The People's Republic of China is a main source and also a significant transit and destination country for men, women, and children who are subjected to trafficking in persons, specifically forced labour and forced prostitution. Women and children from China are trafficked to Africa, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America, predominantly Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan for commercial sexual exploitation and forced labour. Women and children from Myanmar, Vietnam, Mongolia, former USSR (except for the Baltic States), North Korea, Romania, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Ghana are trafficked to China for commercial sexual exploitation and forced labour.
U.S. State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons placed the country in "Tier 3" , the lowest one, in 2017. , China has remained in Tier 3, since the U.S. State Department determined that China did not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and was not making significant efforts to do so. This 2025 report mentions especially widespread forced labor in government-affiliated sectors regarding ethnic and religious minorities such as Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgiz in the Xinjiang Region as well as ethnic Tibetans under the guise of "vocational training", "poverty alleviation" or "deradicalization' programs.
Definition According to the United Nations Palermo Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons of 2000, as part of the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, human trafficking involves "recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons" by "the use of force or other means of coercion" with the "purpose of exploitation".
The Protocol further explains "exploitation" as, at a minimum, "the sex work of others" and "other forms of sexual exploitation". A person is considered a "trafficked victim if he or she is involved in the above-mentioned situations, regardless of whether the person consents to it or not."
Extent
The United Nations Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking reports that around 600,000 migrant workers leave China annually to work overseas. This number accounts for those tracked by the Ministry of Labour and Social Security and does not include those who leave without documents. Perhaps up to 90% of the migrant workers are migrating through unregulated and uninformed channels.
The number of female migrants is also rising rapidly, most of whom are young girls aged 17–25. It has been suggested that cross-border trafficking of women is increasing in China. Undocumented migrants who are trafficked into China mainly come from Vietnam, Russia, North Korea, and Myanmar. The UNIAP states that many individuals have been trafficked from southwest China through Myanmar and eventually into countries like Thailand and Malaysia.
The trafficking of individuals across countries has a wide array of purposes, ranging from commercial sexual exploitation and forced marriage to illegal adoption, forced labour, and begging. For example, of the 8,000 Vietnamese women married to Chinese men in Guangxi province between 1989 and 1999, some were introduced by friends and relatives, and most were found to have been trafficked.
Reports on human trafficking According to a UNIAP study on the reports of human trafficking in China, there were 800 reported human trafficking cases reported in the print media between 2006 and 2007. The study found correlations between factors like age and gender with different types of human trafficking. For example, the trafficking of young boys for adoption, and girls and young women for sexual exploitation were different instances of human trafficking that had a positive correlation with another factor.
The main means of trafficking involved: fraud and deception, 37%; kidnapping, 26%; abuse of power or a position of vulnerability, 17%; and physical violence, 5%. 58% of the articles reported into which sector victims were trafficked: forced prostitution 19%; the entertainment industry, hairdressing or massage parlours 9%; brick kilns 9%; manufacturing 4%; domestic labour 3%; forced begging 3%; and others 11%.
Geographic distribution of forced labourers According to the UNIAP report on human trafficking in China, 301 trafficking cases reported by the media from 2007 to mid-2008 were analysed to determine that Yunnan and Guizhou were the main source provinces of human trafficking. Fujian, Guangdong, and Shandong were the primary destination provinces. Henan province is both a source and destination for human trafficking.
A correlation has also been found between sources and the destinations for trafficked victims. Trafficked victims come from provinces with low GDP per capita like Yunnan and Guizhou. Provinces with high GDP per capita like Fujian, Guangdong, and Shandong, are the prime destinations for trafficked victims because there is a great demand and resources available to utilise forced labourers.
According to a 2023 report, there are up to 500,000 North Korean women and girls in China's northern provinces of Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang, where human trafficking industry exploded, reaching $105 million per year.
China remains a significant source of girls and women subjected to forced prostitution throughout the world. During the year, Chinese sex trafficking victims were reported on all of the inhabited continents. Traffickers recruited girls and young women, often from rural areas of China, using a combination of fraudulent job offers, imposition of large travel fees, and threats of physical or financial harm, to obtain and maintain their service in prostitution. Locations of sex trafficking of Chinese women and girls abroad vary widely, and sometimes are collocated with concentrations of Chinese migrant workers in factories, and mining and logging camps.
