China’s newest export: sex crimes

Religious police in the Gulf Arab state of Yemen recently shut down a string of Chinese restaurants and massage parlours that were fronting for illegal brothels and offering a range of ‘Arabian Night’ services.

Local television reported that authorities dragged Chinese women working in spas and restaurants onto the streets of Sanaa and sealed the vice dens being run by Chinese nationals who had entered the country illegally.

“You won’t find this type of trade recorded in official statistics,” RBS economist Ben Simpfendorfer, who has researched the emerging trade relationship between China and the Arab world, told DNA. “But this is symptomatic of the risks from the dramatically improved trade relationship between China and the Middle East, given the yawning cultural gap between them.”

It isn’t happening only in Yemen. As China’s profile as a trading superpower rises, and as the country’s interactions with the world increase, the outbound flow of Chinese nationals is casting similar dark shadows in the places where they operate.

China’s newest exports, say observers, are “sex crimes”. Syndicates run by Chinese nationals and émigrés have made the headlines in recent weeks and months for running a range of sex crime operations in cities around the world — from illegal brothels masquerading as massage parlours to, more seriously, trafficking of women from China. In some cases, these operations are run by underground Chinese Triad groups operating overseas. 

In just the past two weeks, Chinese citizens or émigrés in the UK, the US, Italy and Australia have been sentenced or are facing trial for sex crimes or have seen their illegal brothels shut down. Many of these cases involve the trafficking of young women from China who were lured by Chinese crime syndicates with offers of jobs as nannies or teachers and forced into prostitution.

Last week, three Chinese citizens were sentenced by a British court for trafficking women from China into brothels in several cities in the UK; in an unrelated case, a police manhunt was on to track down one of three Chinese citizens found guilty of running a chain of ‘chicken houses’ in London, Plymouth and elsewhere, in which trafficked girls worked as sex workers.

In a third case, a gang of Chinese men went on trial in London, charged with holding a Chinese sex worker prisoner for ransom; they had threatened to chop off her hands and bury her if her family back in China did not pay them a large ransom. And in Northern Ireland in May, police smashed a prostitution ring run by a Chinese Triad group and rescued several victims of trafficking for prostitution.

“Evidence points to a high level of Chinese men… at the heart of the sex trade in Britain, from lap dancing clubs to massage parlours,” notes Labour MP Denis MacShane.
Across the Atlantic, in the US, a court in Kansas City earlier this month sentenced two Chinese nationals to prison for sex-trafficking operations involving dozens of Chinese women who worked in massage parlours and offered sexual services.

 And just last week, the northern Italian town of Prato, which has seen a huge influx of Chinese immigrants in recent years, shut down a whole range of massage parlours, game rooms and sex shops “to contain cases of urban decay”.

Academics who have studied the phenomenon say the trafficking of women from China “is one of China’s most serious human rights violations.” Susan Tiefenbrun and Christie Edwards, professor and adjunct professor respectively at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, point out that Chinese citizens are trafficked out of China into Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North America. “Poor and desperate Chinese women are lured abroad with false promises of legitimate work only to be forced into prostitution and commercial sexual exploitation.”

And as China’s trade links with the world increases, and as outbound flow of Chinese travellers swells, the worry among observers is that the country’s export of “sex crimes” will also rise in proportion.