Pomfretfeatures2009

In China, parents mourn children
abducted by traffickers
provinces across the country, according to
witnesses and postings on missing child
websites. Some children are abducted to
serve as props for beggars and women are
also kidnapped and sold into prostitution or
as forced labor in factories.
While many parents are aware of the problem
and have bolstered supervision of their kids
in known blackspots, elsewhere, particularly
in rural areas, a lack of publicity and media
exposure means parents are unaware of the
problem and often let their children play
outdoors unsupervised.
Estimates are difficult to come by, though
the China Ministry of Public Security reported
investigating 2,566 potential trafficking cases
in 2008.
“Due to lack of information and the difficulty
of tracing children in a vast country such as
China, very few children have actually been
found,” Kirsten Di Martino, UNICEF’s Chief
of Child Protection in China told Reuters in a
written response to questions.
FIGHTING BACK
The plight of such torn families is often made
worse by indifferent, sometimes callous
treatment by local police, lax child trafficking
laws and poor enforcement.
“In one case, the traffickers even dared to abduct
a child right inside a police station ... this shows
how rampant they are,” Zheng Chunzhong,
a bakery owner in Dongguan whose son was
kidnapped in 2003, told Reuters.
Since then, the slim, softly-spoken Zheng has
pressured Dongguan authorities to do more to
fight the problem, forming a local alliance of
some 200 parents who held a recent protest
march outside local government offices.
“There are too many cases of missing children.
They (the police) are too embarrassed to let
higher-level officials know,” he said during
a lunch that was interrupted by a public
security officer, a reminder of the police
surveillance he says he’s long endured due to
his outspokenness on the issue.
China’s relatively soft anti-trafficking laws have
made it difficult to locate missing children.
EXCELLENCE IN FEATURE WRITING
SOPA 2010
THOMSON REUTERS JAN 2010
By James Pomfret and Venus Wu
REUTERS imagery
DONGGUAN, 28 Jun 2009 (Reuters) – In
the quiet village of Shang Di, wedged among
factory towns in southern China, Deng
Huidong wheels out a dusty two-seater
tricycle that her 9-month-old son rode the day
he was abducted outside her family house in
2007.
Little Ruicong, who was snatched by men in a
white van as he played in an alleyway, hasn’t
been seen since.
He is one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of
children who go missing in China each year,
victims of roving criminal gangs preying on
vulnerable areas.
“My heart is bleeding,” said Deng as she
cried beside a framed photograph of her son
splashing in a bath tub.
“I just want to find my son. Every time I see a
child, it reminds me of my son and I wonder
whether I will see him again.”
While China has made giant economic
and social strides over the past few
decades, the number of abducted children
remains alarmingly high in a nation whose
wrenching one-child policy and yawning
income disparities have fueled demand for
children particularly male heirs, trafficked by
underground syndicates.
Human trafficking is widespread across China
with kidnapping cases reported in numerous
John Chalmers T +65 6870 3812
Editor, Political and General News, Asia M +65 9107 8590
18 Science Park Drive john.chalmers@thomsonreuters.com
Singapore 118229
49000171_SOPA_Collateral 1 1/27/10 12:32 PM

EXCELLENCE IN FEATURE WRITING JAN 2010
In its 2009 report on human trafficking, the
U.S. State Department said China’s trafficking
laws “do not conform to international
standards.” It urged China to “significantly
improve efforts to investigate and prosecute
trafficking offenses and convict and punish
trafficking offenders, including public officials
complicit in trafficking.”
Not only have current laws failed to deter
the buying of children, traditional patriarchal
values remain deeply engrained in places such
as Chaozhou and in poor, rural communities
where families still see nothing wrong in
buying a kidnapped boy.
“Further policy action particularly in the area
of social protection is required to reduce the
dependence of rural parents on their sons
for support in old age, sickness and other
difficulties,” said UNICEF’s Di Martino.
Boys, particularly toddlers, can fetch
30,000 yuan ($4,390) on the black market,
whereas girls fetch much less, around $500,
according to media reports, making it a
lucrative illicit trade.
Parents like Deng have transformed their
grief to activism, traveling across China with
banners and leaflets of their missing children,
while networking by phone and the Internet
to lobby authorities for tougher laws and
effective enforcement.
