China’s missing Brides

Inside the cardboard box there is an orange hair tie, a packet of Q-tips, lipstick, other cosmetics and a deck of playing cards: all of these items were left behind by Afang, Li Yongshuai’s Vietnamese mail-order bride, when she disappeared in 2014.

Li, a corn farmer from the village of Feixiang in China’s Hebei province, turns each object over in his hand as though it contains some crucial clue and then methodically replaces it. Finally, he produces a photo of Afang. She looks 19 or 20 and is posing with a hand on one hip against a painted backdrop of a beach.

Some shiny material, resembling glitter, is stuck to the glass picture frame near her head. Asked what it is, Li says it was where she painted over her face with nail polish a few days before she left. He now realises she meant to say she was leaving, and that he should not wait for her. He scraped the nail polish off and still keeps the photo.

Afang was one of dozens of Vietnamese migrant brides who married into villages in the region in the past decade. Partly, they helped to plug a gap in the gender balance created over three decades of China’s one-child policy, which led to a surplus of boys in rural villages. The subsequent shortage of women has driven local bride prices through the roof, Li’s mother says, and so men have begun looking elsewhere for cheaper wives.

In her son’s case, they turned to the village matchmaker, an older immigrant from Vietnam who owned a hair salon nearby and had a thriving business matching local men with Vietnamese girls. That was until November 21 in 2014, when an event occurred that has left this little corner of China reeling. All the Vietnamese brides in the region, including Afang, said they were going to a party — then promptly vanished. Nothing has been heard from them since. The millions of renminbi in bride price money which the girls, their parents and the matchmaker had received were never seen again.

Police claim they have 28 reports of vanished brides from that single episode, though locals say they know of many more. There were four in Feixiang, dozens in surrounding villages, maybe more than 100 in total. Whatever private regrets Li has, it is the money that wounds him the most. “So much money we paid for her. Rmb150,000 [about Dh83,250]. She was not cheap, and they had promised us a refund if this happened, which we never got,” he says. “That’s not including all the furniture and the smart TV.”

We are having lunch at his house in Feixiang. Bales of recently harvested corn cobs sprawl across the courtyard of the house, a kerosene heater the only source of warmth in late November. We wear our coats indoors. Feixiang is three hours from Beijing by train but it feels like three decades. The streets outside are unpaved, becoming rivers of mud in the rains. Toilets are outdoors. Li and his family are comparatively well off but the village itself is poor.

His mother stoops over a camp stove boiling water, bringing us platters of steaming mantou buns and cabbage. Guests are treated well in Feixiang: whatever the villagers have they give but life is harsh and they don’t have much. “If you meet a nice girl in Handan [the regional centre, about an hour away], can you introduce us?” his mother asks.

Li, a handsome man with a ready grin from a relatively wealthy family, would normally have no trouble finding a wife. But economics and demographics have intervened. Only a generation ago, China exported black-market mail-order brides to Taiwan and Japan. Now, after two decades of growth, even corn farmers can afford to bring brides in from poorer parts of Asia.

This has become something of a necessity in this part of Hebei for men who want families. Feixiang is desperate for women, a predicament it shares with many parts of rural China. Since 1979, when the government placed strict limits on family size, fearing an environmental calamity if population growth went unchecked, the lack of girl babies has become a serious problem. Violations were punishable by heavy fines, coerced abortions, sterilisation of women, destruction of houses, loss of jobs and the removal of infants from their families.

The lopsided gender balance is mainly a problem in rural China, where preference for boys is strongest and sex selection via sonogram, though banned, was not as strictly regulated as in the city. “All the girls were aborted,” says Li Xinjiang, the father of another local man whose bride ran away. He uses the term zhi, or cured in Chinese. “We couldn’t pay the fines and they used to send people to beat us if we didn’t pay.”

This is not the first time that the unintended consequences of mass social engineering by the Communist party have hit rural China tragically hard. The industrialisation programme known as the Great Leap Forward spawned a famine in the late 1950s that killed 30 million. Today, the results of the one-child policy, combined with pervasive sex selection, are obvious. Starting in the 1990s and 2000s, the number of girls plummeted. China scrapped the one-child policy last October.

According to Chen Wuqing, a specialist in gender studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, men like Li are “just the tip of the wave”. Currently, he says, the ratio of marriage-age men to women nationwide shows no real extremes; 105 men per 100 women is actually remarkably close to the world average. Even the ratio of men to women in the 20-24 age bracket was 109 nationwide in 2013, which is not excessive. But the statistics for younger children are truly disturbing: between 117-118 males per 100 females for all age categories under 14.

That means in five to 10 years the shortage of marriageable women experienced in Feixiang today will be nationwide. By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million surplus bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches”.

All over China, men and women are confronting the increasingly fraught economics of finding a partner. This is not just the result of gender ratios: uneven economic development has opened fissures in Chinese society. While the past two decades have seen millions lifted out of poverty by growth and successful reforms, this has come about largely as the result of massive urbanisation.

