Chinese girl for sale – Christian clerics helping Chinese men target poor girls in Pakistan for marriage, AP reports

Muqadas Ashraf was just 16 when her parents married her off to a Chinese man who had come to Pakistan looking for a bride. Less than five months later, Muqadas is back in her home country, pregnant and seeking a divorce from a husband she says was abusive.

She is one of hundreds of poor Christian girls who have been trafficked to China in a market for brides that has swiftly grown in Pakistan since late last year, activists say. Brokers are aggressively seeking out girls for Chinese men, sometimes even cruising outside churches to ask for potential brides. They are being helped by Christian clerics paid to target impoverished parents in their congregation with promises of wealth in exchange for their daughters.

Parents receive several thousand dollars and are told that their new sons-in-law are wealthy Christian converts. The grooms turn out to be neither, according to several brides, their parents, an activist, pastors and government officials, all of whom spoke to The Associated Press. Once in China, the girls — most often married against their will — can find themselves isolated in remote rural regions, vulnerable to abuse, unable to communicate and reliant on a translation app even for a glass of water.

“This is human smuggling,” said Aslam Augustine, the human rights and minorities minister in Pakistan’s Punjab province, in an interview with the AP. “Greed is really responsible for these marriages … I have met with some of these girls and they are very poor.”

Augustine accused the Chinese government and its embassy in Pakistan of turning a blind eye to the practice by unquestioningly issuing visas and documents. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs denied that, saying China has zero tolerance for illegal transnational marriage agencies.

Human Rights Watch called on China and Pakistan to take action to end bride trafficking, warning in an April 26 statement of “increasing evidence that Pakistani women and girls are at risk of sexual slavery in China.”

• U.S. approved thousands of child bride requests, and it was legal

On Monday, Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency arrested eight Chinese nationals and four Pakistanis in raids in Punjab province in connection with trafficking, Geo TV reported. It said the raids followed an undercover operation that included attending an arranged marriage.

The Chinese embassy said last month that China is cooperating with Pakistan to crack down on unlawful matchmaking centers, saying “both Chinese and Pakistani youths are victims of these illegal agents.”

The Associated Press interviewed more than a dozen Christian Pakistani brides and would-be brides who fled before exchanging vows. All had similar accounts of a process involving brokers and members of the clergy, including describing houses where they were taken to see potential husbands and spend their wedding nights in Islamabad, the country’s capital, and Lahore, the capital of Punjab province.

“It is all fraud and cheating. All the promises they make are fake,” said Muqadas.

Working as a beautician in Pakistan’s capital, Mehak Parvez was earning $175 a month at a beauty parlor but wanted to do more to support her family and supplement her father’s income as a rickshaw driver.

Last year, Parvez visited her hometown, Faisalabad, to attend the wedding of a female relative, who married a Chinese man. This was a turning point in the life of Parvez, 18, who is a school dropout.

“I decided to do the same. I thought this is good for my future and in this way I will be able to help my family,” Parvez said.

While at the wedding, she spoke to the Pakistani assistant of one of the Chinese guests, who assured her of finding a Chinese man for marriage.

Parvez’s journey through the Chinese matchmaking process did not turn out as she had hoped.

Recent raid, arrests

Last week, Pakistan’s law-enforcing Federal Investigation Agency raided a similar wedding in Faisalabad and arrested several people for human trafficking.

In the days since, authorities have arrested almost a dozen people in other cities, including Chinese and Pakistani citizens. They stand accused of human trafficking, as well as arranging fake marriages between Pakistani women and Chinese men and forging documents.

Human Rights Watch has raised alarms about bride smuggling from Pakistan to China, saying many girls and women are at risk of being pushed into prostitution. The group said the allegations are similar to the pattern of trafficking women to China from at least five other Asian countries. Women’s families are paid thousands of dollars, but the women themselves can end up sold into sexual slavery for years.

FILE – In this April 29, 2019, photo, graffiti advertising a marriage agent is spray-painted on the wall of a warehouse in Pei County in eastern China’s Jiangsu province.

The Chinese Embassy in Islamabad says it has sent a task force to Pakistan to cooperate with law enforcement, and Beijing supports Pakistan’s efforts to ensure cross-border marriages are legal. However, the embassy statement disputed reports that Pakistani women are subject to forced prostitution or human organ transplants in China.

