Selling Sex Overseas Chinese Women and the Realities of

Prostitution and Global Sex Trafficking

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For Catherine and Midge (Margaret )
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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. What Is Sex Trafficking? 1

2. Going Down to the Sea 34
3. The Women 51
4. The Destinations 76
5. The Sex Markets 118
6. The Traffickers 147
7. Supply and Demand: Follow the Money 170
8. Response and Rescue: How the System Works 201
9. The Reality and the Myths: A Critical Analysis of Sex Trafficking 230
10. The Politics of Prostitution and Sex Trafficking 254

Notes 281
References 293
Index 305
About the Authors 311

>> vii
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Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the many people who helped us
with the research that is the basis for this book. First, we thank all the Chi-
nese sex workers (or xiaojies as they are called in China), who agreed to take
part in our research and who willingly shared their stories with us. We owe
our deepest thanks to these women, who are anonymous except for some
pseudonyms here. Second, we are grateful to the various “facilitators” in the
sex trade (agents, escort agency owners, mommies, brothel keepers, etc.)
who not only let us talk to them, but also let us enter their world and see how
they operate their businesses. Again, we can only thank them anonymously
because their identities will not be revealed.
Because of Ko-lin Chin’s wide range of family and friends, we were
able to rely on them to help directly and indirectly on the project. We owe
a debt of gratitude to Huilin (a cousin), her husband C.Y. Shaw, and their
son Rui Shaw for helping us in Singapore. In Hong Kong, we were assisted
by Ah Ping (a cousin). We would also like to thank our friends: Yulan Chu,
Chuanqiang Zhao, and Guanxuan Cao in Macau; Tiva Jentriacharn in Bang-
kok; Philip Tien, Benny Phan, and Ferry Siddharta in Jakarta; Punky Pang
in Kuala Lumpur; Wei Chen and Jimeng Tang in China. We thank Robert
Chu and his wife Jinfeng Gao in Vancouver. In the U.S., Meilan (a sister)
and her husband Frank Su offered their help when we were in Los Angeles.
We would also like to take this opportunity to express our heartfelt gratitude
to our considerate and caring neighbors and friends—the Gundersen family
(George II, Barbara, Teresa, and George III)—for support and encourage-
ment, and for providing an ideal environment in which to live and write.
Finally, we were also helped by Diana Hadel (Midge Finckenauer’s niece),
who assisted with some translation from Indonesian.
Among the many individuals from the academic community who offered
us their invaluable help, we are especially indebted to Yiu Kong Chu of the
University of Hong Kong, Chuen-Jim Sheu of the National Taipei Univer-
sity, Pei-Ling Wang of Jinan University, Shu-Lung Yang of the National
Chung Cheng University, Sandy Yu-Lan Yeh of the Central Police Univer-
sity, Narayanan Ganapathy of National Singapore University, Sheldon Zhang
>> ix
x << Acknowledgments

of San Diego State University, Mohd Kassim Noor Mohamed of Birming-

ham City University, and Yong Wang and Changrong Zhang of the Fuzhou
Police Academy.
Many people in government and law enforcement also offered their help.
We would like to thank Mark Taylor of the Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking in Persons, U.S. Department of State; Kevin Shu-sing Lau, Paul
Fuk-chuen Cheng, Sunny Kai-chor Lam, Man-chung Wan, and Philip Kin-
cheung Choy of the Hong Kong Police Force; Eric K. K. Chan, K. K. Yip,
and Cindy So-ying Yeung of the Immigration Department of Hong Kong;
Mathew Tyson of the U.S. Consulate General in Hong Kong; Chih-Kun
Chiang of the Coast Guard Administration of Taiwan; Ann Hurst, Gary Phil-
lips, and Gary Kiernan of the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok; Mathew King and
Trung Vu of the U.S. Embassy in Singapore; Wong Choong Mann and Jason
Loke Choy Seng of the Singapore Police Force; Stanley Harsha, Thomas Dan-
iels, and Robert Barlow of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta; Law Hong Soon of
the Royal Malaysian Police; Lee Baca of the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s
Department; Pamela Chen and Nancy Fabrizio of the U.S. Attorney’s Office,
Eastern District of New York; David Stein and Tania Hedlund of the New
York City Police Department; and Barbara Stolz of the U.S. Government
Accountability Office.
We would also like to express our heartfelt gratitude to those people work-
ing for various nongovernmental organizations and social service agencies
who gave us their time and help. We are particularly grateful to Elise Chung
of Zi Teng in Hong Kong; Kendy Yim of Action for REACH OUT in Hong
Kong; Fran Gau and Sally Chou of the Women’s Rescue Foundation of Taipei;
Ruengrawee Pichaikul Ketphol of the Asia Foundation in Bangkok; Michael
Chong of the Malaysian Chinese Association in Kuala Lumpur; Selvi of Pink
Triangle in Kuala Lumpur; Lee Soo Choo of Tenaganita in Kuala Lumpur;
Elizabeth Dunlap of the International Organization for Migration in Jakarta;
Debbie Marulanda of Refugee Resettlement and Human Trafficking in New-
ark, New Jersey; Gilbert Ortiz of the Human Trafficking Information and
Referral Hotline in New York City; and Wenchi Yu Perkins of Vital Voices in
New York City.
Ilene Kalish, Executive Editor at NYU Press, was critically helpful in
shortening and improving the manuscript. She offered us many excellent
suggestions, and above all was just a most pleasant person with whom to
work. We are also indebted to Despina Gimbel, Managing Editor, and Aiden
Amos, Editorial Assistant, of NYU Press for helping us in the transformation
of our manuscript into a book.
Thanks also to five anonymous reviewers (in addition to Sheldon Zhang
 Acknowledgments >> xi