“Until now there are no real laws punishing
buyers ... if there is no one buying the children,
they wouldn’t snatch the children in the first
place,” said Deng.
But Fu Hualing, a legal expert at the
University of Hong Kong said cracking down
more on buyers could bring social strain.
While the current laws fail to deter the buying
of children, amending the laws alone cannot
solve the root of the problem, according to Fu,
a legal academic at the Hong Kong University.
“It has to do with one-child policy. Unless you
change that particular policy, there are lots
of social consequences which are very much
foreseeable,” Fu said.
In recent years, websites like “Baby Come
Home” (www.baobeihuijia) have cropped
up, providing a powerful forum for posting
2 SOPA 2010 • THOMSON REUTERS
missing child notices, while a groundswell of
volunteers nationwide have emerged, striving
to fill the void of poorly regarded police
enforcement and investigative work.
One volunteer said he’s helped rescue dozens
of abducted children in recent years by posing
as an online buyer to lure traffickers and their
go-betweens and then calling in the police.
“When I succeed, my conscience feels gratified
... I mostly use the Internet, it has transformed
how I find these kids,” said the 27-year-old
who is a martial arts instructor in Guangzhou.
Increased pressure from broken families, the
media, Internet bloggers and activists has led
to some hopeful policy shifts.
Around 20 Chinese provinces have now
established anti-trafficking strategies and
increased budgets for such enforcement
work, according to UNICEF, while the first
National Plan of Action on Anti-trafficking
was published in 2007 to boost co-ordination
among public security agencies spread across
China’s vast territories.
While the percentage of solved cases remains
low, there have been isolated breakthroughs
often trumpeted by state media.
In early June, police across China rescued 23
children in a nationwide crackdown on child
trafficking from poor regions including the less
developed southwestern province of Yunnan
and the coal-mining province of Shanxi.
Parental groups are also petitioning Beijing
directly for help, calls to further expand a DNA
database of missing kids that was set up in
May this year.
“It all depends on the central government’s
actions. You cannot rely on the local
government,” said Zheng.
“Even if there is only one percent hope, we will
still spend 100 percent of our efforts to find
our children,” he added.
REUTERS imagery

GUANGZHOU, 30 Apr 2009 (Reuters) – With
China’s rising affluence, increasing numbers of
infertile couples have been seeking surrogate
mothers to bear them babies.
In recent years, officials have largely turned
a blind eye to this underground womb-for-
rent industry that defies the country’s strict
childbirth laws. Now, there are signs the
authorities are starting to crack down by
forcing some surrogate mothers to abort
their fetuses.
In the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou,
three young surrogate first-time mothers
were discovered by authorities hiding in a
communal flat.
Soon afterwards, district family planning and
security officers broke into the flat, bundled
them into a van and drove them to a district
hospital where they were manhandled into a
maternity ward, the mothers recounted
to Reuters.
“I was crying ‘I don’t want to do this’,” said
a young woman called Xiao Hong, who was
pregnant with four-month-old twins.
“But they still dragged me in and injected
my belly with a needle,” the 20-year-old told
Reuters of her ordeal which happened in
late February.
The woman, who declined to give her full
name for fear of reprisals, said the men had
forced her thumbprint onto a consent form
before carrying out the abortion.
Another of the surrogates, who said she’d
come from a village in Sichuan province,
recounted how officers made her take pills
then surgically removed her three-month-
old fetus while she was unconscious. “I was
terrified,” the 23-year-old said.
A spokesman for the Guangdong Provincial
Family Planning Commission Zhong Qingcai
declined to be formally interviewed by Reuters,
but said authorities were investigating.
The official Guangzhou Daily newspaper
quoted district family planning officials as
saying the women were all unmarried and
acting as “illegal” surrogates. It added the
three had “agreed” to undergo “remedial
measures” in accordance with the law.
But the head of the surrogacy agency caring for
the mothers, disputes this version of events.
“It’s an absolute crime,” said Lu Jinfeng, the
founder of the “China Surrogate Mother”
website (www.aa69.com) which has run for
over five years without encountering any
problems like this.
