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• China-Burma Border Trade Continues to Grow
• For Women, Going across Border to China Means No Return

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THE fruits of Yu Lian and her sister's hard work can be readily seen by anyone who takes a good look at this village in south-western China — the gleaming two-storey house that stands out among the traditional, black-roofed homes made of bamboo.

Their home in this village of 300 residents in Menghai county, located in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan province, was built from the money they saved from working for four years in Malaysia.

But how these women from the Dai ethnic group ended up all the way down south in Malaysia is another story.

Twenty-eight year-old Yu Lian (not her real name), now waiting to marry her Taiwanese fiance, says she had been trafficked by a male villager who in 1993 approached her and her cousin and talked them into 'buying gold' in Thailand — all travel expenses covered by him.

Intrigued by the possibilities of a new life away from the village, the two left Menghai, which shares 146.5-km border with Burma in the west and south, and went on mountain trails all the way from Small Mengla over the border to Kengtung in Burma — ''sleeping only when we could walk no more''.

From Burma they crossed the border to the Thai town of Mae Sai in Chiang Rai province, where they were handed over to a Thai woman in her 40s. From there they went further to Thai capital of Bangkok — and straight to a nightclub.

With the help of the women already in the club, some from Burma, Yu Lian and her cousin made it to the police on their second day in Bangkok. They were sheltered in a child centre for two years before Yu was entrusted to a Malaysian for whom she did domestic work.

When the Malaysian died of nose cancer in 1999, his aunt sought help from the Chinese Embassy and had Yu repatriated home.

Meantime, Yu, with a schooling of not more than six years, was not the only one in her village who had fallen prey to human traffickers. Her sister, now a tour guide on a deluxe cruise where foreigners go fishing in Phuket, Thailand, was deceived and trafficked in 1994.

"She can speak Thai and English," says Yu Lian with pride. "She had been cheated by a married couple in the village. We reported later to the police and the couple ran away to Burma."

The trafficking of people across the border has grown in the border areas of Yunnan since the 1980s when China opened its border, observes Yu Hanbian, an official with the women's federation of Mengzhe township, Menghai.

"Many people on either side of the border speak the same language and share similar customs. Local residents have been moving fairly freely across the border for a long time," she says. "In Manlai village alone, seven girls were trafficked to Thailand from 1994 to 1998, mostly via friends or relatives."

Official figures show that 1,041 women from Menghai, which has a population of 293,400, had crossed the border and entered Burma by 2000. Some went of their own free will, others were trafficked.

A study conducted by the International Labour Organisation Mekong Subregional Project to Combat Trafficking in Children and Women at the end of 1999 showed that more than 5,000 rural residents of Menghai — two-thirds of them women — were leaving their villages to seek work elsewhere every year. Nearly 40 percent of these migrants sought work outside China.

Many girls, about 70 percent below the age 18, from Simao, Lincang and Xishuangbanna in southern Yunnan have been trafficked to Thailand, Malaysia and other South-east Asian countries for sexual exploitation, says Xian Yanming, deputy chief of the Yunnan Provincial Public Security Department.

The main driving force behind migration is poverty. In rural Menghai, per capita income is less than 1,000 yuan (120 U.S. dollars). "I hadn't seen a 50-yuan (6 dollar) bill before (I went to Thailand)," admits Yu Lian.

Xian adds that little communication with the outside world, naivete due to poor education and lack of experience add to the vulnerability to being trafficked. Promixity is another factor, since "the nearest point from Yunnan to Thailand is only 200 kilometres''.

Vorasakdi Mahatdhanobol, a researcher at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and a volunteer interpreter for the Centre for the Protection of Children's Rights Foundation in Thailand, found that all the 35 Chinese women CPCR rescued from Thai brothels from 1991 to 1993 were from Simao and Xishuangbanna.

"Sightseeing and job offers are the tricks to lure the girls out. Since the China-Burma border has no fences or walls, natural barriers such as mountains and rivers can hardly stop the girls from snaking into foreign land," writes Vorasakdi in his book 'Chinese Women in the Thai Sex Trade'.

In the seven years to 1997, CPCR rescued through police raids and insiders' help 70 Chinese women and children from the Thai flesh trade.

The number of cases handled by CPCR have since dwindled sharply, because "it's much more difficult to get tips on trafficked women and children" as the trafficking networks seem to become more efficiently organised, says Wassana Kaonopparat, a CPCR expert on trafficking.

On the Chinese side, says Yu Hanbian of the Mengzhe Township Women's Federation, the number of trafficked people is now anyone's guess because very few report to the police.

Sompop Jantraka, a Thai social worker based in Chiang Rai province, says that in trying to curb cross-border trafficking, "The most difficult part is that we don't know the area of China, the environment, the culture. Otherwise you'll have the confidence and know you are sending someone to some place safe, a place (where) children can survive."

Worse, he adds: "Lots of young girls now wait for certain recruitment to come again. This is something scary''.

Chinese law says that traffickers who sell women and children abroad or for sexual exploitation face 10 years' imprisonment. But if victims do file lawsuits, it happens years after the trafficking took place.

Without effective law enforcement cooperation between China and neighbouring countries, Chinese police say they are relatively powerless to act against cross-border trafficking.

Mahatdhanobol suggests that a formal cooperation along the lines of an extradition treaty be forged to allow witnesses to cross borders and testify.

Zhang Jie, a researcher on cross-border migration with the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, says more attention is needed on the social roots of trafficking.

"Modernisation is not merely embodied in skyscrapers and highways," she says. "We must guard against the tendency that minority people who have been at peace with nature for generations are marginalised and overwhelmed by the mainstream culture in the globalisation tide."

Zhang has also found that many survivors of trafficking seem to have been uprooted and do not feel at home at either side of the border, even after they are rescued.

Yu Lian of Menglai is not staying put. She is waiting for her fiance, a Taiwanese doctor she met in Thailand, to take her away for marriage. Her sister "is no longer used to life here," either.

But despite the toll on the trafficked women, it is easy for others in the village to see only the material benefits of their years overseas. "These girls and their material gains may arouse envy among other girls at home. But their marriage and future are simply uncertain," says Zhang.

Liu Meng of the China Women's University based in Beijing adds: "You can hardly resist the impact of external influences and foreign lifestyle, which can be reinforced by China's opening up. Unless you get well developed, you cannot expect people to stay at their homeland contentedly."

Until then, she says, "what we could do is to provide potential migrants information on self-protection, control of HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases and skills training."

More population mobility is expected in China's border areas. The highway project linking Kunming, Yunnan's capital, to Bangkok is slated to be completed in 2006 — and reach the road networks of Malaysia and Singapore.

Ma Guihua of 'China Features' wrote this story under the IPS-Rockefeller Media Fellowship Programme called 'Our Mekong: A Vision amid Globalisation'.