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Chinese churches face off against human trafficking — and start to see social justice as part of their mission.
Works of Mercy
by Sylvia Yu
This article appeared in the February 2012 issue of Sojourners magazine
At a safe home for former trafficked women in the "Golden Triangle"
EVERY TUESDAY, AI JIN and two other young women from one of China’s underground urban Christian churches get together to pray—then walk the streets of a mafia-run red light district to tell girls as young as 13 who work in brothels that they can get out of prostitution. “Eight years ago, the average girl working in brothels was 25. Now it’s 14 and 15,” Ai Jin tells me. “I think it’ll get worse since it’s more difficult to find jobs, especially for girls from poor families with no education. They desperately need money to survive.”
Ai Jin and her two colleagues work with Mercy Outreach, an organization that offers prostitutes and trafficked women a safe home and alternative jobs. Started in 2003, Mercy Outreach is one of the first social enterprises of its kind based near the infamous “Golden Triangle”—the euphemistic name for one of the world’s busiest drug-trafficking routes. Running through Thailand, Burma, and Laos and bleeding into China, Vietnam, and Cambodia, it is a potent mix of extreme poverty, sex trafficking, rampant illicit drug production, and complicit local government leaders and warlords.
Ai Jin, 28, is part of a new breed of daring young women pioneers from the underground church reaching marginalized people, such as prostitutes, who had not previously been readily welcomed into house churches. “My pastor told me that what I’m doing in reaching out to prostitutes is what Jesus did,” Ai Jin says. “When I first started working at Mercy Outreach, I didn’t even want to shake hands with prostitutes. Every day I prayed for more love for the women. Now I can treat them like my own family.”
Ai Jin and her peers see their work as part of their contribution to building a civil society—unlike some underground church members in the past, who have traditionally steered clear of social service in the community because of persecution from authorities. “Social work is a new area in China,” Ai Jin says. “Most people don’t want to help prostitutes. Others don’t want to get in trouble with the mafia and pimps who control the girls.”
Ai Jin and others at Mercy Outreach—mostly women in their 20s and early 30s—boldly speak to mafia bosses and brothel owners to offer alternative vocational training and to point out that what they’re doing is morally wrong. She adds, “Just to be able to say to a person that what you’re doing is wrong can start a chain of events that can make a difference in a person’s life. We want to close one brothel at a time, reach one mafia boss at a time … to reach the entire community for God.”
The organization provides free medical support and mental health services; it also runs a social enterprise selling jewelry made by rescued women and former prostitutes.
Every morning before the work day begins, more than a dozen women on the morning shift in the jewelry-making workshop get together in a room to sing hymns, pray, and read the Bible. Kun Li, a petite staff member in charge of the main safe house, sits quietly in a corner with her head bowed in prayer. She says seeing the changed lives of the girls makes the intense challenges of this ministry worthwhile. “A lot of times I wanted to give up. But I’m encouraged by the fruit—the girls who have moved on and haven’t forgotten Jesus,” she said.
Entrance to a brothel in the Golden Triangle region
EXACT NUMBERS OF trafficking victims in China and the Golden Triangle region are unknown due to the hidden nature of the crime. According to the U.S. State Department, the Chinese police reported rescuing 10,385 women and 5,933 children from trafficking in 2010 (the latter figure includes kidnapping for illegal adoption).
Trafficking, for forced marriages as well as prostitution, could increase dramatically in the years to come in China and the rest of Asia because of China’s unprecedented gender imbalance: There is the prospect of an alarming shortage of at least 24 million marriageable women by 2020. Dubbed the “bachelor time bomb,” this skewed ratio was brought on by the “one-child” family planning policy that China began in 1979. Families preferred boys to carry on the family name, leading to sex-selective abortions and infanticide.
During my trip to China earlier this year, Ai Jin helped arrange interviews for me. One was with a young woman named Mei Mei. With her trendy auburn highlighted hair, meticulously applied make-up, and green hoodie, the jovial 23-year-old could fit right in at any campus or trendy hotspot—but Mei is a survivor of bride-trafficking. At the age of 14, she was tricked by a family friend of a classmate, taken by train to a distant place, trapped in a house with high walls, and strategically starved for two weeks. She screamed for days, but finally told her captors, “I’ll marry whomever.”
The couple watching over Mei brought in several men to inspect her like a piece of meat, then sold her for less than $1,600 to a middle-aged farmer who couldn’t afford to marry the traditional way. He took Mei back to his home village and chained her up like a dog except when he wanted to have sex with her. Mei eventually became pregnant and, at the age of 15, gave birth to a baby girl.