Quick process

Parvez said once she indicated she was interested in a marriage, the Chinese organizers moved quickly, finding a Chinese groom and setting their marriage for Nov. 19, 2018, in Faisalabad.

It was after her marriage ceremony, while she was waiting in Lahore for their travel documents, when she became suspicious as the wait grew longer.

“I was staying in a house with other Pakistani girls and soon realized things were not right,” she said. “I asked my husband through Google translation and he would tell me nothing.”

Parvez told VOA that when she told the Chinese hosts that she no longer wanted to go to China, the Pakistani agent started blackmailing her.

Christian community activist Saleem Iqbal, based in Lahore, has been working with the victims and said he had heard stories of blackmail and coercion from other victims.

He estimated 700 Christian girls have been taken to China under the pretext of marriages during the last few years. The number of married women is higher, Iqbal said.

FILE – A top private Pakistani television station airs images of several Chinese men with six local women, including two teenage girls, at an illegal matchmaking center in the eastern city of Lahore.

Christian families targeted

According to authorities and Christian community activists, the smuggling gangs are mostly active in Punjab province and mainly target poor Christian families for phony marriages. They had displayed banners in public places seeking young brides for Chinese men.

But media reports suggest Muslim girls have also been targeted.

“The gang members normally tell Muslim families the Chinese suitor has recently converted to Islam, and to the Christians they say the Chinese men have converted to Christianity,” said Saleem, adding that all such stories are fabricated.

Christian community leader Saleem is worried for the young women, some of whom are pregnant: “What will happen to the children? Who will marry these young mothers even if they get divorced?”

The newly married Parvez is also discussing getting a divorce.

“I am not upset that I did not travel to China,” she said.

Linh, a high school student, thought nothing of accepting a family friend’s casual invitation to visit the neighbouring district of Muong Khuong.

That family “friend” turned out to be a lying crook – he was in fact working for a human trafficking ring, and had taken a year to slowly befriend the 17-year-old.

En route to Muong Khuong, the teenager was kidnapped and brought to China, where she was forced to marry a stranger.

‘If you are trafficked, of course you will be raped. Probably everyone was raped,’ she recalled.

‘I became a wife there (in China). At that house, I had to obey everything they said or else I would be beaten. They beat me without fear because I am not Chinese.’

In the scenic rural highlands of northwestern Vietnam, girls like Linh, and as young as 13, have been disappearing from the remote villages at an alarming rate.

Kidnapped and sold to human traffickers, many of these young girls end up re-sold as brides in China, a country grappling with a gender imbalance in which men greatly outnumber women, as the programme Insight discovers. (Watch the episode here.)

A TRAFFICKER COULD BE ANYONE

Vietnam and China share a long mountainous and porous border, which has made it easier for traffickers to snatch girls from the villages and move them across the border.

‘There’s a lot of money in human trafficking. The people who sell girls can make tens of thousands of dollars on a sale,’ pointed out Michael Brosowski, founder of Hanoi-based charity Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation which rescues Vietnamese trafficking victims.

Between 2012 and 2017, more than 3,000 people, mostly women and children, were trafficked, according to the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security. But these are just the official figures – the number of unreported cases is widely thought to be significantly higher.

Caitlin Wiesen, country director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), pointed out that Vietnam is known as a source country for labour exploitation, sexual exploitation and forced marriages.

Poverty in remote areas, low education levels and a lack of jobs have created an environment where women feel they need to go out and find work, she said. Some, lured by promises of jobs, end up being trafficked by unscrupulous agents.

And these agents, or traffickers, explained Brosowski, are willing to invest weeks and sometimes months in getting close to a victim, so that they can make that “sale”.

There’s no typical profile of a trafficker; he or she can be anyone – from young, unemployed school dropouts, to elderly women selling tea in a marketplace, to even fellow teenage girls.

‘Traffickers can be male or female, they can be any age … most of the time, the traffickers have built a relationship with the victim, sometimes over many months,’ said Brosowski.

‘They may have even gone on holiday together, before the trafficker takes her to China.’

BEATEN INTO OBEDIENCE

That was the case for Linh (not her real name) who lives in Bac Ha, one of Vietnam’s most impoverished regions in Lao Cai where villagers rely heavily on small-scale farming as their main source of livelihood.

That region’s per capita income is around half that of the country, and many farmers feel trapped in a cycle of poverty.