In turn, this has left rural China depleted when it comes to resources and young people, while mass migration has further skewed delicate social balances. In 1978, on the eve of the economic reforms that first unleashed this flood of humanity, less than 20 per cent of China’s population lived in a city. Today, 55 per cent of people live in urban areas.

In Feixiang, the few women there are tend to leave. Men go to work on construction sites, coming back home to harvest once or twice a year. Women, meanwhile, become factory girls and nannies. “The girls have left the villages to find work,” says Li. And the men? “Some of the men stay at home and open small businesses, or put their skills to work here,” he says.

That means that while there is a surplus of men in rural areas, there is the opposite problem in tier-one cities. In Beijing, for example, there are eight eligible women for every available man, according to Zhou Xiaopeng, who researches marriage economics for China’s top dating website Baihe.com. Women are more likely to stay in the cities, even if their marriage prospects are not as good, she says. “Once your standard of living goes up it is hard to lower it again. Especially for women. To put it bluntly: do you like to bathe every day? Women who move to cities tend to stay there, while for men it is more temporary.”

The rise in housing prices, meanwhile, makes it prohibitively expensive to get married in a city where apartments can cost the same as in London or Paris, while incomes — measured in dollars — still lag behind Belarus. “The reason for the rise in the cost of marriage is that the women nowadays need to feel secure,” Zhou says. “It’s not because there is a shortage of women.”

A man registering at Baihe.com will be told that a financial audit is the first thing that female clients ask for and a necessity if he wants to attract any interest. A top female client, such as one with an advanced degree, “will want to see a bank balance with at least Rmb100 million [Dh54 million],” Zhou says. “That’s the starting point.” Almost all female clients ask that a potential male make at least Rmb8,000 a month. “Less than 4,000 and he is not qualified to be in a relationship,” she says. “If this sounds harsh, it is.”

Ma Chunhua, a gender specialist at CASS, says that the main pressure on bride prices is the wide income gaps that have opened in China. “Women today want to feel protected and so they apply an upfront cost [to getting married],” she explains. The rise in bride prices began in the 1990s when there was no real shortage of women nationwide. CASS research on bride prices in China, published in 2011, records average prices of Rmb10,000-Rmb11,000 between 1990-1999. These rose to 33,000 in the decade after. “Obviously there has been a lot of inflation since,” says Ma.

But while shortages of women have yet to appear in nationwide statistics, Ma points to a scarcity of men at the top end of the social pyramid and of women at the bottom, driven by economic changes. “The A men marry the B women, the B men marry the C women, the C men marry the D women. The only groups left are the A women and the D men, and the D men can bring in the E women, the mail-order brides,” she says.

When it was time for Li to marry, his father, like many others in the village, consulted Wu Meiyu, the local matchmaker. Wu, according to people who know her, had arrived 20 years ago from Vietnam as a former mail-order bride herself. She built a thriving business finding Vietnamese brides for the local men. A formidable woman by all accounts, she was also an entrepreneurial one, whose beauty salon doubled as a “palace of romance” complete with white plastic chairs and a flower display.

Villagers would bring sons to meet the two or three Vietnamese girls she brought over every few weeks from the old country. Where these girls came from or who they were remains a mystery. They tended to stick together, calling each other “sister” according to Li, and they never had any paperwork. None of the families we spoke to could offer any proof of identification for their wives or daughters-in-law.

Wu gave a guarantee with her girls — if they ran off before five years, the abandoned husbands would get a new bride, free of charge. That was good enough for most of the villagers. “I didn’t really want to get married but my friends were getting married and my parents wanted me to get married, so I thought: why not?” says Li.

Li first met Afang at Wu’s salon. She was pretty but spoke virtually no Chinese. However, her price tag was unbeatable: she cost Rmb150,000. This seemed pretty steep to Li but his father reminded him that it was about half of what local girls cost and, in contrast to them, there would be no need to buy her a house and possibly a car. Scarcity value has made the price of marrying a Chinese girl astronomically high.

Deal done, they went back to Li’s house. There had been no wedding and no papers were signed. His father had called a cousin to raise the money to get his 23-year-old son a wife. “Vietnam had never crossed my mind before, I had never thought about it,” says Li. “I still don’t know who she was, where she came from.” They scraped together enough to buy furniture and a flatscreen TV for the new family member.

The men of Feixiang seem able to recall the monetary negotiations that accompanied their marriages or those of their kin in minute detail. They know precisely how much was paid, how much was borrowed, what was the value of other property that went towards the bride. But, like Li, they are hazy on the details of the women they were marrying.

Li Guichen, another husband who lost a bride in the same exodus, can’t remember what she was called. “I’m not sure what her name was, I didn’t even get to know her before she left,” he says. Li Guichen is in his forties and the Vietnamese bride was his second marriage. She stayed for six days.

