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Child trafficking in China

example, after adopters’ pay for victims, they usually need to purchase a falsified birth certificate to legitimize their
“children” (Shen, 2013; Wang, 2015).

3.2 Geographic pattern of child trafficking
Using the brightness to represent the frequency, panels (a) and (b) in Figure 1 show the concentrated areas of trafficking
origin and destination of victims, respectively. Consistent with the previous findings on child trafficking patterns in China,
the Central East (Shandong, Henan, and Hebei Provinces) and the Coastal (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong
Provinces) regions were the most frequent destinations of child trafficking in the past few years, though victims were also
trafficked from Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou Provinces besides the areas overlapped with destinations. Figure 2 maps
the origin and destination with the known route information. It is clear that the trafficking routes could be classified into
two types: Intra- and inter-province. Among the origin and destination overlapped areas, most of the routes share the same
origin and destination at the provincial level, while the Southwestern region (Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces)
dominates at the inter-province level, serving as the main supplier to the Central East and Coastal provinces. Possible
reasons for these patterns may include the large demand for adoptions in the Central East and coastal regions, and the
profit-driven trafficking in the regions where the implementation of the one-child policy is relatively less restricted (Xing,
Chen, and Xu, 2017; Wang, Wei, Peng et al., 2018).
To further explore whether the pattern of child trafficking differs by gender, Figure 3 shows the heat maps of male
and female victims in relation to their origins and destinations. Compared with the destinations of the female victims, one
distinct pattern of male victims is that more boys were brought to the Southeastern coastal areas, especially for Fujian and
Guangdong Provinces where the son preference is high (Wang, 2015). Similarly, for the origins, the Southeast region, for
example, Fujian and Guangdong Provinces, contributed to substantial numbers of boy victims, while the demand and supply
of the Central East region, such as Shandong, Henan, and Hebei, tended to be less gender selective. Scholars have linked
gender-selective trafficking to the combination of patrilineal family structures and practices in certain regions, as well as the
high level of economic development that makes illegal adoption affordable (Shen, 2013; Wu, 2017; Zhang, 2006).
3.3. Provincial characteristics and child trafficking

To evaluate the effects of provincial socioeconomic characteristics, we estimated a series of zero-truncated Poisson
models against the number of cases by gender and location of victims, and the results are summarized in Table 2. After
controlling for regional hotspots, the level of adoptions was positively associated with the expected log count of child
trafficking for both male and female victims at origins and destinations, which could be an indication that the frequency
of child trafficking is triggered by the demand of adoptions. Another interesting finding is that the SRB was correlated to
the expected log count of male victims at the destinations, which means that a higher SRB is linked to more boys being
purchased in the destinations.

Figure 2. Routes of child trafficking in China from 2014 to 2016

6 International Journal of Population Studies | 2018, Volume 4, Issue 2