China’s Shadow Empire: A Global Leader in Human Trafficking
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Commentary
In addition to its advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technological achievements, China is a dominant force in that most ancient of depraved practices: human trafficking.
According to the U.S. State Department’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, China remains on Tier 3—the lowest ranking—for failing to meet minimum standards to combat trafficking, with government complicity in widespread abuses.
This isn’t just cruel criminality; it’s state-orchestrated terror, abuse, and mutilation. What’s more, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plays a key role in dreary trade by exploiting its vast population under its totalitarian control to fuel a multi-billion-dollar industry of forced labor, sexual slavery, and forced organ harvesting. The Chinese regime targets vulnerable groups not just to suppress dissent and instill fear within the population, but to reap illegal economic gains, as well.
China’s Trafficking Network
The CCP’s hand in human trafficking isn’t a new phenomenon in the world; other nations and civilizations have practiced human trafficking for centuries, if not millennia. That said, the CCP’s trafficking efforts aren’t done in half measures.China’s state-sponsored trafficking enterprises are worth billions in revenue per year, aided by the latest surveillance technology and financial influence. The CCP’s trafficking tentacles extend throughout the country and international channels, trafficking vast numbers of refugees and dissidents alike. From rural child abductions to the systematic organ trade from prisoners of conscience, to sex slavery around the world, there are seemingly no limits on victims or trafficking behaviors that the CCP is not willing and able to perform.
Trafficking of Children for Forced Labor and Adoption
China’s internal migration crisis is a major source of trafficking. With more than tens of millions of rural migrants, children are “left-behind” by parents seeking urban jobs. By some estimates, millions of those children are abducted or sold into brick kilns, factories, and illegal adoptions each year. Of course, that amounts to modern slavery, which is separate from the figures on organ trafficking.According to the 2023 Global Slavery Index (GSI), an estimated 5.8 million people were living in slavery in China in 2021, about 4 out of every 1,000 people in the country.
Women Trafficked for Sexual Exploitation and Forced Marriage
There are powerful dynamics beyond the financial draw that drive some of the trafficking. As a result of the CCP’s one-child policy, there are 30 million to 40 million more men than women, creating a shortage of marriage-aged women. To address this self-inflicted demographic crisis, Chinese authorities turn a blind eye to perpetrators importing brides through deception and coercion..
A Pakistani official takes pictures of detained Chinese nationals on alleged involvement in a trafficking gang to lure Pakistani women into fake marriages, arriving at a court in Islamabad, Pakistan, on May 9, 2019. Christian girls are being lured into marriages with Chinese men, whom they are told are Christian and wealthy, only to end up trapped in China, married to men who are neither Christian nor well-to-do, and some are unable to return home. B.K. Bangash/AP Photo
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For example, women from Burma (Myanmar), Vietnam, North Korea, and Pakistan are lured to China with job promises, only to be sold for $3,000 to $13,000 into forced marriages, prostitution, or as concubines. The 2024 Trafficking In Persons Report notes traffickers use fraudulent brokers to subject these women to rape, forced childbearing, and domestic servitude, with North Korean refugees particularly vulnerable due to deportation fears. Human Rights Watch reports this “bride trafficking” generates billions, with victims from ethnic minorities facing compounded discrimination.
But it’s not a big concern for the CCP. For example, in 2022, the plight of Xiao Huamei, who was chained for 24 years after multiple sales, exposed the systemic failures within China to stop trafficking or punish those who do it, yet Chinese authorities downplayed the report.
North Korean Trafficking Channels Border Smuggling and Forced Returns
China’s poorly guarded northern border with North Korea is a major channel for human trafficking between the two countries. Desperate North Korean defectors, mostly women fleeing famine and repression, are quick and easy targets for traffickers. As of 2023, up to 500,000 North Korean women and girls are trapped in China’s Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang provinces, sold into a $105 million annual sex and bride trade.The trafficking business with North Korea is depressingly simple. Brokers lure women across the Yalu and Tumen rivers with false job promises, only to force them into cybersex operations, prostitution, or marriages. The Korea Future Initiative documented more than 4,340 cases in the last decade, and according to Liberty in North Korea, 60 percent of female defectors were trafficked. This state-backed channel blends geopolitical complicity with profit, turning escape routes into slave pipelines.
Middle Eastern and South Asian Channels: Cross-Border Bride Scams
China’s demand for brides extends to Middle Eastern and South Asian routes, where traffickers exploit economic pacts and porous borders to supply women from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and beyond. These channels combine Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure with human trafficking, exporting China’s demographic crisis abroad, to the Middle East and South Asia.This is nothing new, of course; it’s been known for years.
Organ Harvesting and Political Persecution of Dissidents, Falun Gong, and Christians
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) began persecuting the spiritual practice Falun Gong in 1999, and since 2000, its practitioners have become prime targets of organ harvesting. China’s organ transplant industry is up to $1 billion annually—it relies on forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, intertwined with political persecution that silences dissent through trafficking-like abuses. Estimates are that 60,000 to 100,000 unexplained transplants occur yearly from blood-tested detainees..
(L-R) Robert Destro, former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Cheng Peiming, a Falun Gong practitioner who had his organs forcibly removed in China, and Dr. Charles Lee, forced organ investigator, speak during a press conference in Washington on Aug. 9, 2024. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
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In 2019, the China Tribunal concluded that organ harvesting had occurred “on a substantial scale,” killing victims in the process. In 2021, United Nations experts cited that involuntary procedures took place on Falun Gong, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians. In July this year, it was reported that the Chinese regime plans to triple the number of organ harvesting clinics in Xinjiang, which, incidentally, has a heavy Uyghur population.
When Will It End?
Will the CCP’s wicked practices against its own people and others ever end?At some point, it will. It must. But the CCP will have to meet its end first.
In the meantime, as the world marvels at its scientific and technological progress, keep in mind that communist China is also the world’s largest surveillance state, persecutes minorities, political dissidents, and religious groups, and allows corrupt officials to profit from its global supply chains of human misery.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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