From this mountain to the Jade Emperor Village in the mountainside, there is no "road" (Photo by Liu Xiangnan)
As a kind of story behind an interview, I often tell people about the road that has no road.
It was an experience I had in May 2009 visiting a "human trafficker village" in Yunnan.
On April 29, 2009, the Ministry of Public Security issued a Class A wanted list of 10 fugitives suspected of major trafficking in women and children, three of whom were from Guangnan County, Yunnan Province, namely Yan Chaoxiang, Wu Zhenglian, and Zhang Weizhu.
Curious about the county of Quang Nam, I visited the area and found that the harsh living environment, the reality of poor life, and the desire to grab wealth constitute the environmental factors for these people to participate in the crime of trafficking in women and children.
One
Among the 10 people wanted by the Ministry of Public Security, the 10th was Yan Chaoxiang, who was 38 years old at the time.
Yan Chaoxiang's home is in the Jade Emperor Zhai group in Yangliujing Town, Guangnan County.
Where there is no road, it is the Jade Emperor Village.
On May 15 of that year, I rented a van from the town of Willow Well and walked along a rugged mountain road along the mountainside, often with deep valleys on the narrow side of the mountain road. An hour later, when we reached a place called Road Ditch, it could no longer be opened to traffic. I climbed down the sheep gut trail in the low woods and reached the Jade Emperor Village.
The Jade Emperor Village is very small, with only a dozen households and more than 100 people. Yan Chaoying's second sister, Yan Chaoying, was married to this village at the age of 43, and had been working in Nanning, Guangxi Province, planting eucalyptus trees for those years, and only returned to the Jade Emperor Village a month before I arrived at this village. She told me that there were 9 brothers and sisters, 6 men and 3 women, and the third oldest in the yan dynasty. Yan Chaoxiang also has 5 children, two boys and three women, of which the eldest daughter is 13 years old at the time, and one of her younger brothers and one sister is studying at The Ran Elementary School.
There was originally a primary school in Yuhuangzhai, and in the last semester when I arrived in the village, the only private teacher in the school was transferred to another school because of the regularization, and there were no teachers in this school, so some children dropped out of school, and some transferred to Scolding Primary School to study. On the day I arrived at Yuhuangzhai, Chen Huaineng, the director of the village committee, was worried about this matter, and he told me: "It takes more than two hours to walk from the village to scold, the children are young, climbing mountains and ditches, and there is a lot of water in the rainy season, which is too dangerous." ”
The Ministry of Public Security released wanted photos of the three people in 2009
No one wants to come to the village to teach, and the harsh conditions are of course an important reason. The village was so poor that "each person had only two points of land", planting bud rice and rice, "shaving in the stone", and the harvest could only fill the stomach. If you want to "find" extra money, you can only go out and work.
In 2004, Chen Huaineng's family built a house, when laying the foundation, found antimony ore, they organized villagers to dig, sold the ore to the smelter in Guangnan County, 5 yuan / kg, each household sent one person to dig, the income was divided equally, and later found by the management department, including Chen Huaineng, 5 people were arrested, locked up for 9 months, and the mine was also blown up. Chen Huaineng said: "There is no way to do the mine, since the previous year, everyone went out to work."
Starting from The Jade Emperor Village, walking for a few hours to Yangliujing, then taking a car to Funing County, and then transferring to Guangxi, Guangdong or Fujian, the people in the village are on the road, among them, there are "human traffickers" feasting on the face.
Two
Counting up, Yan Chaoxiang should be one of the earliest people to walk out of the Jade Emperor Village.
I met Yang Mouqin, the wife of Yan Chaoxiang, who was 30 years old at the time and was from Guizhou, and had been married to the Jade Emperor Village for more than 10 years. She recalled that she and Yan Chaoxiang met in Guizhou, where they had been working for five or six years. Yang Mouqin told me that since marrying into the Jade Emperor Village, she and Yan Chaoxiang had not been out much, but a few years before I arrived in this village, in order to have one more boy, they hid in Guizhou and gave birth to a son and a daughter before returning.
Two children of Yan Chaoxiang playing at home (Photo by Liu Xiangnan)
Before that, they already had three children, two more, and the daughter who was secretly born in Guizhou was also 6 years old when I arrived at the Jade Emperor Village, and reached the age of study, but because she was a super student, there was no household registration, and she could not enroll. That day, when I came to the Jade Emperor Village, the Yan family was the only pair of children at home, the brother and sister went to school, and the two children played in the sun outside the door, or went into the dark, empty and messy room, playing with the only electrical appliances in the house--- television. Their home was on a hillside, and they walked into the yard and looked out at the mountains.