Soon after, Mei ran away and was recruited by a pimp to work in a brothel. She was sent to prison for six months for working as a prostitute. “When I got out of jail,” she told me, “I felt so much self-hatred and was too ashamed to return to my family, so I went back to prostitution.” A year later, Mei contracted HIV, something she had never heard of.
The staff at Mercy Outreach pulled Mei out of a dark pit of drug addiction and suicidal thoughts. They gave her shelter, counseling, training, and a job in jewelry-making and made sure she took her HIV medication. With the help of Mercy Outreach, Mei made a decision to commit her life to Christ. Today, Mei is smiling, and has regained a sense of hope.
I interviewed a teenaged prostitute and her pimp (looks in his 30s) in the Golden Triangle
FROM BEIJING TO Hunan to southwest China to the Tibetan plateau, courageous Chinese Christians are fighting the scourge of sex trafficking and slavery. In Chiang Khong, a city in Thailand where a highway is being built to connect with China, a new base for Chinese missionaries engaged in anti-trafficking work is slated to start up. “This region is in a time of transition; the highway could bring even more crime and flow of trafficking victims,” says a member of Target Ministries, a small international missions agency with bases in U.S. and Africa, which is setting up the base.
On three separate occasions, he told me, he has come across bride trafficking in China where women were sold into marriage with much older men. He hopes to help foster “concerted efforts to help provide refuge for sex trafficking victims,” he says, and to help “the Chinese church to make inroads into the Golden Triangle.”
Ai Jin and others’ groundbreaking work is a picture of what is happening in the urban underground church in China. Slowly, Christians are wading into anti-trafficking work, preaching the good news to the afflicted, binding up the broken-hearted, and proclaiming liberty to the captives and freedom to prisoners. But it will involve a radical mindset change in a shame-based culture to reach a segment of society that is considered the most “sinful”: prostitutes, pimps, and the mafia, according to Andrew Chiang, a British Christian who lives in Beijing and is co-founder of Daybreak Asia, a social enterprise that builds bridges between China and U.S. “The church in China has the wrong theology—we need to reform the church. There are problems in society historically because the church hasn’t done what God has called them to do,” he says.
It is clear that Ai Jin feels a sense of calling to her work, but she has one other reason: Her 14-year-old cousin is a prostitute. “When I found out that my own cousin was working in a brothel and wasn’t willing to leave, I was so upset and wanted to quit the ministry. But God said to me that, if I quit, other families will ask you, ‘Why didn’t you help my daughter?’” she says with tears in her eyes. “This makes me believe God called me here. If God is calling me, I want to do this ministry for the rest of my life. It’s an honor, not a duty, to work here.”
Sylvia Yu is a Hong Kong-based journalist and philanthropy adviser. She directed funding to Mercy Outreach in 2008 and 2009. She tweets at @Light1candle.
From the archives: My CBC Viewpoint China Column from 2005
By Sylvia Yu
For 63 years, Mr. Chen Chong Wen has had to change the bandages on his leg daily. His home-style remedy for his oozing wound is to use a playing card to stop the flow. “There’s no medicine for this,” he said, “it hurts very much and it itches.”
The stench of rotting flesh is overwhelming as he shows his leg. His open sore is terrible-looking and has a tofu-like texture. He feels he’s been a burden to his family because they have to take care of him. “It’s my bad luck,” he says and looks down at the ground.
Mr. Chen Chong Wen (center) with injured leg from biological warfare
Chen was infected with “rotten leg disease,” it’s also known as glanders, as he was running away from the Japanese Imperial Army in Zhejiang province in 1942. His mother was also infected. And not too long after her heel rotted off, she died in terrible pain.
At the time he didn’t know why he had met such misfortune, but Chen now knows that he was a victim of biological warfare, inflicted by the Japanese military during an invasion of China.
Chen has had several costly surgeries in the last eight years with no government support. He’s interested in joining a lawsuit against the government of Japan to receive some compensation to ease some of his suffering. So far no single rotten-leg case has been filed against the Japanese government.
Since June 1995, Chinese victims of Japanese war crimes have begun to sue the Japanese government, according to Kang Jian, a Beijing-based human rights lawyer. She says there are 24 cases altogether on behalf of biological warfare survivors, Rape of Nanking (Nanjing) and sexual slavery victims.
“We’re asking relatives to testify and we have survivors to bear witness on the use of biological warfare dropped on villages, and chemical bombs and canisters that are still being unearthed in China,” she says.