Most of the women trafficked from China to Thailand and Malaysia are from ethnic minorities like the Dai ethnicity from areas like the Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan province and they are trafficked by men of their own ethnicity. The Dai people are related to Thai people.
While Chinese prostitutes in British Malaya refused to service non-Chinese men, Japanese karayuki-san prostitutes in British Malaya were open to non-Japanese men.
Chinese prostitutes in French Indochina also only served overseas Chinese men there unlike the Japanese karayuki-san prostitutes who serviced non-Japanese men.
In 2011, a brothel in Moscow with Chinese and Vietnamese prostitutes which served only Chinese male citizens as clients was uncovered, it advertised to its Chinese clients via coded messages in a Chinese language newspaper but was uncovered by the police.Prostitutes from China to Moscow was caught on the verses!. TIME (08.04.2011). Retrieved on 2012-03-06.
Chinese women sex trafficked to Chinese owned offshore gaming operators in the Philippines only serve Chinese male clients who visit or work at those Chinese owned offshore gaming operators according to the Philippines National Bureau of Investigation, with both the pimps and clients of the prostitutes being Chinese men residing in the Philippines, not local Filipino men or other foreigners in the Philippines.
Major Chinese hubs for human trafficking The U.S. State Department's human trafficking report (2010) writes: "Internal trafficking is most pronounced among China's migrant population, which is estimated to exceed 150 million people. Forced labour remains a serious problem, including in brick kilns, coal mines, factories, and construction sites throughout China. There were numerous confirmed reports of involuntary servitude of children, adults, and migrant workers during the reporting period. As an example, in May 2009, media reports exposed a forced labour case at brick kilns in Anhui province, where mentally handicapped workers were subjected to slave-like conditions". The U.S. State Department's human trafficking report (2024) estimated that the PRC's internal migrant population exceeds 169 million people, placing them at high risk of forced labor in brick kilns, coal mines, and factories.
In addition to internal trafficking of the migrant population in China, rampant trafficking is often also attributed to a decade-long one-child policy that resulted in gender imbalance, and a universal expectation to marry. Men in communities experiencing a severe shortage of women are under strong pressure to find a bride. When they cannot afford to pay the high bride price for local women, they readily resort to purchasing brides kidnapped from other areas.
Popular areas of origin for domestically trafficked brides are the poorer areas of Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou where poverty renders women more vulnerable to trafficking. Traffickers generally sell these women in distant areas, such as Shaanxi, Ningxia, Guangxi, Hainan, and Guangdong provinces with large gender imbalances.
Types of human trafficking
Child labour One demographic particularly susceptible to forced labour is children. The U.S. Department of State has issued a report stating that "Chinese children are forced into prostitution, and various forms of forced labour, including begging, stealing, selling flowers, and work in brick kilns and factories; the children of migrants are particularly vulnerable to trafficking." For example, there were reports that child labourers were found working in brick kilns, low-skill service sectors and in small workshops and factories. These reports found that the underage labourers are in their teens, typically ranging from 13 to 15 years old, but some are as young as 10 years old.
In another instance, children in Xinjiang were forced to pick cotton as part of a "work-study" program, according to foreign media reports. They worked long hours and were exploited under this simple guise. Students do not have a voice in raising concerns about how they are employed and have no protection against any abusive work practice or dangerous conditions of being on the job.
The overall extent of forced labour and child labour in China is also unclear in part because the government releases only limited information on the subject according to the report on trafficking issued by the U.S. Department of State. In 2014, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor where China was attributed 12 goods ranging from bricks, coal and cotton to electronics, fireworks and Christmas decorations.
Sex trafficking
China's legal definition of trafficking does not automatically regard children over the age of 14 who are subjected to the commercial sex trade as trafficking victims. Chinese laws only recognize forms of coercion other than abduction, such as threats of physical harm or non-physical harm, as constituting a means of trafficking. In the United States Department of State report: "Article 244 of the Chinese Criminal Law criminalizes forced labour, but prescribes punishments of a fine or no more than three years imprisonment, and only if the circumstances are found to be 'serious' - penalties which are not sufficiently stringent." In addition, the definition of trafficking does not pertain to male victims of trafficking or adult victims of labor trafficking.
The number of women suffering from sexual exploitation is exponentially increasing. Traffickers usually attract victims through false promises of high salaries and stable job incomes. Many women are deceived because of their poor education and they are often also marginalized minority groups who believe the false promises of traffickers who offer the hope of living an urban life.