“By forcefully dragging people away like this
Forced abortions shake up
China wombs-for-rent industry
By James Pomfret
REUTERS imagery
to undergo an abortion is a savage illegal act
that violates human rights.”
TIGHTER CURBS
Since the incident, a notable vein of officially
sanctioned media reports, including one paper
describing the profit margins of the surrogacy
business as “greater than the narcotics trade,”
has led some observers to expect tighter curbs
in future.
“When you see this kind of reporting it’s a kind
of public education ... a sign the government
is going to do something,” said Siu Yat-ming,
an expert on China’s family planning issues
with Hong Kong’s Baptist University.
“They’re becoming more aware of the
situation ... a lot of the (surrogacy) agencies
are making a lot of money just like an
organized industry,” Siu added.
Underground networks of surrogacy agents,
hospitals, and doctors have spread in recent
years as infertile Chinese couples with money
hire surrogates to produce babies for them.
The surrogates are often confined to secret
flats for most of the duration of their
pregnancy to avoid detection, while fertility,
obstetrics and childbirth procedures for the
mothers are often carried out discreetly by
medical staff at public hospitals and health
clinics with links to agents.
“Under China’s civil law, this (surrogacy)
should be prohibited. Intermediary
(surrogacy) services are also essentially
illegal,” said Zhang Minan, a law professor at
Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University and an
expert on the issue.
“But these cases exist and they cannot
possibly be made public or legalized. You
cannot legalize such practices,” he added,
referring to China’s tight birth planning rules
which have restricted couples to just one child
since the late 1970’s.
With around one in six couples in the U.S.
now estimated to be infertile and with
similar rates seen in China as modern urban
lifestyles take hold, surrogacy agencies have
been recruiting girls, often from poor villages,
to have babies on behalf of prospective
parents, in ever greater numbers.
Accurate figures on the size of the industry
are hard to come by, but a recent report by
the respected Southern Metropolis Weekly
estimated around 25,000 surrogate children
have been born so far in China, citing
research into surrogacy agency websites
carried out by family planning authorities.

Hundreds of Chinese surrogacy agencies
are openly listed on Chinese search engines
like Baidu, luring prospective clients with
maternal imagery and pop-up windows
offering live chats.
Prospective surrogate mothers are openly
recruited and paid between 50,000 to
100,000 yuan ($14,650) per pregnancy on
some sites, making it a lucrative profession
for poor village girls in a country where the
average annual per capital income for rural
households is around $600.
OUTLAWS
While emotional, ethical and legal
complications make surrogacy a thorny topic
in many countries, the trend has been on the
rise globally. India, in particular, has become
a “surrogate outsourcing” hub for infertile and
gay Western couples.
“There are millions of people out there who
want to have kids but can’t,” Robert Klitzman,
a bio-ethicist at Columbia University’s Medical
Center told Reuters by phone from New York.
India has moved to introduce legislation on
surrogacy to safeguard the rights and health
of impoverished women from exploitation.
In some U.S. states paid surrogacy is outlawed,
while weak regulatory oversight in states such
as California has led to clients being duped by
unscrupulous surrogacy brokers.
“Whenever you have an underground industry
you’re going to have problems because
there’s no guarantee that they’re going to
follow standards of safety, follow standard
medical or ethical practice. There’s a lack of
transparency,” Klitzman added.
In China, however, with the number of
surrogate births still very small compared to
the overall birth rate, the prospect of a safe
legal framework remains a distant one, leaving
open the risk of arbitrary, violent enforcement.
“They (the authorities) do have the right (to
force abortions) but it rarely happens because
such surrogacy is extremely secretive. And for
the authorities it’s difficult to get evidence,”
said Zhang, the legal scholar.
“Because this problem hasn’t yet sparked
widespread social interest, so from this
perspective the Chinese government hasn’t
really noticed the matter, nor accepted it,”
he said.
“If this problem does spark widespread social
interest, then authorities might start to do
something about it,” Zhang added.
REUTERS imagery

SHENZHEN, 28 Jan 2009 (Reuters) – As
China’s economic storm clouds darken and
more firms face bankruptcy, factory workers
such as Xiang Yongheng have seen their
confidence badly shaken in authorities who
are supposed to protect their labour rights.
