Chinese Regime’s Approach to Human Trafficking Critiqued

OPPOSES POLICE RAIDS: Tiantian Zheng, Ph.D., professor, Anthropology, State University of New York, Cortland, has conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the sex trade in China. She says the police raids are counter-productive. She spoke on Capitol Hill, before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Aug. 21. (Gary Feuerberg/ Epoch Times)

Human trafficking, the transporting of human beings for purposes of forced labor or sexual exploitation, involves profound issues of legal jurisdiction, criminal behavior, law enforcement, and human rights.

These issues are particularly problematic for a country like China, which in the past has often been unwilling to enter into international agreements or abide by its commitments. However, in the last year, the Chinese regime has acceded to the international standard—the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (the TIP Protocol), after years of refusing to ratify it.

To discuss the TIP Protocol enforcement and the human trafficking problems in China in general, the CECC held on Aug. 20 a roundtable discussion. Panelists examined various examples of human trafficking in China.

Sen. Dorgan described a typical example of forced labor in China from his book on the subject. A woman, Ms. Li, working in a factory making stuffed animals for export collapsed and died at work. Ms. Li was working 16 hours a day, for two months without a day off, for 30 cents an hour, under appalling conditions—90 degrees and terrible air quality, said Dorgan.

Dorgan pointed out that China’s definition of human trafficking is narrower than the TIP Protocol. It does not prohibit forced labor. Also, Chinese law leaves out offenses committed against male victims. The regime’s announced plans at the national level for combating trafficking focuses mainly on women and children, according to CECC Oct. 2009 annual report.

Underground Economy

Earl Brown, labor law attorney China Program Director for the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, gave an example of how the forced labor trade in China operates. A young man he met from a pineapple plantation wanted to get away from the farm. A Chinese gang literally “shanghaied” him, held him for three weeks, put him on a vessel, where he fished near Indonesia, without pay and under force. He jumped overboard and swam to freedom to Indonesia and eventually returned to China, where a Hong Kong gang “shanghaied” him again.

Brown stressed there was a dual labor market—a formal legal labor market and an informal, illegal market. The economic crisis is “taking a toll everywhere as more employers seek to avoid labor laws by resorting to semi-legal and illegal labor markets,” said Brown. The benefits from the employers side is that children can work, no hour restrictions, and labor is cheap because it is illegal.

Trafficking for forced labor creates unfair competition for employers who want to obey the law. It erodes the rule of law, said Brown and is a growing problem.

Smuggling vs.Trafficking

We often think of those subjected to human trafficking as victims but that may not always be so clear. Patrick Radden Keefe, fellow at the Century Foundation and author of “The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream,” says it is a common misconception to confuse human smuggling with human trafficking.

He said that many Chinese looking for a better life may approach someone to help them get away. The fee is huge. To come to the United States in the 1980s cost an average of $18,000. In the 1990s, the fee had risen to $35,000. Now the fee is about $70,000. The seeker pays a small down payment and is smuggled into the country.

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Keefe said that it is a common myth that the person works as an indentured servant and pays the debt off slowly. Actually, Keefe says, collecting the money from hundreds of immigrants over the years needed would be too much trouble. Instead, Keefe said they are held for 72 hours, often at gun point, and told to call anyone they know to beg or borrow the money.

Keefe said it is very hard to prosecute smugglers. Witnesses are reluctant to come forth because they willingly entered into the agreement, knew the risks, the perilous journey, and perhaps even the threats after arrival are not a surprise.

“Are [global migrant workers] criminals or victims? At what point do they go from one to the other,” asked Keefe. He suggested it was possible for them to be both.

The most successful human smuggler of human cargo, (or, to use the Chinese term, snakehead) was the person whom Keefe wrote his book about, Sister Ping, who surpassed all snakeheads, according to Keefe.

“Moving people illegally from one country to another requires an extensive network of international contacts and an ability to outwit immigration and law-enforcement officers. With a well-connected family, acute entrepreneurial instincts, and a callous, life-is-cheap attitude toward the poor migrants who were her customers, Sister Ping was well suited to the job,” said Keefe when he first wrote about the story for the New Yorker in 2006.

Looking like an old Chinese peasant, she created an intricate smuggling network, including violent gangs, out of her store in Chinatown, New York. An immigrant in the 1980s from Fujian Province, she was very adept at smuggling her compatriots until one of her ships in 1993 ran aground off of Queens.

The nearly 300 undocumented Chinese trying to get to shore were emaciated with little food and water, and some died from the accident. The rest fled or were arrested. Eventually Sister’s Ping’s operation was brought down. The FBI estimated that she made $40 million over the years sneaking in immigrants.

Raids on Sex Trade Workers

The confounding of the trafficked victim with a person seeking a better life was also highlighted by Dr. Tiantian Zheng, professor of anthropology, State University of New York, Cortland, and the author of “Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China” (2009) and “Ethnographies of Prostitution in Contemporary China” (2009).

A common misconception in discussing trafficking of sex workers is the failure to make distinctions between voluntary migrant sex workers and forced sex workers, according to Zheng. Zheng doesn’t deny there are persons who are forced into prostitution, but the majority chooses this life as their most viable alternative because of poverty.

According to Zheng, since 1989 the public security bureaus in China have portrayed their periodical national “crackdown” campaigns against prostitution as anti-sex trafficking. By declaring that all prostitution is a form of sex trafficking and that a woman who engages in prostitution is a victim who requires help to escape, the Chinese police justify their raids on brothels, and the arrest, detention and deporting of women identified as illegal migrant sex workers, according to Zheng.

“Usually when a woman is ‘rescued’ from the sex trade and put into police custody, she is subject to possible sexual assault by the police, deportation to her hometown, and forced relocation into more dangerous work areas. In my research on migrant sex workers in China, frequent police raids, crackdowns, and raid-and-rescue have pushed sex work underground and made it more dangerous,” said Zheng

Zheng encountered several sex workers who “actively made the decision to seek out traffickers to move for a better living and a new livelihood.” Often they had tasted factory work or been domestic maids and were willing to endure the risks and hardships of sex work. These individuals could not migrate in a legitimate way, Zheng said.

China’s exclusive focus on “raid-and-rescue” thwarts NGOs and programs providing health education and other assistance the prostitutes could receive, Zheng said.