Li Meitou with Thekla Lit, a founder of BC Alpha. (Photo: BC Alpha)
Last fall I met another survivor of biological warfare in southern China. I went to visit 77-year-old Ms. Li Meitou in her home village near Tang Xi township.
The tiny woman limps along ahead of me as we walk to her home. She smiles gently and often in spite of the chronic pain she endures. Li has had rotten leg disease since she was 12 years old.
“I’ve had difficulty walking and I experience pain, a fierce burning feeling,” she says. Because she can’t afford medical treatment, she uses some over-the-counter medicine and salt.
Li’s home was a small, dark one-room place with a dirt floor and dingy walls; one small table and bench lined the back. I felt sick that she had to live this way. Why wasn’t she receiving any substantial financial support?
As she sits down she takes off her bandage and shows me her rotting leg. One of my friends has to walk back and turn away because the smell of her open wound made him nauseous. She asked us to tell her story to the world so that all would know what the Japanese did to her and others in her village.
Exact figures of deaths as a result of Japanese biological warfare are hard to come by. But China’s most famous champion of biological warfare survivors, Wang Xuan, who has gathered evidence for lawsuits launched in Tokyo, says as many as 50,000 people in Quzhou died in 1940 from the plague that spread to neighbouring areas until 1948. In total 300,000 people fell ill from this plague attack.
China's most famous champion of biological warfare survivors, Wang Xuan. (Photo: BC Alpha)
Wang, whose home village in Yiwu was devastated by biological warfare, says the Japanese military used germ-carrying fleas mixed with grains, fibres, beans and cottons. They dropped these “balls” from the sky and let them float down. The local rats then ate the grains, and the fleas also jumped onto small animals and infected people.
The fleas were specially raised to carry germs at the infamous Unit 731 laboratory in Northern China that the Japanese military set up to create and test biological warfare experiments. One Unit 731 veteran testified in a Japanese court how rats and fleas were raised and how 600 kg of anthrax was produced monthly at the compound.
About a decade ago, farmers from Wang’s home village “wanted to fight for their rights and dignity” for the immense suffering and deaths caused by the Japanese military. They sent a petition to the Japanese Embassy in Beijing.
Somehow a group of Japanese peace activists heard about the village and decided to find out more. The Japanese activists reported their findings at an international symposium in Harbin, China, which the Japan Times covered. Wang, who was living in Japan at the time, read the article. The rest is history. She got in touch with people from her village again and eventually became a vocal activist as well as researcher and translator for the Japanese legal team.
The illiterate villagers set up a Japanese biological warfare investigation committee. They were able to obtain a diary of a Japanese military doctor who was stationed with the occupation army in Yiwu. He was a Christian and humane, says Wang. He condemned the war crimes and documented biological warfare activities in his diary.
There was three years of preparation involving the Japanese peace activists, scholars, villagers and local Chinese government. They had an annual medical check up to trace evidences of the plague in the area. Every year, researchers caught 100 rats to see if they still carried the plague, by determining if plague germ antibodies were in their blood.
Up until 1996, plague germs were found in rats. In 2001, a Chinese doctor testified that biological warfare still threatens the Chinese people. His testimony was covered by international news agencies.
The villagers lost their first-ever lawsuit in August 2002. However, the Tokyo District Court confirmed the use of biological warfare by the Japanese Imperial Army. “For the first time in history an office of authority in Japan admitted biological warfare in China. The verdict is in history. The [Japanese court] said biological warfare was in violation of the Geneva Treaty and international agreements and that Japan was responsible for that,” says Wang. “But they said the issue of responsibility was resolved because China gave up her rights [to seek war reparations] in the 1972 Sino-Japan Joint Communiqué.”
In the recent war of words and diplomatic tensions between China and Japan, the most important voices have not been heard. Many actual victims of Japanese war crimes are living in squalid conditions and cannot afford basic medical treatment.
How is it that survivors of cruel, inhumane acts in war, like Chen Chong Wen, have been forgotten? I just don’t understand and shake my head at the Japanese prime minister and his repeat visits to a shrine that honours infamous war criminals (no one responsible for biological warfare was ever convicted for crimes against humanity).
Indeed, I’m dumbfounded at the lack of financial aid for these biological war crime survivors, when I’ve been told China is angry about Japanese history textbooks that whitewash the suffering of the Chinese during the Japanese invasion. The elderly survivors need medical help, and they need financial aid.
