Sex And Order: Why Do The Chinese Buy Slave Wives

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Sex And Order: Why Do The Chinese Buy Slave Wives
Sex And Order: Why Do The Chinese Buy Slave Wives

Video: Sex And Order: Why Do The Chinese Buy Slave Wives

Video: Sex And Order: Why Do The Chinese Buy Slave Wives
Video: Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan 2024, March
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If in Russia, according to statistics, there are only 9 guys for 10 girls, and the task of finding a husband is considered one of the most difficult to fulfill, then in neighboring China there are queues not for grooms, but for brides. Finding a wife with a colossal gender imbalance in China is extremely difficult, and the pragmatic inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom have found an alternative way to build family happiness - to buy a spouse. We wrote about what life is like for modern Chinese women in the previous article. Now "Lenta.ru" understood how the market for brides works in a country where the keeper of the family hearth can be selected in a convenient catalog.

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Yunnan province on the border of China and Vietnam. Among thousands of people at the Kunming train station, police spotted young couples. They are attracted by the couple's suspicious behavior: the man barely looks around every few minutes. His companion, bowing her head, walks with a mincing gait and does not leave him a single step. The young people are approached by police officers and asked a few simple questions. “She does not speak Mandarin (the official language in the PRC - Lenta.ru note),” the man says. The order clerk suspiciously asks the crumpled girl to show her documents. She looks frightened at the men in uniform, but at her husband. Her identity card turns out to be fake, and both are taken to the police station for clarification.

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video Humanearth.net

After interrogation, it becomes clear that the "spouses" are actually a trafficker and his goods, which should soon be sent to the village and married to a Chinese man who paid 10 to 60 thousand yuan for the young bride. However, this wedding was not destined to happen. The news later reported that this particular check resulted in the rescue of 33 Vietnamese girls and the arrest of 78 suspected traffickers. But this is only an isolated case in the huge supply chain of Vietnamese brides to the Celestial Empire.

In provinces in southern China, gangs of slave traders take girls between the ages of 13 and 20 out of Vietnam under the guise of migrant workers or tourists. Then they are sold in different parts of the country to those who cannot afford to marry a Chinese woman and choose a cheaper and more affordable option. Not everyone is as lucky as the heroines of a news story. The police at the train stations do not pay attention to some of the girls.

You can't stay running

In 2016, the author of the Sisters for Sale documentary, which will be released in 2018, Ben Randall was interviewed by Vice, in which he told the story of one of his Vietnamese girlfriends. She was stolen from her native village and sent to China for sale.

In 2010, Ben worked as an English teacher in northern Vietnam, where he befriended 14-year-old May. A year after he left the country, one of his former students wrote to him that Mei had disappeared from the village and was most likely sent to China to be sold. It was rather difficult to get in touch with the girl: she was constantly monitored, was not allowed out of the house and was rarely allowed to use the phone. There was also little benefit from talking, since she absolutely could not explain where she was. This is not surprising, because most of the stolen girls did not even go to school much and do not have geographical knowledge, not to mention knowledge of foreign languages.

Ben managed to find out that his friend was in a village near Beijing. She could not name the name, but it was clear that the settlement was small, and foreigners usually did not come there, so the sudden appearance of a tall white savior could arouse suspicion. At the moment when the man had already begun to look for real ways to return the bride under duress home, he was faced with the fact that it was very difficult for a Western person to understand. Firstly, May's parents told Ben in a harsh manner that they would not be happy to see their daughter back, and to be convincing, they threatened him with death. Secondly, Mei herself, as it turned out, was not particularly eager to go home either, and chose to stay in China with her newborn child.

Considering the local way of life, its decision is quite logical. Having been married and having lost her maiden honor, at home she will be considered "illiquid". They will not marry her, she will not give birth to children, she will only cover her family with shame. Traditions, harsh from the point of view of the West, are the main reason for the reluctance of girls to return home on their own. And in the event of forced deportation, most of them remain outcasts among their fellow villagers. Therefore, stories of happy family reunions are rare and more the exception than the rule.

In the interview, Ben also talked about another trafficker victim named Pang. It was a little easier to reach her, her husband worked as a taxi driver and was rarely at home, and she herself wanted to return more than May. Escaping from a new home, she crossed several thousand kilometers without documents and ended up on the border with Vietnam. Ben contacted the Blue Dragon Foundation, which is helping to bring stolen children back to their homeland, but the girl said she found a local resident to help her cross the border. This made Ben very wary, and his concern was soon justified. The girl got in touch more. Most likely, her new acquaintance simply resold her in the bride market.

