Reduces pressure on families desperate for son: analysts
An official with the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) said on Tuesday that the nation's two-child policy announced last week will help reduce human trafficking.
Chen Shiqu, director of the anti-trafficking office of the MPS, said in an interview with chinanews.com that the two-child policy will help stem child trafficking at the source. "Because having a second child is allowed, it will decrease the demand for purchasing children. This can prevent trafficking."
China will ease its family planning policy in response to its aging population by allowing all couples to have two children, putting an end to the one-child policy introduced in the 1970s, according to a communiqué issued after the Fifth Plenary Session of the 18th Communist Party of China Central Committee on Thursday.
"Child trafficking has become rampant since the adoption of the one-child policy. In many places, family control is very strict and many couples are forced to undergo sterilization. Because the couples still want a boy, they take a risk and buy an abducted child," Zhang Baoyan, founder of Baby Come Home, an organization dedicated to helping abducted children go home, told the Global Times.
Data from court cases from January 2014 to October 2015 shows that the number of abducted boys is double the number of girls. In a child trafficking case heard in a local court in Jining, Shandong Province, boys were sold at 45,000 yuan ($7,101) on average, while girls started from 10,000 yuan, the Nandu Daily reported.
Zhang said that people in regions like Minnan in Fujian, Chaoshan in Guangdong, Shandong and Jiangsu are more prone to buy abducted children, because of the traditional values in those areas.
Zhou Haiwang, an expert with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that the new two-child policy has some good influence on reducing trafficking, but the new rule may not affect demand from families who buy children because they are unable to give birth to their own.
To better deal with child trafficking, China made changes in its criminal law that took effect on Sunday, stipulating for the first time that people who buy children will face up to three years in prison. Previously, traffickers faced heavy penalties but buyers faced no criminal charges.
Zhou added that in the long run, the two-child policy can help ease the sex ratio imbalance in China, which helps prevent people from abducting women from other countries to sell in China for marriage.
Many human traffickers fool foreign women into thinking that they can find jobs for them in China, according to Chen.
Figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show that by the end of 2014, there were 700.79 million men in the Chinese mainland, 33.76 million more than the number of women.
