Population

(TIME: Nov. 11, 1991) When Lu Menphen, 21, was offered a job in a pharmacy in Shangqinsi in the southwestern province of Sichuan, she felt fortunate to get the work and did not hesitate to accept. Then her new employer suggested that she accompany him to Beijing to buy medicine. There she found she had fallen into a trap: her supposed employer sold her as a wife to a man she had never met before. He then took her with him to live in the norh-eastern province of Shandong, far away from her home and family.

Stories like Lu's are becoming all too familiar these days in China's impoverished regions. Says an economist in Beijing: "It's truly medieval and 'violates all laws." Young and often naive girls from the countryside are particularly vulnerable to men who abduct them and sell them into marriage or prostitution. Attracted by a lucrative and grow ing market in human beings, gangs specializing in abduction have sprung up around the country.

Children are also being kidnapped and sold, though on a smaller scale than women. One childless couple was recently reported to have paid 5,000 yuan, or $930, for a baby boy. In rural areas, where the government's one-child policy is not strictly enforced, peasants who have girls may want a boy in order to have an heir in the family. The official People's Daily has reported that almost 10.000 women and children are abducted and sold each year in Sichuan alone. Although no nationwide figures are available, the practice is known to be prevalent in such other poor areas as central Hubei, eastern Anhui. southeastern Jiangxi and southern Guizhou.

The practice of abducting and selling women was common in times past. Then, after the communists came to power in 1949, it was condemned as feudal and banned. But in the past decade it has returned, as rising unemployment and poverty have driven millions of young people from the countryside into the cities in search of work. (About 40 million peasants in China are currently looking for nonfarming jobs.) The economic reforms of recent years have also fueled a get-rich- at-any-price mentality. Says a Western academic in Beijing: "The problem of a commodity economy is that everything becomes a commodity, even human beings."

Exacerbating the problem is a ratio between the sexes that is unbalanced, in part because baby girls are often considered a burden and abandoned by their parents. For every 100 girls who survive infancy there are 106 boys. Faced with a shortage of marriageable women, peasant men will pay large sums for a wife. Moreover, buy ing a kidnapped woman for about 2.000 yuan, or $370, is cheaper than marrying a local girl and purchasing the various obligatory betrothal gifts for her family, which can run to as much as 5,000 yuan.

Most of the women who are abducted are poor, uneducated and traveling outside their home for the first time. Should they try to flee from the men who purchased them, they may be held prisoner. Some have had their leg tendons cut to keep them from running away; others have been kept in leg irons. One young woman, who was watched day and night either by her husband or by a member of his family to prevent her escape, managed to slip a letter out describing her plight. Before officials succeeded in rescuing her, they had to battle their way past 200 villagers armed with sticks and knives. Alarmed by the problem, Beijinh has launched a campaign against selling women, which it hss classified as one of the "six evils," along with prostitution, pornography, gambling, drug trafficking and what it calls feudal supentition (consulting fortune tellers and the like) During a 15-day crackdown in the coastal province of Shan- dong last June, city and county officials were called into the governor's office and told that they would he held responsible if they fialed to take action. During the peri- od, according to the English-language newspaper China Daily, 170 women and children were rescued, 859 middlemen arrested and 82 gangs broken up.

Under a law that will become effective Jan. 1, those who traffic in women and children may be sentenced to prison terms of five to 10 years and fined as much as l0,000 yuan. ($1,860), while those who obstruct official attempts to rescue victims will be liable for prison sentences of up to five years. In the most serious trafficking cases, capital punishment has been imposed. In a recent incident, for example, a farmer known to be involved in the flesh trade was tried and executed: a 23-year old woman he had sold committed suicide after she was raped by the man who had bought her.

The All-China Women's Federation, a semioffical agency, with 2.340 offices nationwide. has been working to publicize the new law and inform women of their rights and where to turn for help. The organization has also set up marriage-introduction services in every province to help bachelors find wives through legitimate channels. "The sale of women has become very serious," says Cui Keping, a deputy division chief for the federation in Beijing. "We must stop it"

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