Used brides

Several years ago, in one of the Chinese programs, the audience was told the heart-warming story of a married couple from the same province of Yunnan. Hu Jianhe met the father of his future bride by accident. He told him about his daughter Ma Zhengfen and invited the young people to meet: such matchmaking in China is considered normal. The only snag was that the girl did not speak Chinese and did not understand the dialect of the new acquaintance. This did not raise suspicion, since there are more than a hundred different dialects in China, which differ from each other roughly, like Swedish and French. After some time, Hu gave the bride's family a dowry of 60,000 yuan, and he and Ma got married. She soon learned the language spoken in her new home and gave birth to a child.

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China Photos

In the frames, the man touchingly recalls the suddenly interrupted happy life together. One day, Hu's wife went away somewhere and then disappeared. Then she called her husband and through tears said that she had been abducted and she was in Fujian province, two thousand kilometers from Yunnan. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of ten thousand yuan. After Hu sent money to the criminals, both they and his wife disappeared. A grief-stricken, poorly educated resident of a mountain village did not even think about contacting the police and simply resigned himself to his grief.

While the audience sympathizes with the unfortunate husband left by his wife, the presenter reports that not everything is so simple in this story. It turns out that Ma Zhengfen was not at all what "dad" said she was. Some time before her disappearance, she confessed to her husband that she had been smuggled out of Vietnam when she was a teenager, and the so-called “father” is actually just an intermediary for traffickers. For Hu, this was a complete surprise, since he saw both his wife's identity card and her Yunnan residence permit. She confessed to her husband that she missed home very much and asked to let her go to see her family. Moved by the truth about the hard lot of his beloved man, of course, he gave her the go-ahead for a trip, from which she never returned home.

The journalists found out that what happened to Hu was not the only case. Throughout the province and beyond, criminal gangs are wielding the weddings of stolen flip-flops with Chinese on the conveyor belt. The scheme works like this: a girl is given in marriage, sometimes under the guise of a Chinese woman, she lives with a family for several years, then escapes and gets back to her owners. A ransom is demanded for the wife, but the girl, of course, does not return to her husband's house. Instead, she goes “to work” in her next marriage.

Interestingly, the program emphasizes not so much the tragedy of a girl who was forcibly taken away into slavery, and not that she got married against her will and gave birth to a child whom, most likely, she will never see again. According to the authors of the material, the story of a man who bought himself a bride and was left with nothing should evoke sympathy.

Vietnamese brides, obedient, inexpensive

The main way to order a bride from Vietnam is to contact an intermediary personally or via the Internet. In remote villages of the southern provinces, accomplices, as a rule, themselves get acquainted with potential buyers - single men - on the street or in a cafe. Under the guise of a relative, they offer to marry their sister or daughter. Word of mouth also works. You can get to know intermediaries, for example, through former clients or their acquaintances.

However, these are ways for less affluent buyers, those who still use a push-button telephone and do not have access to the Internet. There are about 600 million such people in China, a little less than 50 percent of the population. They are more likely than others to become victims of scammers, because they cannot look at reviews and get advice on a special forum.

It is easier for active Internet users to order a bride, but it is more difficult to get caught by scammers. In the Chinese search engine Baidu, you can go to a forum where brides shopping is discussed. People share their own experiences and give advice on how not to be deceived in a deal.

One of these, with a title that can be loosely translated "Vietnamese Brides, Fly In" (越南 新娘 吧), has about 18,000 subscribers. One of the users asks for advice from the "experienced". “Can you trust this intermediary? Says 10 thousand,”one of the users signs a screenshot of a conversation with a certain woman. In the correspondence, she assures the potential client that the girl already has Chinese registration and documents, and there is no need to pay extra for this. However, in the comments they write: "this is a setup anyway, don't agree", "what's the difference, a Vietnamese woman will run away anyway", "10 thousand is too cheap, it will surely run away in a couple of months", "if the money in advance is definitely a setup" …

Among the advice and opinions there are more interesting messages: "if you want to find a Vietnamese bride - write me 131 ******* 96". Of course, you can't just go ahead and write “hello, I need a wife,” the dealers are not dumb, they are careful. Correspondent "Lenta.ru" wrote to the alleged seller and asked how much the bride. The alleged seller first asked the question "who gave the number?" It was not possible to give the correct answer - the bride dealer asked to get out and not bother me anymore. However, just in case, he still asked where his contacts had come from.

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Ng Han Guan / AP

Marrying a Chinese is not such a bad fate for a girl seeking a better life. Many, contrary to the expectations of the Western public, go for it quite deliberately and themselves turn to marriage agents and post their profiles on special sites.