Linh was duped and sold to a trafficking ring in China. She was oblivious to what was going on, ‘until I arrived in some district and saw Chinese characters. That’s when I realised I was trafficked. I was frightened’, she recalled.

She was moved from place to place, and finally sold as a bride to a family who beat her frequently – simply because she couldn’t speak their language.

‘You have to be completely obedient when you are over there,’ said Linh, now 19.

Fortunately, her resourceful father managed to track her down, to a home in Yunnan province where she was subsequently rescued by the authorities.

Then there’s Giang, who is also from Lao Cai – she was just 16 when she was kidnapped by a friend at a market last year.

She suspected that she had been drugged, as she suddenly found herself in China.

‘We hung out at the market and when we left to go home, they took me straight to China,’ recounted Giang, who wanted to be known only by this nickname. ‘When I knew what was going on, I was already in China.’

She refused to get married and cried every day, she said.

Giang was lucky – she met a Vietnamese guy who pitied her and sold his motorbike to pay her kidnappers for her release. The whole ordeal lasted five long agonising days.

EXTREME MEASURES TO GET A BRIDE

These two girls are just a fraction of the trafficked girls who are able to return home, with many more left trapped in a foreign country against their will.

But what’s fuelling this demand for Vietnamese brides in China, home to 1.4 billion people?

READ: The ‘leftover men’ of China, who just want to get married

WATCH: China’s men desperately seeking wives (4:44)

Massive gender imbalance, intense cultural pressure and expensive dowries have forced many men from poor villagers in China to resort to extreme measures to find themselves a bride.

China’s one-child policy, which came into force in 1979, has prevented around 400 million births, according to the Chinese government.

Coupled with the general preference among Chinese families for male offspring, it has resulted in China having one of the highest gender imbalances in the world – it is estimated that come 2020, there would be 55 million more males than females.

It is little surprise that some of these men look towards neighbouring countries such as Vietnam for lifelong partners.

This surplus of bachelors has caught the attention of human traffickers who hope to cash in. And a Chinese man – legitimately looking for a life partner – may not realise that the woman he is meeting is a victim of human trafficking.

The Vietnamese police investigated more than 1,000 cases of human trafficking between 2012 to 2017, and arrested more than 2,000 people for their involvement in this illegal trade.

However, not all marriages involving Vietnamese brides and Chinese grooms are forced ones, claimed matchmaker Lim, who maintained that some women were willing to be sold as wives.

‘Vietnamese women have a lowly status and so that’s why they come to China to get a husband,’ she elaborated. ‘People who want to come here, they are happy but the people who don’t (find happiness), they run away because they are anxious about their lives here.’

But the reality is, many young women from Vietnam have gambled on their marriages in China, driven by their extreme poverty – and fallen prey to scams that leave them open to abuse.

STIGMATISED, AFTER BEING RESCUED

The good news is that on average, about 100 victims return from China each year, estimated Nguyen Tuong Long, head of Lào Cai’s Department of Social Evils Prevention.

But often, these victims have been through sexual abuse and labour exploitation. ‘In many cases, victims were forced into prostitution. Consequently, most returned victims suffer from severe psychological trauma,’ he said.

The situation got so bad that the Chinese government embarked on a campaign to clean up those brothels, said Brosowski. ‘That form of trafficking has disappeared although it does keep popping up from time to time.’

Aside from the scars of their experiences, some of these victims find out that they are not even welcomed by their own family when they return home – simply because of the stigma associated with trafficked girls.

‘When these victims escape trafficking, they have already endured great physical and mental pain, and when they return to their communities and families, there is still prejudice,’ observed Nguyen. ‘The people believe that the victims prostitute themselves.’

Survivor Linh is familiar with that feeling of rejection – her relief at returning home soon turned to anger where she felt that people were judging and scrutinising her.

‘People looked at me like I am a stranger, but it is not like I wanted this to happen to me,’ she said.

However, she has since found some closure – she found out that her kidnapper confessed to the police a week after he sold her and was sentenced to prison. She hasn’t seen him since.

Her goal now is to graduate from high school and figure out what to do next.

‘At first when I just returned, I had these moments where I blamed myself,’ she said. ‘But since I went back to school, I have told myself it was not my fault … chinese woman dating I have to be less harsh on myself so I can live better.’