ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the experiences of Chinese victims of transnational trafficking to the UK. The general increase in out-migration from China over the past 30 years and especially since the late 1990s, the emergence of new ‘sending’ areas beyond the traditional ones (Skeldon, 2007), and the expansion of Chinese business and Chinese communities into new parts of the world, have created larger and more diverse streams of Chinese migration that can now truly be termed global. It is under cover of these streams of willing and informed migrants, documented and undocumented, that trafficking takes place of individuals who have been deceived about the terms and destination of their migration. UK government statistics show that Chinese citizens form one of the largest groups of transnational trafficking victims by nationality (UKHTC, 2011), and offer some support for the view of the stereotypical Chinese victim as a young woman trafficked into the sex industry. However, using a sample of 48 victims (43 women and 5 men) from 2007 to 2011, 2 my research shows that there is a wider range of Chinese victims ending up in the UK in terms of age, gender, employment destination, and even immigration status, than is often supposed. Four brief case studies are presented here in order to illustrate this range of experience. Drawing on the experiences of the whole sample of victims, I argue that trafficking should be located within the context of arranged migration out of China, and that rather than there being clearly identifiable individuals who are exclusively traffickers, it is often more a case of identifying exploitative and controlling relationships between agents and willing but deceived migrants that can be defined as trafficking.
