by David Eimer
With no social security system to speak of in China, caring for the aged is the job of individual families. Even in the big cities, it is common for three generations to live together and grandparents often assume the role of principal guardians for children while their parents work. But in the country it is always the son’s responsibility to provide a home for his mother and father, because when a daughter marries she becomes part of her husband’s family and so has to care for his parents.
Exacerbating the demographic divide is the increasing tendency of young women to leave the countryside for the cities. In the past, village girls were often not sent to school because it was seen as a waste of money as they would only end up living with another family after they married. Now more widespread education opportunities, as well as the desire to escape the tedium of rural life, mean many are moving away to find better-paid work. Few return to their villages, and there are plenty of settlements in China where the only females are old women.
Increasing numbers of men in farming areas are now faced with a harsh choice: stay single or buy a bride from somewhere else. An underground industry has grown up to meet the demand for wives, and Myanmar is the perfect place to find them. In Kachin and northern Shan State, where the average salary in rural areas is the equivalent of £1 a day, it is easy for traffickers to persuade women to leave for China and jobs that don’t exist. By the time they are through the border fence in Ruili and discover they have been lied to, it is too late to return and they face dismal futures as captive spouses.
No one knows exactly how many thousands of Burmese women are trafficked into China each year. What is clear is that the numbers are rising. ‘I can only go by how many women come to our safehouse in Ruili and the number has doubled in the last year,’ said Julia, a Kachin woman working for a Thailand-based organisation which assists the tiny percentage of women who are rescued, like Aba, or escape.
Julia was twenty-seven, small and serious and passionately proud of being Kachin. She was also paranoid and had good reason to be so. She flitted between Ruili and Kachin State via the holes in the border fence, just like the smugglers do, and her work took place in the shadow of the state in the same way as the trade in women does. With the Myanmar authorities uninterested, as most of the women being sold are from ethnic groups fighting the government, and the Chinese more concerned with the kidnapping and sale of children inside China, a major problem in itself, Julia was on her own.
For those snared by the trafficking gangs, it is an exceptionally nasty and humiliating experience which leaves the victims with emotional scars that last a lifetime. ‘The Burmese traffickers bring the women to the border, where they are handed over to the Chinese traffickers. Sometimes the sale has been arranged in advance, but often the women are sold in markets held in parks in Ruili,’ explained Julia. ‘The traffickers will put them in nice dresses and make-up and then they are sold. It’s very cruel because the women are happy to be in nice clothes, which they’ve never had before, and then they are sold like vegetables.’
Thankfully, Aba avoided being paraded in front of a crowd of potential buyers as if she was an animal at auction. She was very young to be taken too, which is why she was sold as a future bride, but around a quarter of all the women trafficked are under the age of eighteen. ‘The men buying them always want women who can produce babies. They always ask about that first. They want healthy young girls,’ said Julia.
Prices for a bride range from 6,000 to 40,000 yuan (£600–£4,000), depending on the woman’s age and appearance. Some will be bought again, once they have provided the man with an heir, according to Julia. ‘The women are really just regarded as baby-making machines. After they give birth, they’ll be sold on to another family, or sometimes into the sex industry to work as prostitutes.’
While Yunnan is the principal destination for trafficked women from Myanmar, some like Aba are sent to the other side of the country. Aba had no idea which province she ended up in. ‘I was taken a long way away, first by bus for a day and then two days on a train,’ she said in her small voice. ‘It snowed a lot and was very cold in the winter and they spoke a different kind of Chinese to what they speak here.’ From her description of the weather and the length of the journey, I thought Aba was transported to somewhere in the north or north-east of China. They are both regions where the lack of women in the countryside is most acute.
Thousands of kilometres away from home and living with strange people speaking a different language who treated her as an unpaid servant, Aba was terrified. ‘I was afraid a lot of the time and very lonely because I had no friends I could talk to. I cried a lot. In the beginning, they told me gently to stop crying. Later on, they would shout at me when I cried.’ She was also physically abused. ‘I couldn’t speak Chinese at first, so I couldn’t understand what chores I had to do around the house and farm so I would make mistakes. Then the mother would beat me,’ said Aba.
That she was still traumatised by her ordeal was obvious. ‘I feel scared going out on my own, especially in the evening,’ she told me. Her life up to the time she was kidnapped had been far from easy anyway. One of three children of a casual labourer in Muse, Aba had already left school and was looking for work to help support her family when she made her fateful journey to Ruili.
Escaping from the farm was impossible. Aba had no money and no idea where she was and the family made sure she couldn’t slip away. ‘They watched me all the time. I wasn’t allowed to go out on my own.’ Nor could she call her parents; they are too poor to own a phone. So Aba resorted to pleading with the family to let her leave. ‘All the time I wanted to go home, to go back to my parents. I would ask them to let me go, but they would say no and that I had to stay.’