In Yuhuangzhai, supernatural birth is not a phenomenon unique to the Yan family, Chen Huaineng, director of the village committee, told me, "There are 1/3 of the people in the village who have super births," Chen himself has 4 children, all of whom are boys, and two of them are fined.
Yang Mouqin's mother's family in Guizhou is also very poor, "but it is a little better than here, and the family can cultivate a lot of land." There is little land here, only enough chickens to eat, and it is a bit difficult to feed two pigs. Yang Mouqin said that in recent years, their family has planted their brother's land, because they have gone out to work, and no one has managed it. The Yan family originally had no cattle, and one of Yan's brothers saw that his family was in difficulty, so he asked the Yan family to help raise two cows, "Raise a few years, get off the cubs, sell the calves, and the two families divide the money for selling the cattle equally." ”
After the Spring Festival of that year, Yan Chaoxiang finally couldn't stand it and went out, "I want to go out and find money." It is said to be "part-time work". Yang Mouqin recalled that before leaving, they also quarreled, "I was sick, I didn't let him go, said he couldn't plant a field, he said he wouldn't plant, he went to find money, came back to buy food." Yan Chaoxiang was wanted and believed to have collaborated with others to abduct and sell children, and Yang Mouqin said that she did not believe that her husband would do the business of abducting and selling children.
"I thought he was out selling coolies." Yang Mouqin said to me.
However, the rumors of Yan Chaoxiang doing a "doll business" have long been spread in the village. Chen Huaineng, the village chief, told me that he had heard other villagers talk about this matter two years ago, and once he went to the yan family and told the banquet, "Your children are still young, it is illegal to do this, don't do it", but the banquet could not listen.
Yang Mouqin, wife of Yan Chaoxiang (photo by Liu Xiangnan)
In the two years before he was wanted, Yan Chaoxiang suddenly became rich. Chen Huaineng said: "He likes to gamble money, and in the past two years, I can often see him pull money out of his pocket, hundreds of yuan, or even thousands of yuan." Yan Chaoxiang also bought a racing horse, which was said to have cost 4,000 yuan and hung a bell, and Yan Chaoxiang often rode it around the village, which was very imposing.
When I arrived at the Jade Emperor Village, the horse was still tethered to the Yan family's stable.
Three
Wu Zhenglian, then 24, and Zhang Weizhu, then 35, were both women who were wanted by the Ministry of Public Security along with Yan Chaoxiang in the A-class, and according to the information on the wanted order, their household registrations were the Guanshan Group of Jiaobo Village in Babao Town, Guangnan County, and the Gaojiapo Group in Nanping Town.
I arrived at Guanshan on the afternoon of May 16, 2009, the day after I arrived at The Jade Emperor Village. This is a village with only 17 families, located on the side of the road from Wenshan Prefecture to Funing in Yunnan and Baise in Guangxi, and the Kunming-Nanning Expressway, which has just opened to traffic, is also on the edge of the village, with convenient transportation.
Wu Zhenglian's mother's family, Guanshan Village (Photo by Liu Xiangnan)
This is actually Wu Zhenglian's mother-in-law, who got married four or five years before I arrived in this village, married to the sinkhole in Yangliujing Township, and had a daughter. When I came to Guanshan, Wu Zhenglian's parents were at home, Wu's father was 62 years old, very thin, for my inquiry, he repeatedly said "can't understand", Wu Zi used a machete in the dark room to make a tool called "knife bracket" in the light that came in. When he went up the hill to cut firewood, he would hang it on his back waist, and the sharp machete would be inserted into this "knife scraper" so that the blade would not hurt himself.
Surrounded by towering mountains, here is also a poor mountain group, villager Tao Mouguang told me that the Guanshan group was only electrified in March 2009, the per capita arable land is very small, can only go out to work, almost every family has one person outside. Tao Mouguang was 33 years old at the time, and he had just returned home from Dongguan, Guangdong Province, for a month, and when he returned home, he heard the news of Wu Zhenglian's accident, which surprised him very much. "She's a little girl." Tao Mouguang told me, "Nothing has ever happened in the village, everyone is an honest person, farming, part-time work." Tao Mouguang judged, "Wu Zhenglian's change should be after marrying out." ”
Villager Tao Mouguang's judgment is not unfounded, and later in the village of The Sinkhole where Wu Zhenglian married, a villager told me that in 2008, four or five people were arrested for doing "doll business" in several villages around the sinkhole.
