- Published: 10/12/2011 at 12:00 AM
When China gets tough on crime or malfeasance in office, executions or severe prison sentences frequently follow. The precise number of these executions is a state secret and only those put to death for particularly heinous crimes receive special attention from the state media. They are alerted when the government wants to demonstrate its growing intolerance with a specific criminal activity such as corruption, disregard for food safety, soliciting bribes as a state official, or human trafficking.
The highest-ranking offender in recent years was former food and drug regulator Zheng Xiaoyu, who went to his death in 2007 for taking bribes to approve untested medicine at a time when Beijing was trying to show it was serious about improving the safety of Chinese products. The most recent was female gangland prostitution ringleader Wang Ziqi, who was executed this week for forcing hundreds of women into prostitution in Chongqing, southwest China. Aided by her sister, she would lure the women into working in beauty salons, hotels or teahouses, seize their identity cards and then force them into prostitution and confiscate their earnings. One girl, who was paralysed after jumping from the eighth floor of a brothel in a bid to escape in 2003, was forcibly detained until rescued by police six years later.
Such abuse is not a problem that is confined within China's borders. Officials in Beijing directing the fight against human trafficking, say that an increasing number of women from Southeast Asia are being smuggled into China, and sold into marriage or forced to work as prostitutes.
Many of these trafficked women come from poor rural areas of Vietnam, Burma and Laos and are lured by transnational criminal gangs with promises of good jobs or marriage with rich Chinese men who find themselves without wives because of the gender imbalance.
On arrival the victims are often sold to villagers as brides, or forced to become sex workers in underground brothels. State media reports say the women are "purchased" for between 20,000-50,000 yuan (96,000 to 242,000 baht) each. This is modern-day slavery but the profit margins are so immense, the payoffs so huge and the demand so unrelenting it will be a nightmare to stop. No single country has total jurisdiction, and transnational suppression operations are fraught with language and cultural difficulties and the absence of a proper chain of command. Look no further than the Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden for an example of how hostage-takers become adept at exploiting transnational barriers. China, as the destination country for these gangs, is going to have to prove once again how tough it can be.
Exploitation occurs in our own country, although on a lesser scale than it used to. Nowadays the victims are not always Thai, or even female. And no one should assume the absence of recent high-profile convictions means home-grown traffickers have reformed. Far from it.
They have merely turned their attention elsewhere. With porous borders and a prosperous economy, Thailand is a magnet for migration. Most of it comes from Burma, Laos and Cambodia and young men, many underage, are trafficked into slavery in the fishing industry and condemned to spend months at sea in appalling conditions.
The solution to human trafficking lies in enforcing the law, in better education and in awareness campaigns directed by some very smart and creative people.
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