and Barbara Stolz) for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this work.
Judy Mellecker edited the manuscript and we would like to thank her for
doing an excellent job. Thanks to Min Liu for managing our data sets. In
addition, Phyllis Shultze of the Don M. Gottfredson Library of Criminal
Justice, Rutgers University, deserves a special mention here for providing us
with so much information and material on prostitution and sex trafficking.
The research project was supported by Grant No. 2006-IJ-CX-0008
awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S.
Department of Justice. The points of view expressed here are solely those of
the authors and do not necessarily represent the official positions or policy of
the U.S. Department of Justice. We thank Karen Bachar, Jennifer Hanley, and
John Picarelli of the National Institute of Justice for their support.
Finally, but most importantly, we would like to thank our wives—Cathe-
rine and Midge (Margaret)—for their encouragement and patience through-
out the course of this project. Without their full support, this study would
not have been completed. This book is dedicated to them.
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1

What Is Sex Trafficking?

Within the space of just three years, in different parts of the world, three
women were brought to justice for their roles in what has become a high
profile form of global crime. There are a number of common threads among
these women and their cases. They exemplify in microcosm a host of issues
that surround the illicit movement of people around the world. As such, they
provide a kind of backdrop for the theme and focus of this book.
Perhaps the best known of the three cases is that of Cheng Chui-ping, or,
as she is better known, Sister Ping. Sister Ping was an international human
smuggler — in Chinese, a shetou or snakehead.1 She charged tens of thou-
sands of dollars to assist illegal Chinese emigrants to come to the United
States. It was Sister Ping who was one of the masterminds behind the in-
famous Golden Venture (the name of a smuggling ship) incident in which
hundreds of Chinese illegals were unloaded into the ocean off Long Island
in 1993 — ten of whom drowned after the ship ran aground.2 Described as
the Mother of All Snakeheads, Sister Ping is estimated to have made some
$40 million in her two decades of human smuggling. On June 22, 2005 a
>> 1
2 << What Is Sex Trafficking?

federal jury in New York convicted Sister Ping of conspiracy to commit alien
smuggling, hostage taking, money laundering, and trafficking in ransom
proceeds. She was sentenced to the statutory maximum of thirty-five years in
prison for her crimes.3
Wei Tang emigrated from China to Australia in 1998. There, she ran a
brothel called Club 417, in Melbourne. In June 2006, she too was convicted
of crimes, in her case possessing and using sex slaves in her brothel. The
sex slaves in question were five Thai women. According to court documents
in the Tang case, the five women had worked in the sex industry in Thai-
land, and had consented to go to Australia to continue this line of work
in Melbourne. Despite this initial consent, the court found that the “debt
bondage” nature of Tang’s arrangement with the women constituted slavery,
because they were “effectively restrained by the insidious nature of their
contract.” That insidious nature included having to perform sex acts for no
pay while working off their debt of $45,000 each. Tang, who was sentenced
to ten years in prison, was the first person in Australia to be found guilty of
sex slavery.4
The third woman, Wei Qin Sun, was sentenced on February 22, 2008 in
a U.S. federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands following her convic-
tion for sex trafficking. A jury found her guilty of luring a young woman
from China by promising the woman a job as a waitress in a karaoke club
managed by Sun. Sun charged the woman $5,000 for “recruitment fees” and
travel expenses. It was only after the woman began to work at the club that
she was informed that she would have to work as a prostitute to repay Sun.
Sun was convicted of coercion and enticement for prostitution, foreign trans-
portation of a person in the execution of a fraudulent scheme, and criminal
conspiracy. She was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.5
So what can one make of these cases? Actually, many things. We have
three Chinese women who exploited, for money, the basic human desire of
people to improve their condition. In each case, things did not turn out as
the victims hoped or had been promised. There was debt bondage and de-
ceit, but there was also consent of a kind. Sister Ping was a human smuggler,
whereas Tang and Sun were convicted of human trafficking, and specifically
of sex trafficking. That distinction is important for our purposes. So too is
the matter of the victims’ consent and of coercion. And then there is the way
their crimes were organized — how did the three women arrange to carry out
their crimes, and who else was involved? These issues and more will be the
basis of our discussion. We begin with some background on migration and
the distinction between human smuggling and trafficking.
 What Is Sex Trafficking? >> 3

