China’s Korean Comfort Women

Professor Donna Hughes, who spoke at last week’s Freedom House conference, has an article in National Review online about the trafficking of North Korean women in China. Thanks to her for forwarding a copy.

Women and children are increasingly the majority of refugees crossing the river into China. If they can locate a friend or relative’s house, they have a chance at finding a safe haven. But if the ethnic Korean Chinese traffickers find them first, they are abducted and sold, either to men as informal wives or concubines or to karaoke clubs for prostitution. Their price and destination are determined by their age and appearance. China’s one-child policy has resulted in a deficit of women from selective abortions, infanticide, and the selling off of girl babies. Kidnapping and trafficking have become common ways that Chinese men acquire women.

The women are raped by sellers and buyers. Some of the traffickers are looking for a woman for themselves, and they sell the other ones. According to an activist who makes regular trips to China to assist refugees, women are mostly sold in cities in Jilin Province in northeast China. He has gone to karaoke clubs in search of women and found that the clubs were protected by Chinese police. A young woman refugee said that Chinese officials are complicit in the trafficking of North Korean women.

Just imagine if it were exposed that a famous Korean politician had once been an advocate of overlooking Japanese enslavement of Korean women in the name of accomodation, or acting as a “regional balancer.”