What was she like? “She was like a normal woman,” he says. Explaining his decision to marry her, he cites simple economics. “We only marry a foreign wife when we have no other choice. Because we are poor, we don’t have a good source of income. They ask for a low betrothal gift, we can afford it, that’s the reason. If we were to marry a local bride, the gift plus building a home, a car, that would be Rmb400,000-Rmb500,000. For the gift alone, this year the rate is between Rmb180,000 and Rmb300,000.”

Li Yongshuai says he never learnt Afang’s last name, nor did he see any ID cards or passports, which made establishing her identity difficult.

Xinjiang, the father of another jilted groom, also cannot remember the name of his son’s bride. “We called her ‘Hey, come eat’.”

Marriage in rural China is very much an exchange of property and the women are just one of the commodities involved in the exchange. As a result, the lives of the Vietnamese brides were not always easy. They had one function, which was to reproduce, and they were rewarded for staying. The first words in Chinese that Afang learnt, says Li, were “Mama, Papa, I’m out of money.”

Afang didn’t take well to life in Hebei, land of harshly cold steppes and coal mines. She made them buy rice — which as Chinese northerners they never eat. “After she left we had to feed the rice to the chickens,” says Li’s mother. She also left behind a clue to what may have been on her mind: a Vietnamese-Chinese phrase book entitled 7,000 Chinese Sentences for all Circumstances.

Handwritten on a blank page are phrases that Afang was apparently trying to learn. “That’s because you don’t allow me to go out” is at the top, followed by “You smell!” and “You need a bath.”

Things may not have been going very well, Li admits, though he insists that she was free to come and go. “She always had the scooter,” he says. It’s clear from his retelling that the couple didn’t exactly get along. “Sometimes she got angry, sometimes I got angry,” he admits. Only once, after he nearly lost his leg in a motorcycle accident, did she show some tenderness. But that was mixed with glee: “She finally thought she would get away from me for a few days. She was happy.”

Then, last November, the matchmaker Wu started acting strangely. She went off for long trips, taking groups of girls with her, sometimes for days. Then she reappeared, saying she was gathering all the brides’ ID cards for the purpose of registering them. A day or two after that came the mysterious party and subsequent vanishing.

Li remembers his phone began ringing: “They [other grooms] said, we can’t get through to them [the brides].” He tried calling Afang but her phone account had already been shut down. Some of the brides had left children behind, and some had been living with their husbands for years. It was obvious the men had been scammed. “We think she had been planning it for a long time,” he says.

Police in Qizhou named a special detective task force to investigate the 28 reports of bride price fraud. Li says he and several others went to give statements but were warned off co-operation by relatives who “said we might get in some kind of trouble”. Last December, the police claimed to have made three arrests, though Wu remains unaccounted for. Officer Zhang, the task force leader, contacted by phone, declined to discuss the case, saying it is ongoing.

Feixiang may have been the largest bride price fraud incident to date but it is by no means the only one. In 2013, eight Vietnamese brides vanished in Shandong province, while in 2012 another eight disappeared in Jiangxi. In March 2015, police in Suiyuan broke up a large Vietnamese bride fraud gang, arresting 11.

Back in Feixiang, Li says he would like to find a new wife and settle down, but the warped economics caused by China’s past few decades make it seem like a distant goal. He has few options — he won’t be doing any mail-order brides again, he says. But moving to the city would mean he couldn’t afford a house. Meanwhile, staying in Feixiang means finding someone to move to the country — not an easy ask. “I guess I have to meet a girl first before I decide. If I find someone right, I’ll get married — but if I get married again, my family will have to borrow more money.”

Women have more bargaining power

As the shortage of girls in rural villages continues, more and more bargaining power is put in the women’s hands. This is clear not only from the rise in bride prices but also in the way men are adapting to new behaviour.

It was not possible to speak to any of the vanished brides but a Vietnamese woman who gave her name as Thu agreed to share her views through a translator. She married into a Chinese family in Liaoning, in northeast China, and has stayed, she said, largely because her in-laws and husband allow her to return yearly to Vietnam with her children.

Thu has no personal knowledge of what happened in Feixiang but she does know three Vietnamese brides who have run off, including her sister-in-law. “I think that was mostly because the brides’ families were a little bit mean, they don’t keep up their promises that Vietnamese brides can go back to visit their families,” she said. “They are afraid that when they leave for Vietnam, they don’t come back. Some families don’t even allow them to eat proper food [meaning Vietnamese food].”

Thu stayed because she was treated well. “Living here, I see that the husbands do almost everything,” she said. “They have to work and the women at home just play mahjong. In Vietnam women aren’t supposed to spend all day playing cards.

“When they get married, they accept their new lives. When they return to Vietnam, if the new lives are good, the husbands are good, then of course they will go back to China. But if the husbands treat them badly, they have to run.”

Her husband, a migrant worker, was sitting next to her when we contacted Thu at her family’s home outside of Ho Chi Minh City during a trip back to Vietnam. He not only lets her travel to see her parents, he goes with her, and has made the effort to learn Vietnamese. They have a young daughter, loudly playing in the background during a video chat. “It’s important for her to be happy too, that’s why we’ve stayed together” he says.

(Financial Times)