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Le trafic des femmes et des enfants au Viêt Nam représente un fléau qui n'est ni récent, ni contemporain. Pendant la période coloniale française (1858-1954) l'administration coloniale, les consuls de France en Chine, les militaires et d'autres colons se rendirent compte que les rapts de femmes et de fillettes vietnamiennes étaient non seulement fréquents mais faisaient aussi souvent partie de réseaux criminels bien organisés. De nombreuses bandes armées sillonnant les régions côtières et les villages frontaliers entre la Chine et le Viêt Nam capturaient ou enlevaient des femmes et des enfants vietnamiens afin de les vendre dans de nombreux marchés chinois. Ces femmes et enfants, destinés au concubinage, au travail domestique ou à la prostitution, parfois permirent à des bandes vietnamiennes anticoloniales de les échanger contre des armes. Malgré de nombreuses mesures mises en place pour mettre fin à ce trafic, le commerce des femmes et des enfants vietnamiens demeura constant pendant la période coloniale française et devint un phénomène embarrassant pour les autorités coloniales.
In December 2002, a news service out of New Delhi reported on the current practice of kidnapping Vietnamese women to be sold in China. One of its articles recounted the story of Pei Xing Fu, a Chinese man arrested for drug trafficking who also confessed to having kidnapped a Vietnamese woman in broad daylight.1 In Ban'ai village, where Pei Xing Fu resides, it was reported that seven men had been sentenced for trafficking Vietnamese women across the border into China.2 Another man, Zhang Yuanfu, claimed he had first been married to a Vietnamese wife for whom he had paid about 500 Yuan (about US$60) to the go-between. Now married to a Chinese woman, Zhang seemed nostalgic about his Vietnamese wife, who, he claimed, had been "more considerate and hard working" than his current Chinese wife.3 As for Pei Xing Fu, he estimated that around 30 to 40 percent of the men in his village had Vietnamese brides.4
Such instances of human trafficking from Vietnam into China have increased with the resumption of diplomatic and economic ties between Beijing and Hanoi in 1989. The subsequent increase in trade has made the nearly 2,300 kilometers of land border between both countries busier and more porous, therefore more difficult to monitor....