Human Smuggling and Trafficking

A little known topic just a decade or so ago, the illicit movement of people
both within and across national borders has began to draw worldwide atten-
tion since then.6 A variety of developments account for the growth in both
the size of the problem and in the attention paid to it: the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the breaking up of Yugoslavia, vast socioeconomic disparities
between Mexico and the United States, burgeoning economic development
and social inequality in China, rapid advances in global communication and
travel, increasing demands for cheap labor, a growing sex industry. The list
could go on and on.
These developments taken together comprise what have come to be called
the “push and pull” factors driving human migration. Push factors include
both societal conditions — lack of opportunity, discrimination, persecution,
civil war, and the like — and personal issues such as domestic violence and
divorce that push the individuals suffering them to want to migrate. The pull
factors are the opportunities — real or perceived — in developed and develop-
ing countries for jobs, freedom, safety, and so on. In most instances, the most
dramatic difference between source countries and destination countries is
economic opportunity. The demand for cheap labor in industrialized coun-
tries creates opportunity. With specific reference to the sex industry, coun-
tries that have lucrative commercial sex venues — brothels, massage parlors,
karaoke lounges, topless bars, escort services, and so on — and/or that are
tolerant toward or have legalized prostitution create a simultaneous demand
and pull for commercial sex.7
Would-be migrants with connections, professional skills, or education
can and do pursue legitimate channels to follow their dreams. For thou-
sands of others, however, the legitimate channels are closed off. For them,
the choice is to give up their ambitions, or to seek alternative means. This
is where smuggling and trafficking come in. Here certain facilitating factors
usually work in concert with the push/pull scenario. Those facilitators in-
clude liberal or porous border policies and corruption. Greasing the palms of
officials is almost always necessary to secure documents and to avoid detec-
tion, especially when smuggling is involved.
Unable to follow the legal route of migration, one can approach a Sister
Ping or one of her many counterparts. For a price that can vary from a few
hundred dollars in the case of Mexican coyotes (as those particular smug-
glers are called) to well up into the tens of thousands, all travel and neces-
sary documentation will be arranged. Human smugglers are in the business
4 << What Is Sex Trafficking?

of illegally moving people across national borders. Their clients are willing
customers. Once the fee has been paid in full and the transaction has been
completed, the customer, the person smuggled, is generally free and clear
of the smuggling operation, although they are illegal aliens in their destina-
tion country.8
Human trafficking is defined by the exploitation of victims. These victims
are forced to work with little or no pay; they are beaten or raped; they and
their families are threatened; they are deceived by being promised one job
and then forced to work at another; they are controlled in their movements;
and their documents are held.9 The Tang and Sun cases above had one or
more of these characteristics. Our focus here will be on this more insidious
form of human movement and exploitation.
As mentioned earlier, a good deal of attention has been devoted to this
subject during the past decade or so. Literally hundreds of articles, books,
and reports have been published, especially in the past several years.10 So
why do we need yet another examination of the issue? Despite the concern
and attention heaped on this problem, there is still much about it that is un-
known or subject to controversy.11 In general there is little empirical research
on the issue, as was suggested by Sheldon Zhang, a sociology professor, in his
review of the literature on human trafficking:

Much of the current discourse on human trafficking has not been guided
by empirical research. The increased urgency in U.S. government policy
and funding priority to combat trafficking in women and children has
been influenced more by a moral panic that continues to gain momentum
rather than by solid and systematic assessment of the problem. Research
on human trafficking remains challenging due to its secrecy and politi-
cal sensitivity.12