In addition, special internet pages registered in Singapore or Malaysia offer a wide range of girls volunteering to travel to China for a successful marriage. For example, on vietnamcupid.com you can find hundreds of job seeker profiles. On another Singaporean site, you can “see everyone”, choose a Chinese or Vietnamese bride by height, weight, age and other criteria.

The site ynxn1314.com now looks pretty harmless, it sells either music, or socks, or tutoring. However, several years ago, The Global Times reported that the resource provided mediation services and organized collective trips to Vietnam to find wives. As it became known to the authorities, the agents organized meetings of Chinese and potential brides in hotels. If everything worked out, the organizers received a commission, and the happy future husband did not return home alone. If, for some reason, procuring failed, then the client paid a fixed amount of two thousand yuan, and was exempted from the rest of the costs.

The Internet resource 55tuan.com, which now allegedly provides money transfer services, distinguished itself with aggressive advertising in 2013 and came under the gun of law enforcement agencies.

First they drowned, now we buy

There are no exact statistics on victims of slave traders. A 2011 report from the British Embassy in Hanoi stated that between 2005 and 2009, 3,190 women and children were trafficked to China illegally. Some Chinese publications talk about several hundred brides brought to China a year. In reality, their exact number cannot be counted. Firstly, they enter the country with false documents and the migration service does not receive official data about them. Secondly, those who enter officially do so with tourist or work visas. Third, not all Vietnamese brides in China are sex slaves and come to the country against their will.

At first glance, it may seem that the slave trade in one of the fastest growing and most technologically advanced countries in the world is nonsense. However, the consumer attitude towards women and the need for foreign wives have their own preconditions.

The main reason for the popularity of imported brides in China is a serious gender imbalance. In 2015, according to UN estimates, there were 17 Chinese women for every 10 women. The reason for this gap is, first of all, the thousand-year agrarian history of the country. The birth of girls was rarely a particular joy for the Chinese. She could not help the family in the same way as her son. In addition, she had to be fed for 13-16 years, and then married off and given to another family. From the point of view of the pragmatic inhabitants of the Celestial Empire, this was not very profitable.

In recent times, the reason for the reluctance to give birth to girls was the belief that, being the only child in the family (in the PRC, the One family - one child policy has been in effect since 1979, it was canceled only in 2016 - Lenta.ru comment), a daughter will not be able to feed and provide old age for parents and a whole set of grandparents.

The situation began to change when gender bias became apparent, and brides - no matter which - became a real value. Now the birth of a girl is no longer perceived as something terrible. For the bride, the groom's side must pay the parents quite a substantial amount. In addition, now girls do not even consider a potential husband without an apartment, a car and a good job. At the same time, the tradition of paying a dowry remained in the past, along with the fear of having a daughter. The boy's happy parents begin to save money for the wedding from the first filial diapers, but not everyone can collect the amount worthy for a Chinese woman.

For clarity, in large cities - for example, Shanghai - the groom will spend at least 100 thousand yuan (about 900 thousand rubles) to create a family. In Beijing, you can get married at a more reasonable price: about 10 thousand yuan (90 thousand rubles).

Because of their high demand, Chinese women, from the point of view of Confucian morality, go beyond the scope of behavior worthy of a woman. Now, in an average Chinese family, the wife lives like a real princess. The husband earns money, the husband does the housework too, the grandparents sit with the children. Chinese ladies are very capricious, and they certainly cannot be called compliant wives. Not wanting to endure the freaks of their compatriots, many men deliberately marry calm and courteous Vietnamese.

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VCG

The human rights issue is one of the most pressing issues for the Chinese government. Confucian traditions, where humility and obedience to the elder and strong, that is, a man, is considered the basis of order and stability, a serious gender imbalance caused by the mass murder of unwanted girls in infancy, and the inability of the central government to control what is happening in remote villages ruin the lives of thousands of girls. With the tacit consent of police and local residents in remote Chinese villages, young girls are raped, held in captivity and forced to give birth. Often, their mother-in-law was also once bought and know what horrors the newlywed goes through. The doomed humility of brides is even more shocking than the composure of society.

Despite the fact that the authorities are trying to influence the situation, the measures taken are not enough. Conservative villagers, who often do not even suspect that they broke the law by buying a man, are unlikely to change their way of thinking soon. It is hoped that the abolition of the one-child policy will somehow affect the attitude of the Chinese towards the appearance of girls in the family, and in 20 years the search for a bride will cease to be a problem for young guys and their caring mothers.

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