Eventually, she discovered why she had been abducted and was being guarded so closely. One day, the family revealed she was to be the wife of their twenty-year-old son. ‘I had been there almost three years when they told me I was to be married to him,’ said Aba, her voice becoming even more inaudible. ‘I had no idea that was why they had taken me until then. Of course, I refused but they told me I had to marry him.’
Virtually all the women sold as forced brides have no choice but to marry the men who have bought them because they have no chance to run away. Just as Aba was, they are trapped in what is to all intents and purpose a domestic prison. ‘Most trafficked women don’t escape. We can’t help them,’ Julia said. Faced with the hopelessness of their situation, some choose to end their lives by swallowing the highly poisonous chemical pesticide used on farms – the most common way to commit suicide in the Chinese countryside.
A few resourceful women do manage to flee, although they tend to be the ones living much closer to home in Yunnan. ‘Sometimes, kind people will tell us there is a trafficked woman in their village, or a woman will call us on her own initiative,’ said Julia. ‘Then we’ll call the local police. Often they can’t be bothered to help, but if we know the exact village they will go. Otherwise, we tell the woman to try and get to the nearest police station. Because they have no Chinese identity card, they’ll be arrested and eventually returned to Myanmar.’
Not having an identity card saved Aba too. Two months after learning she was to be married, she was working on another farm with the grandmother and daughter of the family. They were being paid 1,000 yuan (£100) a month each, although Aba’s salary was being kept by the grandmother. ‘One day the police came and asked to see everybody’s identity cards, because there were many migrant workers on the farm. I didn’t have one, so they took me away.’
Once in the hands of police, Aba explained what had happened to her. ‘The police went to see the family and told them, “You can’t buy people, they’re not animals.” They asked me if I wanted to prosecute the family, but I said, “No.” I just wanted to forget it and go home.’ Aba was treated well by the police, a new development in itself. Until recently, the Chinese authorities regarded all trafficked women as illegal immigrants and imprisoned them
until they could be returned to their home countries.
Three years after disappearing from her parents’ lives, Aba walked alone across the official border crossing to Muse and returned to her house. ‘My mother and father were very shocked to see me,’ said Aba. ‘They started crying and so did I. I was so happy to see them. They didn’t ask me questions about what had happened. My parents knew I was taken and just said it was all in the past.’
They had tried to find their daughter. After Aba disappeared, her parents went to the Muse police and told them she had been kidnapped and taken to China. ‘They asked for money to investigate. They wanted 6,000 yuan [£600], but my parents couldn’t afford to pay,’ said Aba. Julia told me that is the standard response of Myanmar officials to cases of trafficked women. ‘Unless you pay, the police won’t refer the case to the Chinese authorities.’
Ruili’s status as the women-trafficking capital of China is just its latest dubious claim to fame. The city has been known for smuggling ever since the late 1980s, when China started to relax its controls on its frontiers, which were technically sealed at the start of the Cultural Revolution. Closing the borders in Yunnan was never possible and people carried on crossing them to visit friends and family, or to escape the Red Guards. But it was the official reopening of the crossing with Myanmar in 1986 that led to Ruili becoming a byword for crime.
An extreme incarnation of a debauched frontier town, Ruili was China’s original sin city, a place people flocked to for wild weekends where anything went. In a country where everyone had been under the rigid control of the CCP for decades and subject to its twisted and puritanical version of morality, Ruili was not unique in the way it embraced the seamy side of life. But its location next door to the lawless borderlands of Myanmar ensured that nowhere else in China could match Ruili’s capacity to provide depraved entertainment for those in search of it.
Gambling dens and jungle casinos flourished just across the border, so many that the village of Maijayang became known as the Macau of Myanmar. When I first visited Ruili, prostitution took place on an immense scale with hundreds of shop-front brothels where Han and Burmese women, as well as women from the local ethnic minorities, sat on display. Heroin from the Golden Triangle was readily available and, as addicts shared both needles and female company, Ruili soon had the highest incidence of HIV/AIDS in China.
Over the last few years, the local government has attempted to rid the city of its sleazy image by touting it as the jade centre of south-west China. Jade has a mystical resonance for the Han, both as jewellery that indicates wealth and status and as a metaphor for honesty and virtue. Countless Chinese women have been told to stay as pure as jade, while Confucius employed it to symbolise the character of the most upstanding of men.
Hotan in Xinjiang is the source of white jade, the most coveted of all. But Myanmar’s jade, known locally as ‘green gold’, is almost as popular. The jade market in Ruili had doubled in size since my last visit. Despite the surfeit of shops, the traders claimed business has never been better. ‘Prices are going up, mainly because the Burmese are hoarding the jade,’ explained one Han dealer. ‘There’s still plenty being produced in Myanmar, but there’s a quota on how much can be exported.’
Rising incomes have made jade far more affordable for ordinary Chinese than it was in the time when it only adorned emperors, high officials and their wives and concubines. Such is the insatiable appetite for ‘green gold’ that the Burmese export quota has simply fuelled the black market for jade and it continues to be illegally imported into Ruili in large quantities, along with rubies and teak.