I will never forget the sight of Chen Chong Wen weeping. With a pained expression on his face, Chen sobbed loudly, “I don’t want anything else. I just want the wound to close. That’s the only thing I want.”
I have to confess that I know so little of the plight of women in the Middle East. For more than 6 years, my focus has been on social justice issues in China, North Korea, S.E. Asia and parts of Central Asia and Africa (ie. trafficking issues, HIV/AIDS, migrants).
Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot of Egyptian women and in general, women’s rights in the Middle East (protests have broken out in Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria and Libya). What will change for women and their freedom when the riots and protests quiet down and a new regime takes over in those nations?
Egyptian women protesters
Now in light of the revolutions that are erupting and the seismic global shifts that are taking shape, it’s critical that we learn more about these Middle Eastern women and the issues they face. What’s taking place now in the Mid East will change our world in the West, Europe, Africa and Asia forever. What these women contend with, will be our fight as women in the rest of the world and be what concerns us intimately. John Donne put it well in saying: “No man is an island.”
My good friend, an American diplomat, forwarded me an NPR article on harassment against women in Egypt and after reading it, I feel this heavy burden to stand with the women and pray for women’s rights in the Mid East… Any woman, at any age, can relate to the widespread harassment Egyptian women face, having at one point or another experienced unwanted male attention or sexism in some form (ie. catcalls from men, sexist remarks from male colleagues or students, or even from fathers in some patriarchal cultures who emphasize getting married over careers), and harassment from delusional men.
Let’s hope that these Egyptian women will be protected during this chaotic time and when the regime handover ends:
From the NPR article:
Activists say attacks on women have been encouraged by the culture of impunity that has existed for many years here. The regime of former President Hosni Mubarak did little to punish perpetrators — and the victims, because of the stigma, often stayed silent.
Women are hoping that will now change. A unique aspect of the revolution was that women participated in huge numbers. They slept in Tahrir Square and marched alongside their male counterparts. They say harassment was rare during that period.
How utterly tragic it will be IF dark elements get into power and start oppressing women in these nations where prior to the revolutions, women were relatively free. Women from religious minorities, ie. Christian women will particularly be at higher risk for abuse. Now is the time to prepare for these worst case scenarios!
Milton Rogovin, the great social documentary photog, dubbed by the NY Times as a "working class" hero
Milton, we need more photographers like you in this world!
I, for one, am deeply inspired by his passion to document the poor and forgotten for the world to see and learn. I plan to snap more photos in my travels this year. One of his most well known quotes: “The rich have their photographers, I photograph the forgotten ones.” This man was also exceptionally kind and thoughtful: he always gave a copy of the portrait to those he photographed.
You can read more about him on his website.
AP article on his passing from today:
Milton Rogovin, a social documentary photographer who built a life’s work by looking through a lens at people who were invisible to others, died Tuesday at age 101. Rogovin was in hospice care after a brief illness and died at his home in Buffalo surrounded by family, said his son, Mark.
After being blacklisted in the communist scare of the 1950s, Rogovin dedicated his life to photography. His pictures documented the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, the working class — in particular those living in a six-square-block neighborhood in Buffalo near his optometry practice.
“He referred to these people as the ‘forgotten ones,’” his son said. “These were poor and working people who were not ever in the limelight.” Rogovin found “forgotten ones” on New York Indian reservations and in far-flung corners of China, Zimbabwe, France, Scotland and Spain.
His first project was a documentary series on Buffalo’s black churches. Living on his wife’s schoolteacher salary, he traveled to Appalachia, Chile and Mexico to take portraits of working people — always using a vintage Rolleiflex, a bare bulb flash, occasionally a tripod, and black and white film.
Born in New York City in 1909, Rogovin moved to Buffalo in 1938 to practice as an optometrist. He married Anne Setters in 1942, the same year he bought his first camera and was drafted into the U.S. Army. After returning from the war, he organized an optometrists’ union in Buffalo and served as a librarian in the city’s Communist Party. In 1957, he was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
“Rogovin, named as top red in Buffalo, balks at nearly all queries,” read the headline the next day in the hometown Buffalo Evening News. With his optometry business sliced in half because of negative publicity, Rogovin turned to photography — although he never studied it formally.
“The rich have their photographers,” Rogovin often said. “I photograph the forgotten ones.”
In 1972, Rogovin turned his lens closer to home — the Lower West Side of Buffalo, one of the most impoverished neighborhoods in the state, a place where Italian-Americans had been replaced after World War II by Puerto Ricans, blacks, American Indians and poor whites.