Although there are roads, going to Zhang Weizhu's home in Gaojiapo, Nanping Town, is still as difficult as going to the Jade Emperor Village. From the east of the old street of Nanping Town, walk about 18 miles of mountain road, that is, to Gaojiapo, if the weather is good, motorcycles and tractors can also be bumpy into, a little rain, the mountain is high and slippery, you can only walk.
It is a village of more than 230 people. Zhou Mouen, who practiced medicine in Laojie, was a neighbor of Zhang Weizhu, and he told me that Zhang Weizhu was married from the Zhangjiatang group in Jiaobo Village, Babao Town, and her husband was named Zhou Mouchun, and in the early 90s of the last century, Zhang Weizhu's family moved to Enping, Guangdong, where it is said to rent land to farm.
Wu Zhenglian's father (photo by Liu Xiangnan)
In Gaojiapo, more than 10 families moved to Enping, Guangdong Province, like Zhang Weizhu's family, to farm. Zhou Mouen said that shortly after Zhang moved away, she heard that she was engaged in the business of abducting and selling children, and one year, she returned to the village and was arrested by the police in Funing County and locked up for a period of time. Zhou Caishan, director of the village committee, told me that in December 2008, Zhang Weizhu's husband, Zhou Mouchun, had returned to the village to drink, and when he returned to Enping, he was arrested. ”
Four
If the source of the abduction and trafficking of women and children is pursued, Longqi Village in Nanping Town, Guangnan County, is a place that cannot be bypassed. Ma Zhongshou, director of the village committee, told me that on the evening of January 21, 1998, on the eve of the Spring Festival, the Police of Quang Nam arrested 24 traffickers in this village at one time.
"The village was very poor at that time." Ma Zhongshou said, "There are girls who marry in Fujian, and there are children over there, and these girls take their children from us." ”
According to Ma Zhongshou, this kind of child trafficking business arose in the Nanping area in 1993, "At that time, the girls in this village went out to work with people, and some stayed in Fujian, and some people in other villages married in Fujian." Bring a child over, just sell for a few hundred yuan, very cheap. At that time, most of these children came from Miaozhai in Heizhiguo Township, "where they were carried and transported to us again." ”
Ma Zhongshou told me that most of the 24 people arrested by the police in 1998 were fined and then released, and only two were sentenced. Long qi has also become a "provincial civilized village.".
In the area of Nanping Town, the Iwakami Group and Tianping Group of Xiao'amu Village are also famous "baby trafficking villages". On the evening of November 30, 2005, the Police of Quang Nam County arrested more than 20 people at a time in several villages in Xiao'amu, and more than 10 of them were sentenced.
That year in Quang Nam County, I used to rent a car from Nanping Town to Yanshang and Tianping, and the van passed through layers of mountains, bumping on the bumpy mountain road for more than an hour to arrive, all the way full of mountains and stones, karst landform features are obvious, and the mountains are barren.
Countryside of Guangnan County (Photo by Liu Xiangnan)
When I found Feng Moushou, a villager in Yanshang Village, he was watering in the field, and it was the busy season of farming, and the villagers could be seen planting seedlings and cultivating in the fields everywhere on the dam. Feng Moushou was 31 years old at the time, in the 2005 police arrest operation, Feng was also arrested, and later sentenced to five years in prison, locked up in Wenshan Prison, because of good performance, reduced sentence of one year and eight months, when I found him, he was the only one of the same group of people sentenced in the same village, the only one released after completing the sentence.
Feng Moushou told me that he dropped out of elementary school and went to Guangdong Enping to work at the age of seventeen or eighteen, "engaged in construction work." "The year I met him, the Feng family had a total of 7 people, only 3 acres of dry land." The grain produced every year is not enough to eat, so corn is bought to replenish it. Feng Moushou said. However, he was reluctant to talk more about the specific circumstances of the crime that year.
"The verdict said that it was reported by the masses that a child was abducted and sold." Feng Moushou said this to me.
Arrested at the same time as Feng Guangshou was Ning Moucai, the husband of Yang Mouxian, a villager in Yanshang Village, who was later sentenced to seven years in prison. The year I arrived in the village, Yang Renxian was 44 years old, Ning Zhong was only 45 years old, and their family consisted of five people.
"Now there is no one in the family looking for money, and one son is only 16 years old, so he dropped out of school and went outside to work." Yang Mouxian said to me. The traffic in these villages is extremely inconvenient, and when they need to buy oil and salt, they will go to the street and walk for 3 hours to reach it. 1 mu of land per capita, "harvest depends on the sky".
"Most of the villagers just have a little grain at home, and they don't have any other income without working." Yang Mouxian said.