Beaten by thugs last week after demanding
three months of unpaid wages from his
bosses at the “Yi Fan” food processing
factory in Shenzhen’s Longgang district,
Xiang appealed to the local labour bureau
and police for help, but to no avail.
“They just said we can’t help you. The
authorities are trying to suppress my case, I
even took evidence to them but they ignored
it and just told me to go away,” said the
25-year-old.
The enactment of the labour contract law
last year marked a new milestone in the push
to safeguard workers’ rights -- particularly
the 130 million or so migrant workers
powering China’s export engine – making it
tougher for bosses to fire staff, while boosting
social security and severance payouts.
While factory owners decried the laws as a
crippling cost burden, workers hailed the
ChInese labour laWs buCkle as
eConomy darkens
By James Pomfret
new legislation – which unleashed a flood
of arbitration and labour dispute cases in
migrant-heavy manufacturing hubs such as
Guangdong’s Pearl River Delta.
Now though, Xiang and many others are
becoming disillusioned by officials who turn
a blind eye to routine violations in order
to ease the burden on stricken businesses
during the downturn.
TURNING A BLIND EYE
“From what I’ve seen, workers’ justice
hasn’t changed for the better. Like what’s
happening here, we don’t sign contracts, nor
are things settled using the labour contract
law,” Xiang said.
The growing anecdotal evidence of the
strains on China’s labour laws have been
increasingly voiced of late, highlighting
the difficult task faced by China’s leaders
in balancing economic growth and social
stability during the downturn.
“The global economic crisis threatens to
derail much of the progress made by China’s
workers over the last few years,” said labour
rights group China Labour Bulletin in a
recent editorial.
The Dagongzhe Migrant Workers Rights
Centre in the southern boomtown of
Shenzhen has also voiced concerns at
pervasive “tricks” used by employers to
circumvent the new laws.
These include reduced overtime pay and
using doctored contracts that were either
blank, incomplete or written in English to
confuse and limit possible legal liabilities.
In a survey of 320 workers by Dagongzhe, 79
percent said they were “dissatisfied” with the
situation in factories, while nearly a quarter
said factory bosses had hiked both food
prices and penalties for minor mistakes on
production lines.
About 26 percent of workers never signed
any contracts, especially in smaller factories,
while 28 percent said they were paid less
than the legal minimum wage.
“A lot of factories now are using the financial
crisis as a means to protect their own
interests,” said Ivy Yu, a coordinator with the
Dagongzhe Migrant Workers Rights Centre.
In recent weeks, Guangdong’s prosecutor’s
office issued a controversial set of
guidelines, saying it wouldn’t prosecute key
business personnel or technical staff for
minor crimes, in a bid to help businesses
during the downturn.
The move generated a flurry of public
criticism. Meanwhile, other local
governments in the Pearl River Delta have
also weighed in with their own “guidelines”
to help keep firms afloat.
In Huizhou city, labour authorities recently
called on businesses to “stringently adhere”
to the labour contract law given the spectre
of greater bankruptcies, while advising
layoffs be carried out “as much as possible
on a small-scale to avoid legal procedures.”
RULE OF LAW UNDERMINED
But while enforcement of labour laws may
have been quietly allowed to slip during
the downturn, the stability-obsessed ruling
Communist Party hasn’t entirely ignored
the plight of workers either given the risk of
social unrest.
Provisions on mass layoffs and collective
dismissals were recently re-organised under
new “guidelines,” so that firms looking to
lay off more than 20 people or 10 percent
of their workforce now need to get approval
from local authorities.
The push seems to have had some success in
stanching potentially destabilising waves of
REUTERS imagery

layoffs in some cities.
“In Shanghai, where there’ve been lots of
layoffs, the local labour bureau told us that
so far nobody has even applied and they
don’t want to be the first ... to deal with
the mass layoffs,” said Andreas Lauffs, a
Chinese labour law expert at global law firm
Baker McKenzie.
“From a macro point of view, the
(Communist) party is looking at social
harmony as much as possible, and super-
afraid of millions of people unemployed on
the street and causing social unrest,” Lauffs
added.
While Beijing’s desire to tide things through
the crisis may be understandable, some
legal scholars say the shifting policies and
guidelines have ended up tarnishing China’s
rule of law.
