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Xin Y and Cai T.

Scholars have linked some trafficking patterns, for example, the frequency and probability of selling or buying for
economic and cultural reasons (Wang, 2017; Wu, 2017). For instance, studies have suggested that the large income gap,
low level of education, and high illiteracy rate are positively correlated to the probability of selling victims; similarly, a
high sex ratio at birth (SRB), which is considered a consequence of the restrictive practice of the family planning policy
and traditional culture, is associated with the high probability of buying victims (Wang, 2017). In addition to the profit- or
culture-motivated hypothesis (Jiang Q and Sánchez-Barricarte, 2013; Shen, 2013), some scholars have argued that the black
market for child trafficking in China was triggered by the demand for illegal adoption, a result of the unique combination
of the one-child policy, the traditional culture of male-preference, and the barriers to legal adoption (Ren, 2004; Shen,
Antonopoulos, and Papanicolaou, 2013; Tao, 2017; Wang, 2015; Xing, Chen, and Xu, 2017). Given that many children
were voluntarily sold by their parents or relatives, people who lived in poor rural areas with relatively loose family planning
policies were more likely to sell their own children (Wu, 2017; Wang, 2017), given their own gender preference (Rafferty,
2007). In addition, the high profit, low risk, and lenient punishment for parental sellers in child trafficking businesses
elevated the supply (Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte, 2013; Shen, Antonopoulos, and Papanicolaou, 2013; Zhang, 2006).
Although previous studies have examined the child trafficking issue in China, due to limited information provided by
official records and the unreliable nature of self-reported cases, much of the research suffers from inconsistent results or
a lack of empirical evidence. Moreover, to understand the extent of child trafficking, legal adoption has to be considered
because adopters and buyers share the same “market” in China. To fill this gap, the current study aims to provide a
more substantial basis for empirical research on child trafficking through the analysis of official sentencing documents.
Although a single source of information cannot provide a complete picture of the extent of child trafficking in China, the
sentencing documents provide useful information on both the victims and offenders. Furthermore, by taking the advantage
of geographic information system technology, we are able to map trafficking networks and summarize trafficking patterns,
thus contributing to a better understanding of the nature of child trafficking in China.
Taking advantage of the released sentencing documents from 2014 to 2016, the current study seeks to explore the
patterns of child trafficking in China, focusing on the characteristics of the victim, geographic distribution of trafficking
routes, and the related socioeconomic factors. This article is organized as follows: First, we begin by summarizing
previous findings. Next, a description of the data and methods used is presented, followed by our results and discussion.
We conclude with a summary of our findings and suggestions for future studies.
2. Data and Methods

2.1. Data
In this study, we utilized web-scraping techniques to retrieve all available sentencing documents during the period of
2014–2016 citing Article 240 of the Chinese Criminal Law that criminalizes the trafficking of females or children.
Sentencing documents were obtained directly from the China Judgments online (CJO) website, which is the official
archiving platform for the national judicial documents. The process of webpage data collection is to automatically browse
the website through client-server communication, store the contents of webpage, and to structuralize them into analyzable
data. The contents of interest, for example, the sentencing documents, are stored on server and can be located and visited
by a global address - Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Theoretically, once the URL of each of webpages is known, the
contents could be retrieved and transported using HTTP protocol (Fielding, Gettys, Mogul et al., 1996). However, due to
the lack of well-developed software and individually customized structure of the CJO website, the whole process of data
collection was done by specialized programming in Python. According to Article 240, any individual who is involved in
“any act of abducting, kidnapping, buying, trafficking in, fetching or sending, or transferring a woman or a child for the
purposes of selling the victim” faces a penalty of not <5 years or life imprisonment and a fine or confiscation of property.
Since the mandatory uploading started from January 01, 2014, and there is no regulation to urge the People’s Courts to
upload the cases sentenced before that, the number of cases sentenced before the year of 2014 is very limited. While the
project was started in 2017, only three full years of data were available. Therefore, the analytical sample consists of 536
first trial cases sentenced from 2014 to 2016 with 1,074 defendants and 859 victims.
For a criminal case, usually there are three steps involving investigation, prosecution, and trial. The process of each
of cases might be different. Among the total of 536 cases sentenced between 2014 and 2016, more than 90% of victims
were sold at the same year of the case being trafficked. Although there were no official data sources showing the number
of prosecuted child trafficking cases in the legal system, according to the official emergency response system - Tuanyuan
which is led by the Ministry of Public Security of China, there were totally 3,053 reported missing children, and 97.6%

International Journal of Population Studies | 2018, Volume 4, Issue 2 3