China’s Shadow Empire: A Global Leader in Human Trafficking

Commentary

In addition to its advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and other technological achievements, China is a dominant force in that most ancient of depraved practices: human trafficking.

According to the U.S. State Department’s 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report, China remains on Tier 3—the lowest ranking—for failing to meet minimum standards to combat trafficking, with government complicity in widespread abuses.

This isn’t just cruel criminality; it’s state-orchestrated terror, abuse, and mutilation. What’s more, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plays a key role in dreary trade by exploiting its vast population under totalitarian control to fuel a multibillion-dollar industry of forced labor, sexual slavery, and forced organ harvesting. The Chinese regime targets vulnerable groups not only to suppress dissent and instill fear within the population, but also to reap illegal economic gains.

China’s Trafficking Network

The CCP’s hand in human trafficking isn’t a new phenomenon in the world; other nations and civilizations have practiced human trafficking for centuries, if not millennia. That said, the CCP’s trafficking efforts aren’t done in half measures.

China’s state-sponsored trafficking enterprises are worth billions of dollars in revenue per year, aided by the latest surveillance technology and financial influence. The CCP’s trafficking tentacles extend throughout the country and international channels, trafficking vast numbers of refugees and dissidents alike. From rural child abductions to the systematic organ trade from prisoners of conscience and sex slavery around the world, there are seemingly no limits on victims or trafficking behaviors that the CCP is not willing and able to perform.

Trafficking of Children for Forced Labor, Adoption

China’s internal migration crisis is a major source of trafficking. China has tens of millions of rural migrants, and many children are “left behind” by parents seeking urban jobs. By some estimates, millions of those children are abducted or sold into brick kilns, factories, and illegal adoptions each year. Of course, that amounts to modern slavery, which is separate from organ trafficking.

According to the 2023 global slavery index, an estimated 5.8 million people were living in slavery in China in 2021, about four out of every 1,000 people in the country.

Women Trafficked for Sexual Exploitation, Forced Marriage

There are powerful dynamics beyond the financial draw that drive some of the trafficking. As a result of the CCP’s one-child policy, there are 30 million to 40 million more men than women, creating a shortage of marriage-aged women. To address this self-inflicted demographic crisis, Chinese authorities turn a blind eye to perpetrators importing brides through deception and coercion.

For example, women from Burma (also known as Myanmar), Vietnam, North Korea, and Pakistan are lured to China with job promises, only to be sold for $3,000 to $13,000 into forced marriages, prostitution, or use as concubines. The 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report notes that traffickers use fraudulent brokers to subject these women to rape, forced childbearing, and domestic servitude, with North Korean refugees particularly vulnerable due to deportation fears. Human Rights Watch reports that this “bride trafficking” generates billions of dollars, with victims from ethnic minorities facing compounded discrimination.

But it’s not a big concern for the CCP. For example, in 2022, the plight of Xiao Huamei, who was chained for 24 years after multiple sales, exposed the systemic failures within China to stop trafficking or punish those who do it, yet Chinese authorities downplayed the report.

North Korean Defectors Trafficked for Sex, Bride Trade

China’s poorly guarded northern border with North Korea is a major channel for human trafficking between the two countries. Desperate North Korean defectors, mostly women fleeing famine and repression, are quick and easy targets for traffickers. As of 2023, up to 500,000 North Korean women and girls were trapped in China’s Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang provinces, sold into a $105 million annual sex and bride trade.

The trafficking business with North Korea is depressingly simple. Brokers lure women across the Yalu and Tumen rivers with false job promises, only to force them into cybersex operations, prostitution, or marriages. The Korea Future Initiative documented more than 4,340 cases in the past decade, and according to Liberty in North Korea, 60 percent of female defectors were trafficked. This state-backed channel blends geopolitical complicity with profit, turning escape routes into slave pipelines.

Middle Eastern and South Asian Channels: Cross-Border Bride Scams

China’s demand for brides extends to Middle Eastern and South Asian routes, where traffickers exploit economic pacts and porous borders to supply women from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and beyond. These channels combine Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure with human trafficking, exporting China’s demographic crisis abroad to the Middle East and South Asia.

This is nothing new, of course; it has been known for years.

Organ Harvesting, Political Persecution of Dissidents, Falun Gong, and Christians

The CCP began persecuting the spiritual group Falun Gong in 1999, and since 2000, its practitioners have become prime targets of organ harvesting. China’s organ transplant industry makes up to $1 billion annually. It relies on forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, intertwined with political persecution that silences dissent through trafficking-like abuses. Estimates are that 60,000 to 100,000 unexplained transplants occur yearly from blood-tested detainees.

In 2019, the China Tribunal concluded that organ harvesting had occurred “on a substantial scale,” killing victims in the process. In 2021, U.N. experts said involuntary procedures had taken place on Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Christians. In July this year, it was reported that the Chinese regime plans to triple the number of organ harvesting clinics in the Xinjiang region, which, incidentally, has a heavy Uyghur population.

When Will It End?

Will the CCP’s wicked practices against its own people and others ever end?

At some point, it will. It must. But the CCP will have to meet its end first.

In the meantime, as the world marvels at its scientific and technological progress, keep in mind that communist China is also the world’s largest surveillance state; that it persecutes minorities, political dissidents, and religious groups; and that it allows corrupt officials to profit from its global supply chains of human misery.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.