Nightmare of women tricked by traffickers
Print Edition
Xiang Xiang came to China three years ago seeking a better life, only to find that her destination was a brothel.
“I have no option but to stay. I don’t have a passport since I was smuggled here, and they are watching me,” said the 20-year-old Vietnamese woman who declined to reveal her real name.
By “they,” she means the pimps she was sold to in Dongxing in south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
Xiang has been a prostitute in Dongxing, which borders Vietnam, since being trafficked and sold by her older cousin, who is married to a Chinese man and lives in the city.
Xiang began thinking about a move to China after the cousin returned home to visit relatives, flaunting her “affluent and easy” life in China.
“She kept talking about her life — a life I had always dreamed of — and persuaded me to go with her. Her account sounded credible to me at the time, since she was dressed in Chinese top brands from head to foot and wore dazzling gold jewelry,” Xiang recalled.
Soon after, she followed her cousin to Dongxing, joining the vast number of Vietnamese women trafficked to China for prostitution or to be sold as brides to single men.
Their plight was highlighted earlier this month when China’s Ministry of Public Security vowed a crackdown on the purchase of Vietnamese brides, a trade not unusual in the country’s rural areas, saying the practice may involve abduction or marriage fraud.
Trafficking of Vietnamese women to China is not new, but there has been a rise in such cases in recent years, partly fueled by the launch of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area in 2010, which boosted transnational people-to-people exchanges, according to experts and anti-abduction officials.
Chen Shiqu, director of the ministry’s anti-trafficking office, said that between 2009 and 2012, police rescued and returned more than 1,800 Vietnamese women sold to Chinese.
The traffickers promised jobs in China or help to find a Chinese husband before selling them for up to 30,000 yuan (US$4,921), Chen said.
The number of female traffickers has been on the rise, some of whom are trafficking victims themselves, said Sun Xiaoying, a researcher with the Research Institute of Southeast Asia at the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences.
Last March, police in Vietnam arrested six people on charges of abducting 21 women and children to China for prostitution. The principal criminal, a Vietnamese woman named Ngo Thi Hung Trang, had been trafficked to China in 2008.
For Xiang, not a day goes by without thinking about escape, even if she knows the odds are slim. But she insists: “I will return home one day, whatever the cost.”
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