Although he was first suspected of being a police officer or FBI agent, Rogovin eventually gained their trust, shooting 1,000 portraits over three years and always making sure to get a copy back to the subject. In 1984, he returned to the neighborhood, tracked down his original subjects and rephotographed as many as he could. He did the same in 1992 when he was 83 and recovering from heart surgery and prostate cancer. He remained working until 2002.
“Never ever once did he start a project thinking, ‘Ahh, this is historic,’” said his son, a mural painter. “It was all because he saw a face of a Native American woman with all her lines and age and white hair as a beautiful face, a face he wanted everybody to witness.
“I think the thing that he would say is, ‘I want people to use my photographs.’ He wants his work to be used in a million educational ways. His desire was that these works would be learned from and enjoyed in the communities that he photographed in. It’s beginning to happen.”
Rogovin’s wife, who taught mentally disabled children, died in 2003 at 84. Along with her husband, she protested the trial and sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. “She was his PR agent,” Mark Rogovin said. “My father was really an activist since the Depression. My mother got involved in activities around the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War when, as my father says, he started to politicize my mother.”
At the Mother's Heart foster home in Mangshi, Yunnan province, China
These kids were incredibly radiant… there were lots of giggles and hugs… it was a joy to be with them in October 2009 on a trip on behalf of a donor client… their parents have passed away from AIDS. Living in these foster homes has meant the world of difference for them. Before living at these homes, they were at risk of being sold to traffickers, dropping out of school, drug use and mistreatment. To see their beautiful smiling faces was one of the highlights of my time in Yunnan last fall.
I’m missing China.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr is one of my favourite heroes. His prophetic voice for justice, righteousness and equality for all ethnic groups still strikes a chord today. Truth is timeless. His stand for what is right and true impacted me as an immigrant kid decades later. This is my tribute to the giant of a man, though not without imperfection, who led a movement of peaceful resistance that was inspired by Jesus Christ and in part, Gandhi’s philosophy of peaceful activism.
His radical words in that era on equality and justice still apply today to elderly survivors of Japanese military sex slavery (otherwise known as ‘comfort women’), for Korean and minorities in Japan, for impoverished women and children, victims of human trafficking and slavery et al.
I have a dream that the Japanese military sex slave survivors in Korea, China, Netherlands, Philippines etc. will finally get justice in the form of an unequivocal, official apology from the Japanese government and a commitment to teach the younger generation about human rights abuses its military committed in Asia before and during WWII.
I have a dream that sex slavery and human trafficking will be a thing of the past. I have a dream that racism and poverty will be eradicated from the face of the earth; that peace will reign between North and South Korea and in the Middle East. Oh, let it be! That the impossible would be possible.
Here are some quotes from this great man:
“A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.”
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”
“Means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”
“Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
His historic “I have a dream” speech:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Happy Martin Luther King Day! I hope you find one thing to do that will inspire peace and love in others.
Korean human rights activist and survivor Hwang Geum Joo. I took this photo at her place in Seoul in September 2004.
TOKYO, Dec. 20 KYODO NEWS
About 260 memoirs from World War II published between 1990 and 2006 contain specific references to the Japanese military’s wartime brothels in which so-called ”comfort women” were forced to provide sexual services to military personnel, and sexual violence at the battlefront, the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility said Sunday.
From Vancouver-based peace activist Satoko Norimatsu’s blog:
According to a Kyodo News Agency report on December 20, 2009, The Center for Research and Documentation on Japan’s War Responsibility (JWRC) discovered that about 260 documents published between 1990 and 2006, including personal notes written by those who experienced war, had concrete descriptions of “comfort stations” installed throughout different parts of Asia, “comfort women,” and other sexual violence in the battlefields. Among those are reports of kempeitai, or military police officers examining “comfort women” and drawings of “comfort stations.”
JWRC went through about 2,000 documents, including battlefield diaries and personal memoirs, stored in the National Diet Library, from March to June this year. These documents were published during 1990′s and after, when the former “comfort women” started to call for apologies and compensation from the Japanese government.
Chuo University Professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi, who examined those documents points out that there are many specific details reported in these documents, including the deep military involvement with the sex slavery system.
Most of the documents with reference to the “comfort women” are personal memoirs, instead of public documents. Yoshimi suspects there was pressure within veterans’ associations for not speaking out about the issue.
The result of this research will be published in the December 2009 and March 2010 issues of “The Report on Japan’s War Responsibility,” the quarterly journal by JWRC.
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