“It’s always my view that the government
should not interfere with the function of the
court, nor the function of the enterprises,”
said Wang Guiguo, the dean and chair of
Chinese and Comparative Law at Hong
Kong’s City University.
“I think the government should leave the
market alone and let the market function
itself. If a company is bound to die, let
them die.
“As far as this labour law is concerned, I
think on the whole it’s a good law but most
probably has been introduced prematurely to
China, it’s too early,” Wang said.
For now, however, many factories are opting
to simply shut down to avoid paying workers’
claims for unpaid wages and severance pay
– a trend that could worsen during the Lunar
New Year when many migrants return home
for a long annual holiday.
“They (factory owners) didn’t have the
confidence in the legal system to go through
official liquidation and layoffs, so they just
walked away and gave up their assets,”
said Lauffs.
For Xiang, the worker who was severely
beaten and cheated out of his wages, the
new labour laws have opened his eyes to
social injustice, and he has no intention of
closing them again.
“This incident has made me very pessimistic,”
he said.
“But I’ve decided to fight till the end. My life
has come under threat, and I must deal with
this to defend the dignity of workers.”
GUANGZHOU, 20 Apr 2009 (Reuters) –
Sweating heavily and yelling at Chinese police
officers, a group of Nigerians dragged the
lifeless body of an injured compatriot up to
a Guangzhou police station, blood dripping
from a deep gash on his head.
Around them, a crowd of over one hundred
Africans chanted, some holding sticks as
others smashed potted plants and blocked
traffic, demanding justice from the Chinese
police after officers chased the man out of
a high-rise window in a tightening security
crackdown on illegal overstayers in the city
this year.
“They don’t like black people to stay in China
any more. They want us to go,” said Frank, one
of the Nigerians at the protest on July 15 that
was filmed by witnesses.
“They treat us like animals,” added Frank, an
illegal overstayer, who wouldn’t give his name
for fear of reprisals.
The spontaneous protest – a rare direct
confrontation between foreigners and
authorities in China – is a vivid reminder of
the challenges faced by Beijing’s stability-
obsessed Communist Party as it engages with
the world and builds up trade links abroad.
In the past few years, tens of thousands of
African and Arab traders have thronged to
export hubs like Guangzhou and Yiwu in
eastern China to seek their fortunes – sourcing
cheap China-made goods back home to
massive markups in a growing, lucrative trade.
But just as mass Chinese immigration abroad
has fanned recent social tensions in Africa
and other places, the influx of large numbers
of foreigners, particularly Africans, into
China is altering the social fabric of cities
like Guangzhou and proving a headache
to authorities.
While this rising tide of foreigners has
brought vast economic gains, the edgy
cosmopolitanism of melding cultures and
liberal ideals has been laced with racial and
social tensions, along with the problem of
illegal overstayers resorting to crime.
“While most black people are engaged in
valuable trading activities, others are staying
illegally, working without valid permits or
smuggling,” said Peng Peng, the research
Out of Africa and into China,
emigres struggle
By James Pomfret
REUTERS imagery

director of the Guangzhou Academy of Social
Sciences, a provincial thinktank.
“How to manage this is becoming a very big
problem.”
CULTURE CLASH
Guangzhou’s African community began
swelling in the late 1990s with a trickle of
traders from Mali, but in the past five years,
numbers have nearly tripled on a wave of
Nigerians to around 20-30,000 according
to Peng, though reports suggest there could
be as many as 100,000 if overstayers are
factored in.
While Africans have moved to other
cosmopolitan Chinese cities like Shanghai,
Hong Kong and Beijing, those in Guangzhou
are most conspicuous – filling the streets
in a district known as “Little Africa” replete
with ethnic shops, eateries, and export malls
crammed with all manner of goods including
fake designer jeans, wigs, bright African
textiles and VCD players.
But the influx has also caused unease among
local Chinese.
Some neighborhood committees bar Africans
from living in residential complexes, while
Internet forums such as Tianya buzz with
heated, at times xenophobic, discussions of
“black person” issues in the city.
“A lot of Chinese don’t like Africans, but there’s
nothing we can do. They’re flooding into
Guangzhou,” wrote one blogger on Tianya.