Many Burmese have moved to Ruili to take part in the jade trade, enough to make some streets in the city resemble those of Yangon. Longyi-clad Burmese men sit late into the night in restaurants sipping glasses of milky tea, while ladies with cheeks smeared with thanaka, a natural sunscreen worn by all Burmese women, sell betel nut wrapped in banana leaves from mobile stalls. Some Han mutter darkly about the influx of Burmese, claiming they are responsible for much of the crime in the city. Given Ruili’s perennially seedy reputation, I regarded that as wishful thinking.
Jade apart, Ruili is also being trumpeted as a future holiday destination, the authorities pointing to yet another of the projected high-speed rail lines that will run from Kunming to Yangon via Ruili. But I doubted that Ruili was on the cusp of a tourist boom, or would ever be. Until as late as the 1960s, the area that is now Dehong Prefecture was regarded with dread by the Han, a malarial morass of a land populated by largely unknown and unfriendly minorities.
Western travellers, too, steered clear of the region. Marco Polo wrote, ‘the air in the summer is so impure and bad’, and warned that any foreigner ‘would die for certain’. When Reginald Fleming Johnston, a Scottish diplomat based in eastern China, passed through in 1906 on his way to Mandalay, he struggled to persuade his porters to accompany him. Fleming Johnston survived to become the tutor to Puyi, the child who was China’s final emperor, a role which resulted in him being immortalised by Peter O’Toole in the Bernardo Bertolucci movie The Last Emperor.
Nor have the Dai and Jingpo in Ruili prospered as the Dai in Banna have, despite the banana plantations surrounding the city. ‘The Dai here aren’t locals like the Dai in Banna are. They’re more like Burmese people and so are the Jingpo,’ one Han man told me over shaokao: barbecued meat and fish served on skewers at outdoor stalls and the most popular eating option in Ruili.
Throughout Dehong Prefecture, the Dai and Jingpo are almost indistinguishable from their relatives across the frontier, a telling fact considering the huge wealth gap between Yunnan and Myanmar. All the minorities resent the way Ruili has been smartened up, superficially anyway, while they have not benefited. That discontent surfaces in their ambivalence towards visitors, Han or foreign, and they are far from welcoming. Ruili is the only place in China I have been to where I felt the need to look over my shoulder at night.
There are no beautiful Dai girls in dancing shows for Han tourists to goggle at in Ruili, just lots of hookers trying to make enough money to support their families or a drug habit. Prostitutes are the most obvious sign of Ruili’s underbelly. The shop-front brothels that once dominated the centre of town have been closed down, but working girls still congregate on streets not far away. Others do as prostitutes do all over China, and paper every hotel room in town with business cards and wait for a phone call.
Heroin use remains widespread too, with any number of innocuous-looking shops selling it, and yaba too, under the counter. Walking down Ruili’s main street early one evening, I almost fell over three men slumped against a wall. They were dirty, oblivious to everything, and a syringe was sticking out of a vein in the arm of one of them. Across Ruili, and especially in the Jiegao district by the border, discarded syringes half full of blood are a common sight.
But compared to the trade in women, the drugs, prostitution and jade smuggling fades into insignificance. Selling innocent young girls into lives of misery is so sordid that it makes everything else going on in Ruili appear almost wholesome. Even more depressing is the fact that many of the traffickers are Jingpo themselves, like the women they fool into travelling to China. ‘Sometimes, Jingpo people come to Kachin State to find a bride and because we see the Jingpo as our brothers and sisters, we say yes when they ask for one. But often it’s a fake marriage and the women are sold when they come to China,’ said Julia.
Their collaboration in the trafficking trade is probably a result of them being almost as poor as their cousins in Myanmar and willing to do anything to rectify that. Possibly, it is just sheer ruthlessness. But there is no question that poverty drives the sale of women. China’s gender imbalance ensures a market for forced brides, but it is the dire economic and political situation in Shan and Kachin State that prompts young women to leave. It wouldn’t matter if the barrier between Muse and Ruili was ten metres high and electrified; people would still find a way to come to China in search of better lives.
Part IV
DONGBEI – PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES
There is nothing like being an imperial people to make a population conscious of its collective existence . . .
Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (1990)
21
The Pyongyang Express
I thought the two men were Han at first. They wore the black trousers and shoes and casual but smart sweaters which are almost a uniform for provincial Chinese businessmen. Swaying in the area between carriages, cigarettes burning between their fingers, they could have been any aspiring entrepreneurs returning home after a trip to Beijing. But over the roar of the train, I heard them speaking a different language to Mandarin. Then I glimpsed the tell-tale badges of Kim Il-sung fastened to their sweaters.
‘Where are you from?’ I asked. ‘North Korea,’ one replied in surprise. I tried not to smile. For the last couple of hours, I had been prowling through the carriages in search of North Koreans. It was the reason I had caught this particular train: the K27. Twice a week, it departs Beijing for Pyongyang, capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), better known as North Korea. Apart from a handful of flights and a train from Moscow, the K27 is the only public transport link between the DPRK and the outside world.