Sold People: Traffickers and Family Life in North China

Abstract

According to Chinese government estimates, 10,000 children are trafficked in China every year. Johanna Ransmeier’s meticulous and highly engaging study of the trade in people in the late Qing and Republican periods provides an invaluable historical context for understanding the contemporary problem, while also revealing the changing dynamics of the family unit from an entirely fresh perspective. Drawing on new material from police and court records from 1870 to the 1930s, she shows that families at every level of society engaged in buying and selling wives, concubines, child brides, prostitutes,servants, apprentices, and adopted children. While the volume of sales increased at times of crisis, selling a relative was not, as it was generally presented and as has been assumed,a last resort countenanced only by the poorest families. It was rather a socially sanctioned choice facilitated by the universal acceptance of what Ransmeier terms “the transactional family.” Marriage was generally secured by the exchange of money—bride price or a dowry—and concubines were gained through payments in exchange for their “reproductive labor”. Matchmakers arranged such transactions for a fee. This way of introducing women into the household normalized other transactions in human beings.