by finally take the crying girl, who doesn’t speak a word of Chinese, to the police.

Lan doesn’t like to talk about the details of her time in China: “I was very distressed and just sad,” she says. “I had lost all my hope and the will to live.”

According to the Vietnamese government, 6,000 such cases of trafficking in women were registered between 2011 and 2017 alone, and the number of unreported cases is likely to be many times higher. Very few come back.

“Indescribable Fear”

Anh was also sold. A friend of her brother’s had promised her a trip. Then suddenly she was in China and was offered as a bride to Chinese men and families. He paid the equivalent of around 5,000 euros for Anh, the forced father-in-law later told her.

“I felt like an object, like a product on the market. I wasn’t human anymore”,describes her situation at the time. “Men would come by and examine me like a commodity they select. I was so frightened beyond words.”

Even relatives become human traffickers

Most of the girls who are trafficked to China as brides come from very poor families who have only half of the Vietnamese average income to live on. Sometimes they are even sold by their own relatives.

At markets or in social networks, people of the same age approach the young women and lure them to China under a pretext – or drug them and then kidnap them.

Two causes

Extreme poverty on the Vietnamese side and a great lack of women on the Chinese side: This is what social worker Loan Hong Luong from the aid organization Pacific Links sees as the causes of trafficking in women. China had a strict one-child policy from 1979 to 2015. Sons as heirs were preferred, girls were often aborted.

“Chinese men are now unable to find wives and are therefore looking for Vietnamese women to start a family,” says Luong. “Even if they can’t marry, they still want to buy a wife and have a child.”

Government enlightens schools

At Bao Yen High School No. 1, the boys and girls from the high school gather for a government awareness campaign. Almost everyone in their family or circle of acquaintances knows girls who have since disappeared.

Vu Thi Thuy from the Ministry of Social Affairs warns against human trafficking. Teaches teenagers not to be tempted by promises of well-paying jobs or the prospect of a handsome rich man. “It’s cruel what girls and women sometimes have to go through. They don’t just have to serve their husbands sexually.”, she explains to the teenagers, “But sometimes other family members as well. If they refuse, they risk being beaten or given nothing to eat.”

A fence and a memorandum

The Vietnam-Chinese border is almost 1,300 kilometers long and runs through difficult-to-guard mountainous landscapes. However, progress has been made in recent years, reports Trong Ha from the Vietnamese border police.

The Chinese have built a fence, human traffickers now have a harder time: “We signed a memorandum with China and formed bilateral investigative teams. There is a hotline for quick communication to check the identity of victims and human traffickers. In recent years helped China a lot to save many victims.”

Experts estimate that on the other side of the border, in China, there are at least 30 million men of marriageable age who cannot find a wife. The gender imbalance could only normalize again in 20 years.

Lan is mocked in the village

Lan’s family avoids the subject of her being taken to China. They have enough to do trying to make ends meet with what the rice paddies are yielding. Many people in the village have gossiped about Lan: women like her are insulted as “China girls”.

The aid organization has now arranged for her to train as a cook. Her mother is believed to still be somewhere in China. She hasn’t heard from her again: “Sometimes I miss her so much. Whenever I think of home, I think of my mother,” Lan laments. “Whenever I’m tired and exhausted, I just want to go to her.”

Sometimes their lives feel numb: China’s strict Covid policy has made it even more difficult for kidnapped women from Vietnam to return. But Lan hasn’t given up hope of seeing her mother again one day.

You can see this and other reports on Sunday in Weltspiegel – at 6.30 p.m. in the first.