Five
According to the map, several townships in Quang Nam County where the phenomenon of trafficking in women and children is concentrated, such as Yangliujing Town, Babao Town, and Nanping Town, are located in the southern part of Quang Nam County. Yang Jiwu, then deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Guangnan County CPC Committee, told me that the natural conditions of several towns in the south were relatively poor, all of them were karst landforms, 90% of Quang Nam was mountainous, only a few townships in the north were tushan, and it was possible to develop cash crops such as tea; there were 760,000 people in Guangnan County, with a per capita annual income of 1,900 yuan, while some villages in several townships in the south had a per capita annual income of less than 1,000 yuan.
Two children met in the countryside of Guangnan County (Photo by Liu Xiangnan)
In his early years, Yang Jiwu served as the mayor of Nanping For a short time. "This is one of the worst natural conditions in the county's townships, and the original natural villages were not connected to roads, but now it is a little better." He introduced.
"In recent years, more attention has been paid to the work of cracking down on abduction, and the public security organs have done a lot of work." Also in that year, Liu Dongyun, then secretary of the Guangnan County Political and Legal Committee, told me, "Especially after the Ministry of Public Security took a unified action last year, the crime of abducting and selling infants and young children was effectively curbed, but there are still a few people who are eager to move." Mainly in Fujian, Guangdong and other developed areas have markets, this is the most fundamental problem. ”
Liu Dongyun told me that in the Class A wanted notice issued by the Ministry of Public Security against 10 traffickers, three people from Quang Nam, the other two were committing crimes in other places, and only Yan Chaoxiang of Jade Emperor Zhai was responsible for committing crimes in Quang Nam, so the Quang Nam police were specifically responsible for instructing Yan ChaoXiang's case.
Pan Huihua, then deputy director of the Political Work Supervision Office of the Guangnan County Public Security Bureau, told me that according to the information obtained by the police, Yan Chaoxiang was originally at home, and when the police were ready to arrest him, he himself did not know that he was wanted by A-class, and later a local media reporter in Yunnan suddenly entered the village, and the villagers told him about the wanted and ran away. "The result is very passive." Pan Huihua said.
This is the first time that a Class A wanted number of these perpetrators of trafficking in women and children has been carried out. "We continue to report the following situation, which has attracted the attention of the above." Pan Huihua told me that the circumstances of the "baby trafficking" cases that have occurred in Guangnan County over the years are actually similar to the situation in Longqiao Village in those years, "going out to work and establishing contact with people outside", some people in Guangdong, Fujian and other places need children, and some local villages in Guangnan have a serious phenomenon of overbirth, giving birth to children and selling them, they get hundreds of yuan, and the traffickers change hands, "girls are three or four thousand, boys are about ten thousand yuan." Most of them voluntarily sold their children.
Pan Huihua told me that in 2007, there was only one incident of robbing a child in Quang Nam, in Banbang Township, where the family fell asleep and the child was secretly taken away. On the evening of November 19, 2008, under the unified command of the Ministry of Public Security, the public security organs launched the "9-13" operation, and the Guangnan police arrested 23 suspected child traffickers and women in four townships, including Yangliujing, Babao, Nanping, and Nashan.
"The situation is still very serious." Pan Huihua said to me.
Six
I always remember the evening of May 15, 2009, when I left Yan Chaoxiang's house and tried to climb out of the mountain to find a car back in the ditch. There is no road in the Jade Emperor Village, only a sheep gut trail that leads to the top of the mountain. Instead of climbing out along that trail again, I walked into the bushes on the hillside and followed the hills to the top of the hill. The weather was overcast, as if it were going to rain soon. It took me a lot of effort to finally climb out. Looking back now, it always feels very dangerous, and if it suddenly rains when I climb out of the bushes, it will be very dangerous. Fortunately nothing happened.
A month after I left the Jade Emperor Village, at noon on June 22, 2009, Yan Chao surrendered himself to the Yangliujing Police Station of the Guangnan County Public Security Bureau.
Earlier, on May 20, 2009, police in Jiangmen, Guangdong Province, captured trafficker Zhang Weizhu.
Wu Zhenglian was only arrested in 2011. In the three years after she was wanted for Class A, she absconded in anonymity and was finally arrested by police in Nanyang, Henan Province, on November 7, 2011.
I still remember that after leaving the Jade Emperor Village in Guangnan County for a long time, I could receive a call from Yang Mouqin, the wife of Yan Chaoxiang, from time to time, and every time she called, she wanted me to do her a favor: to see if she could help her solve the problem of her child's hukou, her child was going to school, there was no hukou, she was very embarrassed.
After a while, Yang Mouqin did not call me again.