Subject: [Stop-traffic] News/China: Chinese wife-enslavers executed
From: Melanie Orhant (morhant@igc.org)
Date: Thu Nov 30 2000 - 14:15:57 EST
From Salon.com
Chinese wife-enslavers executed
Six merchants
were put to death last week for
selling poor
women to northern Chinese farmers.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Hank Hyena
Dec. 9, 1999
Six convicted men
got deadly bullets blasted into
the backs of
their heads Sunday for the crime of
selling women as
wife-slaves to love-starved
northern Chinese
farmers, reports Monday's
Legal Daily, a
Chinese state-owned newspaper.
The flesh
merchants were sentenced and
executed by the
Intermediate People's Court in
the Shanxi
province's capital city of Taiyuan, in a
public trial
watched by 10,000 people.
Prostitution,
forced marriages and woman-selling
were outlawed by
the communist government of
Chairman Mao
Tse-tung in 1949.
Each doomed
gangster was also impelled to pay
20,000 yuan
($2,400) before his execution. Seven
accomplices were
fined 10,000 yuan and received
life in prison.
The wife-selling
cartel was judged guilty of
tricking 52
impoverished young peasant women
into believing
that the men would find them
distant
employment. The hoodwinked maidens
were gathered
from the marketplaces of Kunming
and Guiyang
cities in the southwestern provinces
of Yunnan and
Guizhou. The enslavers abducted
them to rural
Loushan and Jingle counties in
northern Shanxi,
where farmers purchased the
captive brides
for 3,000 to 6,000 yuan each ($361
to $722).
Official Chinese
figures indicate that 88,000
Chinese women and
children were stolen and
sold into
marriage and slavery from 1991 to 1996.
Human-rights
organizations believe that the true
figures are
significantly higher.
An Oct. 12, 1998
U.S. News & World Report
article describes
one scenario in the wife-selling
phenomenon:
"Eighteen-year-old Yang Wenfang
... was lured to
a riverside, and before she
realized what was
happening, a man dragged her
into a
dilapidated boat and took her far away.
She was locked up
for several days ... until a
buyer came to inspect her."
Yang Wenfang
claims that the first peasant
customer who
examined her was "in his 30s and
very ugly, so I
refused to go with him. The
kidnappers told
me if I didn't marry him, they
would find me a
man in his 60s and it would
serve me right."
When the intimidated girl
relented, she was
purchased, locked in the man's
hovel, guarded by
his kinfolk and eventually
coerced into
being his breeder wife.
The demand for
wives in China has skyrocketed
due to a gender
imbalance: 100 females per 130
males. The number
of girls, particularly in rural
areas, has been
decimated by selected abortion
and infanticide
due to the traditional preference
for boys.
salon.com | Dec. 9, 1999
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Hank Hyena is a
columnist for
SF Gate, and a frequent
contributor to Salon.
Sound off
Send us a Letter
to the Editor
Send e-mail to Hank Hyena
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Melanie Orhant
Stop-Traffic Moderator
Please contact me off-list for any questions about Stop-Traffic at
<<morhant@igc.org>>.
Women's Reproductive Health Initiative
Program for Appropriate Technology in Health
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trafficking in persons into sweatshop labor, domestic servitude,
forced prostitution, forced agricultural labor and coercive
mail-order bride arrangements. Trafficking in people for forced
labor is an ever-growing worldwide phenomena that affects the health
and well-being of millions of women, men and children.
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