Where there have been empirical research studies on sex trafficking, these
have mostly been narrowly focused, for example relying on a single type of
prostitute, mostly street prostitutes. As suggested by Anthony DeStefano in
his book The War on Human Trafficking, prostitution is a multifaceted indus-
try with a proliferation of high-priced prostitutes, and it is essential to study
women in different sex markets to have a nuanced and balanced understand-
ing of the sex trade.13 Sociologist Ronald Weitzer likewise argued that “pros-
titutes vary tremendously in their reasons for entry, access to resources for
protection, number and type of clients, freedom to refuse clients and specific
sex acts, relationships with colleagues, dependence on and exploitation by
 What Is Sex Trafficking? >> 5

third parties, experiences with the authorities, public visibility, and impact
on the surrounding community.”14
One of the shortcomings in the extant body of research on human traf-
ficking, we believe, is the fact that it has included almost exclusively rescued
subjects who were in the hands of law enforcement officials, advocates, or
service providers.15 In a review of more than a hundred scholarly journal
articles on human trafficking, Sheldon Zhang found that “only a handful in-
volved some forms of empirical data” and “the information was mostly ob-
tained from law enforcement officials, representatives from advocacy groups,
and a few interviews with victims in shelters or ‘safe settings’ as Raymond
and Hughes would call them.”16 Such subjects, we believe, constitute an un-
representative sample of the larger population of trafficking victims. Not in-
cluded, for example, are any persons who may have initially been traffick-
ing victims, but who have subsequently removed any indebtedness and have
chosen to remain and to work wherever they are. Also excluded are any vic-
tims who escape on their own without contact or assistance by law enforce-
ment or others, and any victims who fall through the cracks because agency
contacts fail to recognize them as being victims. Individually complex real
life circumstances can get reduced to simple labels or categories by agency
workers. And since affixing the label “trafficking victim” is highly dependent
upon who is doing the labeling, it can come to serve strictly administrative
purposes such as establishing eligibility for temporary housing, and medical
and psychological support.17
In contrast to this approach of relying upon subjects defined by others, we
think it is critical to find subjects by casting the broadest net possible, and
to interview subjects under the broadest range of possible statuses. We also
believe interviews should be conducted under circumstances that will maxi-
mize the probability that subjects will be forthcoming and not constrained
by other motives or agendas. By this we mean it is preferable to interview
them in their own natural settings, without the presence of a third party. This
helps assure subjects that the interview is confidential, and that regardless
of what is said there will be no repercussions and nothing to be gained by
being untruthful.
We also think it is important not only to compare women from different
sex venues, but also in different destination countries. Again, the available
empirical research on sex trafficking has mostly focused on only one group
of women from one source country and in one destination country.18 This
approach overlooks the possibility that women from the same source coun-
try might have significantly different traveling and working experiences,
6 << What Is Sex Trafficking?

handlers, clients, payment arrangements, and so on in different destina-

tion countries.
We do not promise nor assume that we will lay to rest all the controversies
or definitively answer all the questions related to sex trafficking. Instead, our
goals are to shed light on one group of women who go overseas to engage
in prostitution — in this case women from the People’s Republic of China
(PRC)19 — and to provide a more nuanced understanding of the movement
of these women and its possible relation to sex trafficking. Our underlying
assumption is that commercial sex, the transnational movement of women
to overseas sex venues, and sex trafficking are linked. In this study, we sought
to explore that linkage, and to consider whether that linkage is as character-
ized by the U.S. government and the United Nations in their respective codi-
fications of human trafficking. A secondary goal was to provide information
to facilitate the development of better strategies and responses to cope with
these phenomena.
Sex trafficking, our focus, is not the only form of human trafficking. The
demand for cheap labor and their own relative socioeconomic deprivation
entice migrants into many situations having nothing to do with the sex in-
dustry. Typical examples are domestic workers, farm laborers, and construc-
tion and factory workers who will work for less than the locals are willing to
take for the same jobs. They receive less than minimum pay, and no benefits
or job security of any kind, and thus their status is that of being in servitude,
of being little more than a slave.20 For example, a couple in Long Island who
came from India were convicted for forced labor after treating two Indone-
sian maids as slaves through starvation, beatings, and torture and paying
them only $100 a month for working seventeen-hour days with no days off.21
Sex trafficking has most if not all of these same characteristics. But in ad-
dition it raises further issues that link it more closely to our overall interests
in crime and criminal justice. Prostitution is a crime in many places. Picking
potatoes, or sewing shirts, or digging holes is not. Nor have these forms of
work, unlike prostitution, been historically linked with organized crime and
vice. Because of the sex aspect, prostitution also poses dilemmas about con-
sent and coercion that factory and farm work do not.

The Making of a Trafficking Paradigm

Some years before the United Nations and the U.S. government set out their
official definitions of sex trafficking, Kathleen Barry, an influential sociology
professor, offered the following definition that subsequently became a model
for later depictions: