The government made insufficient anti-trafficking law enforcement efforts, including by continuing to allocate extensive law enforcement and paramilitary resources toward the mass detention and forced labor of members of ethnic and religious minority groups. The criminal code criminalized some forms of sex trafficking and labor trafficking. Various provisions of the criminal code could be used to prosecute sex trafficking offenses. Article 240 of the Criminal Law criminalized “the abduction and sale of women or children,” which included abduction by deceit, kidnapping, purchasing, selling, sending, receiving, and transferring for the purpose of sale; however, unlike the definition of trafficking in persons under international law, Article 240 did not explicitly link these acts to a purpose of exploitation. Article 240 prescribed penalties of five to 10 years’ imprisonment and fines for the abduction and sale of women and children. If an abducted woman was then forced into “prostitution,” the penalties increased to 10 years’ to life imprisonment, fines, and confiscation of property. These penalties were sufficiently stringent and commensurate with the penalties prescribed for other grave crimes, such as rape. Article 241 of the Criminal Law criminalized the purchase of abducted women or children and prescribed a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment, short-term detention, or controlled release; like Article 240, it did not require that the purchase be for the purpose of exploitation. Penalties under this provision were not alone sufficiently stringent; however, Article 241 stipulated that if an individual purchased an abducted woman or child and then subjected them to “forcible sexual relations,” they would face additional penalties under the criminal code’s rape provisions. Article 358 of the Criminal Law criminalized forced prostitution and prescribed penalties of five to 10 years’ imprisonment; if the offense involved a child younger than the age of 14, the penalties increased to 10 years’ to life imprisonment in addition to fines or confiscation of property. These penalties were sufficiently stringent and commensurate with the penalties prescribed for other grave crimes, such as rape. Article 359 of the Criminal Law criminalized harboring prostitution or luring or introducing others into prostitution, and it prescribed a maximum of five years’ imprisonment and a fine; if the offense involved a girl younger than the age of 14, it prescribed a minimum of five years’ imprisonment and a fine. These penalties were sufficiently stringent; however, the penalties prescribed for offenses involving girls 14 to 17 years of age were not commensurate with the penalties prescribed for other grave crimes, such as rape. Labor trafficking offenses could be prosecuted under Article 244, which criminalized forcing a person “to work by violence, threat, or restriction of personal freedom” and recruiting, transporting, or otherwise assisting in forcing others to labor, and prescribed three to 10 years’ imprisonment and a fine. These penalties were sufficiently stringent.
Although the central government continued to prosecute and convict PRC nationals for trafficking crimes, authorities did not collect or report comprehensive law enforcement data. Courts likely issued lower, suspended sentences to traffickers who purchased commercial sex from trafficking victims than to traffickers who abducted or sold women into sex trafficking. Partial public records of anti-trafficking enforcement continued to feature crimes outside the definition of trafficking according to international law (including migrant smuggling, abduction of women and children, custody disputes, and fraudulent adoption without the purpose of exploitation), making it difficult to assess progress. The government continued to handle most cases with indicators of forced labor as administrative issues through the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) and seldom initiated prosecutions of such cases under anti-trafficking statutes; observers noted authorities were more likely to persecute human rights advocates and organizations drawing attention to forced labor than to enforce labor laws. Some courts likely continued to prosecute trafficking crimes under laws pertaining to domestic violence, labor contract violations, and child abuse, all of which prescribed lesser penalties. In prior years, authorities did not disaggregate conviction data by the relevant criminal code statutes, and courts reportedly prosecuted the vast majority of these cases under Article 358 – especially for those involving commercial sexual exploitation – rather than under Article 240.
