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China’s “missing women phenomenon” fueling bride trafficking of North Korean refugees

I’ve been reading a few of the articles to come out of North Korea Freedom Week which was April 26-May 2 in Washington, D.C. and among them was particular story focusing on the bride trafficking industry in China.

Not surprisingly, China’s history of favoring baby boys over girls, coupled with its one child policy, has resulted in a severe shortage of women for a generation of bachelors. This shortage is referred to as “the missing women phenomenon” by the World Economic Forum which publishes its Global Gender Gap Index each year. Capitalizing on this major social problem, human traffickers have found a way to make money by selling North Korean brides to single Chinese men along the China-North Korea border.

The problem is so big that the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report 2008 mentioned the problem in a “Topics of Interest” section, referring to North Korean refugees (interesting word choice compared to the common “defector” label we usually hear) as “highly vulnerable.”

From the article covering the bride trafficking problem:

The shortage of women in China is nothing less than a national disaster ““ in some rural areas Chinese men outnumber women by a 14 to 1 ratio, according to the U.S. Committee on Human Rights in North Korea. It is into these rural border areas that North Korean women, desperate to escape the starvation in their homeland, are arriving. For human traffickers, the situation could not be more ideal.

Upon learning about the situation, someone recently asked me where all the Chinese girls have gone throughout the years. I referred him to a 1995 piece written by Tom Hilditch titled, “A Holocaust of Little Girls,” also mentioned in the above article.

The birth of a girl has never been a cause for celebration in China, and stories of peasant farmers drowning new born girls in buckets of water have been commonplace for centuries. Now, however, as a direct result of the one-child policy, the number of baby girls being abandoned, aborted, or dumped on orphanage steps is unprecedented.

(Remember, this was written in 1995.) Hilditch’s piece is worth reading in its entirety as the discoveries revealed in his article are beyond shocking in regard to China’s treatment of baby girls in the 1990s. It’s good background information for the social problems we’re seeing today in China as a generation comes of age.

Regarding the North Korea refugee connection, this particular story is incredibly difficult to read:

Upon entry into China, Mi-Sun Bang fell prey to human traffickers operating on the border. She was sold for $585 to an older, disabled Chinese man, the first of several “husbands” that she would be sold to. The string of abuses and heartache that followed would be enough to crush anyone’s spirit. Her final husband, fourteen years her junior, demanded that she bear him a son. Soon afterwards, Mi-Sun Bang was turned into the authorities and arrested. She was sent back to North Korea, to the horrors of a labor camp.

Bang Mi-Sun, you will recall, has been mentioned on this blog before.

While the North Korean government can hardly be counted upon to help ease the situation, the Chinese can – to a limited extent. According to the State Department, China has made some active efforts at assisting victims of human trafficking by setting up shelters with the help of UNICEF, however, the country lacks any sort of coherent victim identification system which is a consistent hurdle in dealing with the problem.

Despite showing efforts to improve human trafficking within its borders, China was placed on the State Department’s “Tier 2 Watch List” for the fourth consecutive year in 2008 for not fully complying “with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking” and for failure “to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat human trafficking from the previous year, particularly in terms of punishment of trafficking crimes and the protection of Chinese and foreign victims of trafficking.”

(For what it’s worth, North Korea was branded a “Tier 3” nation on the very same State Department report – and with a much worse report card than China. Its country narrative may be found here, but you’ll have to scroll down a bit to read it. Countries are listed alphabetically.)

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6 Responses

  1. Back in the early 90s, South Korea and China had similarly skewed birth ratios of around 117 boys to 100 girls. While China’s number of boys remains stuck in the double digits, South Korea’s has dropped to about 108:100, very close to the high end of the normal range of 103-106. Besides active choices like sperm sorting, abortion, and infanticide, passive natural and artificial environmental influences like famine and pollution can favor the birth of one sex over the other.

    Unfortunately some Western images of South Korea are stuck in the 90s, and they still think sex selection is a big problem in South Korea. It isn’t. South Korea resolved its birth ratio problem not with government interference but through enduring changes in cultural attitudes, changes more easily achieved in a democratic society than in an authoritarian one because in a democratic society, stakeholders have a public voice.

    Sorry for going off on a tangent. You didn’t mention South Korea’s birth ratio, but some readers of this post might make the connection, and I wanted to clarify this misconception.

  2. I wouldn’t want to make too big a deal of this point, but, in relation to Sonagi’s comment: I think the public relations campaign about “Do you want your son’s to marry a bunch of foreigners!!” had a hand in reversing the male baby trend too.

    I remember hearing about a poster campaign on the subways that showed a Southeast Asian bride with a Korean groom with that type of slogan on it. I can also remember other public relations campaign items along this line and editorials in the newspapers and so on.

    I can vaguely remember these stories in the papers about the number of foreign brides, especially from poor Asian nations, coming out within the last few years. (With one theme also being, besides the preference for male babies causing this, that rural farmers were having trouble finding Korean brides as well).

  3. I recall the government’s campaign, but I don’t know that it had much effect. A family isn’t going to raise a girl so that another family will have a Korean daughter-in-law instead of a foreign one.

  6. Oh I see, I was misled by this statement:
    “According to the State Department, China has made some active efforts at assisting victims of human trafficking by setting up shelters with the help of UNICEF, however, the country lacks any sort of coherent victim identification system which is a consistent hurdle in dealing with the problem.”

    Here is an excerpt from the Country Narrative on China in the 2008 TIP Report:
    http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/105387.htm
    “China made incremental progress in victim protection during the reporting period. The government, with the assistance of UNICEF, built a new shelter to provide trafficking victims in Yunnan Province with short-term care, but there remain overall an inadequate number of shelters for victims of trafficking.”

    I was confused because I’ve never heard of any UNICEF activity in Yanbian (Jilin province), where there is the highest concentration of North Korean victims of trafficking, stateless children, and orphans.

    It doesn’t make sense that China would actively hunt down North Koreans and yet allow temporary relief shelters for sex trafficking victims. China never has and never will allow UNICEF (or any other UN body for that matter) to operate in Yanbian – this is an overlooked tragedy especially because stateless children (Han Chinese father, North Korean mother) are actually Chinese citizens.