WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

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LE BACH D. –D. BÉLANGER –KHUAT T. H.
lured by illegal agents and agencies disguised as official ones. Trafficking
and smuggling are important problems of the deregulated and
privatized Asian labour migration industry (Piper, 1999).
In addition to the increases in work migration in Asia, marriage
migration is on the rise with men from richer nations looking for wives
in poorer ones (Piper and Roces, 2003; Constable, 2005). Vietnam is
known for having supplied nearly 100,000 brides to Taiwanese men
since the mid 1990s, and unknown numbers have married to men from
South Korea, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong and China. 1 Agencies
specializing in the recruitment of “cheap” brides facilitate the trade
because these agencies take charge of the whole process on behalf of
the men and their families. Foreign brides are advertised on national
televisions networks, national newspapers and on the Internet. While
some of these agencies operate openly and respect their commitments,
others function more as trafficking networks using deception and
abuse in the process of finding or offering a wife to a client. The link
between marriage migration and trafficking is therefore important in
this context with globalization having changed the characteristics of
migration (Skolnik and Boontinand, 1999).
Besides politics, policies and uneven socioeconomic development,
the demographic landscape also contributed to the increasing demand
for workers and wives within Asia. First, in richer nations, population
aging and labour force shortages in the care (elderly and children) and
industrial sectors partly explain the need for foreign workers. Second,
the demise of marriage by women in their thirties and forties in many
South-East and East Asian countries has created a demand for foreign
brides–who are perceived to be suitable for housework and motherhood,
in contrast to local women who prefer to work and, perhaps, not
to have children (Jones and Ramdas, 2004). Third, the female deficit in
some regions of Asia also prompted a need for female workers and
spouses, thus leading to a demand in female migrants from other
regions or countries. The female deficit, brought about by two decades
of sex-selective abortions and female discrimination (Attané and
Véron, 2005), is an acute problem on the Chinese side of the Vietnam-
China border, which creates a high demand for female workers and for
wives (Attané, 2005).
It is in this complex demographic, socioeconomic and political
context that we examine migration of and trafficking in women from
Vietnam to China at the eastern Vietnam-China border region. In this
chapter, we analyze the situation of increasing female migration and
1 See Wang and Chang (2002) and Hugo and Nguyen Thi (this volume).