Others blamed the immigrants for problems
from drug peddling and petty theft, to the
spread of HIV among prostitutes.
On the streets, while explicit racism is rare
among conservative Chinese urbanites, fights
do sometimes break out between Africans and
Chinese over business disputes.
“Racial stereotypes on both sides do exist ...
it’s indicative of starkly different cultures,”
said Martyn Davies, a China expert at South
Africa’s Stellenbosch University.
“The challenge of the whole China-
Africa relationship is going to be cultural
acceptance ... It’s not about capital or
management skill or whatever, it’s about
culture and essentially to break down
stereotypes they have of one another.”
SECURITY SQUEEZE
In perhaps the most stark indication of official
discomfort with mass African immigration,
Guangzhou authorities have refused to allow
REUTERS imagery
more open and transparent immigration
policies, particularly for visa-extensions.
In numerous interviews with African traders
and illegal overstayers in the city, frustrations
at restrictive and inconsistent visa policies
have risen, exacerbating the plight of Africans
opting to stay on expired visas to keep their
businesses flowing, and thereby avoid costly
flights home and back again.
“It’s very rough,” said Emeka Ven Chukwu, a
30-year-old Nigerian based in Guangzhou.
“It’s been happening for a long time. Even
before the Olympics, it has been very difficult
to extend (visas).”
Resentment toward the police has also grown
amid the recent spate of overnight raids and
perceptions of corruption.
“They just want to arrest you, collect money,
then arrest you again,” said Paul Omoshola, a
Nigerian businessman in Guangzhou.
Visa extensions, seen as critical for traders
and fixers to stay beyond the usual 30-day
visa period – while difficult to obtain through
official channels – can be arranged relatively
easily through Chinese agents for large fees of
$2,000 upwards.
Guangzhou’s Public Security Bureau would
not comment on its visa and security policies
when contacted by Reuters.
“One thing that has been very apparent is
the arbitrariness of visa issuance in China,”
said Gordon Mathews, an academic at Hong
Kong’s Chinese University who has studied
the issue.
With the recent ethnic unrest in Xinjiang
having unnerved Beijing, some experts say
there could be a further tightening of visas
going forward, particularly with sensitive
anniversaries and events coming up.
“During the Asian Games (in 2010) there
will definitely be some level of control, this is
normal. After the Games, we can loosen things
a little,” said Peng, the thinktank director.
Ademola Oladele, a spokesman at the
Nigerian Embassy in Beijing, noted the
need for authorities to crack down on illegal
overstayers. But he also expressed concern at
the recent police raid that sparked such anger
among hundreds of Nigerians.
“If there is any clamping down on illegal
immigrants it’s fine. That’s their law. But it
should not be done in an inhumane way or a
way that could affect a life,” said Oladele.
STILL DOING BUSINESS
Sino-Africa trade exceeded the $100 billion
mark last year, a jump of 45 percent on the
year before, fueled at one end by China’s
demand for Africa’s energy and natural
resources, and Africa’s love of cheap Chinese
goods at the other.
The recent problems in Guangzhou however,
underscore the risks of such rapid changes
exacerbating cultural and religious differences
that might otherwise be avoided through
more sensitive policy-making.
Despite all the problems facing Africans
hoping to lay deeper roots in Guangzhou,
securing short-term visas for events like
the Canton Fair, Asia’s top trade fair, is
comparatively easy.
“It’s a piece of cake,” said Nampewo Sylivia,
a young single businesswoman from Uganda
happily browsing clumps of wigs made from
real and fake hair at the Canaan Wholesale
Trading Center.
“It’s still far easier to get a China visa than an
American one,” she added.
While African traders say business has fallen
sharply this year given a slump in African
demand during the downturn and sliding
exchange rates, many remain drawn to
China’s potential.
“China produces nearly everything that
you need in the world, said Omoshola, the
Nigerian trader who was also at the protest.
“We are still here doing business,” he added.

James Pomfret
thomsonreuters.com
© Thomson Reuters 2010. All rights reserved. 49000171
Republication or redistribution of Thomson Reuters content, including by framing or similar means, is
prohibited without the prior written consent of Thomson Reuters. “Thomson Reuters and the Kinesis logo
are trademarks of Thomson Reuters.”

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