For the seventh consecutive year, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) did not report the number of investigations initiated of possible trafficking cases (1,004 in 2016). The government publicized the investigation of 212 suspects for abducting women and children; some of these cases may have involved sex or labor trafficking. For the second consecutive year, the government neither reported initiating nor continuing from prior years any prosecutions (compared with 86 cases prosecuted in 2021). Authorities did not report investigating or prosecuting PRC nationals allegedly exploiting victims in online scam operations in Burma, Cambodia, or Laos, however, ongoing law enforcement activities between PRC officials and local ethnic armed organizations in Burma reportedly resulted in the PRC arresting and returning more than 44,000 PRC nationals from online scam operations in Burma between August 2023 and January 2024. In addition, the government cooperated with Laos in law enforcement actions, which resulted in the arrest and return of at least 626 PRC nationals involved in online scam operations within Laos’ special economic zones (SEZs). While some of those arrested likely included traffickers or other criminals complicit in the scam operations, the government did not screen any of these individuals for trafficking indicators and observers reported the government almost always viewed those arrested as criminals and subjected them to extensive investigation by law enforcement; that questioning sometimes resulted in victims being identified as “coerced accomplices” whom the government pardoned or gave lighter sentences. In prior years, the government published limited data on convictions in human trafficking cases on a public judicial database; however, it did not publish any convictions for human trafficking crimes during the reporting period. Reports suggested the government also systematically removed previously published information about trafficking cases from previous years. The government publicized recovering 683 abducted women and children, some of whom may have been exploited in trafficking, but it did not provide data on the total number of cases of “women trafficking and child abduction,” “forced prostitution,” or forced labor it concluded in 2023 (compared with 546 cases, 475, and 38, respectively, in 2020, the most recent year for which this information was available). For the second consecutive year, the government did not report convicting or sentencing any traffickers (compared with nine convictions in 2021; unreported in 2020; 2,355 convictions in 2019). However, state-controlled media reported convictions of at least six traffickers in connection with a 2022 case in Jiangsu province; sentences in the case reportedly ranged from eight to 13 years’ imprisonment.
Authorities engaged in law enforcement cooperation with Southeast Asian governments to investigate cases of PRC citizens subjected to trafficking abroad, cases involving foreign nationals subjected to trafficking within the PRC, and to extradite PRC nationals suspected of human trafficking abroad. The government maintained anti-trafficking agreements with the five other Lower Mekong countries to jointly address trafficking via the forced and fraudulent marriage of their citizens to PRC-based individuals; some provincial governments maintained their own similar agreements with counterpart entities in bordering countries. Authorities previously reported maintaining coordinated anti-trafficking mechanisms with law enforcement and interior ministry counterparts in 34 countries, and these mechanisms were likely still in place. Judicial authorities engaged with counterparts from countries who hosted BRI projects to increase judicial cooperation on transnational crimes, including trafficking. Some foreign law enforcement personnel continued to report their PRC counterparts were unresponsive to requests for bilateral cooperation on cross-border trafficking cases, while others reported the PRC’s cumbersome law enforcement bureaucracy hindered joint operations. Some foreign officials noted jurisdictional challenges when attempting to pursue trafficking investigations, including into online scam operations, inside of SEZs in Lower Mekong countries, and single foreign investment project compounds in the Pacific operated by PRC national-owned companies.
MPS maintained an Office of Counter Trafficking that was exclusively dedicated to investigating trafficking crimes, however many of the cases it investigated were missing persons cases, most of which likely did not involve trafficking as defined in international law. The government did not have dedicated anti-trafficking components within the Supreme People’s Procuratorate or the court system. The government did not report providing anti-trafficking training for law enforcement. Observers previously reported the need for training of officials on recent changes to the criminal code. Despite continued reports of officials benefiting from, permitting, or directly facilitating sex trafficking and forced labor, the government did not report any investigations, prosecutions, convictions, or administrative fines or demotions of complicit government employees. Officials at multiple levels, including central party-state officials, were also complicit in state-sponsored forced labor by directing the PRC’s mass detention, political indoctrination, and labor dispatch campaign against members of Turkic and/or Muslim minority groups, and some officials reportedly profited directly from this system. Authorities reportedly subjected Tibetans and members of other ethnic and religious groups to similar abuses. Xinjiang officials continued to obstruct meaningful access for international observers to sites across the region that would otherwise facilitate investigations into credible allegations of forced labor.
from 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report – U.S. Department of State
2024 Trafficking in Persons Report – United States Department of State
