Who would have thought that almost 75 years after the Chinese Communist Revolution, girls would be sold in marriage? Pre-1949, it was common for parents to avoid spending on their daughters by sending them to their future in-laws, even while they were young, after collecting their ‘bride price’. Those who were desperately poor simply sold the girls to the first available bidder.

Liberation changed all that. Like peasants, young women were among those most drastically affected by the Revolution. The 1950 Marriage Law banned child marriages, forced marriages, concubinage and prostitution. Girls married off in childhood walked out of their marriages and the divorce rate in the 1950s shot up to 1.3 per 1,000. The idea of women being a burden on their families collapsed.

But the practice of child marriage seems to have made a resounding comeback, going by the case of the 16-year-old who ran away twice from the marriage her parents sold her into last month. They were given gifts worth 260,000 yuan (approximately Rs 31 lakhs) as bride price. The girl managed to escape from Sichuan and travel 1,600 kilometres to Guangdong province, where it is easy to find anonymity in a factory job. Normally, dormitory accommodation is provided within or near the factory complex.

Unfortunately, the girl was spotted by her husband’s relatives when she stepped out of the complex. It wasn’t long before her husband and his family landed up there and asserted their right over her, dragging her out of her dormitory.

But this was a girl determined to win her freedom. Under the excuse of using the toilet at an expressway service centre, she pleaded for help with a staffer, who called the police. Luckily for her, they responded immediately. The video of her opening the toilet door to a policeman and saying, “My parents sold me,” has gone viral. The police took the 16-year-old to a children’s shelter.

Bleak future

Now that she was in the hands of the State, she should have been safe, as her parents had clearly committed an illegal act — the minimum age of marriage is 20 for girls. But the police behaved exactly as they would in India — they called up her parents, and her father and brother came and took her away.

The outburst of anger online at this unjustifiable action forced the authorities to explain. The Communist Party of China-backed Women’s Federation said that, along with the civil affairs department, it had “patiently persuaded” her family members before buying them train tickets home. It also claimed to have contacted its counterpart in the girl’s hometown and got an assurance that the latter would check up on her every month. But no mention was made of prosecuting the parents or the husband. When reporters contacted the Sichuan authorities, they found the latter clueless about the girl.

Last year, the case of a woman who’d been trafficked into ‘marriage’ thrice, had had eight children and ended up tied to a wall by her third ‘husband’, made headlines. In January this year, came the story of the weeping bride. Dressed in her white bridal gown, the tearful 20-year-old posted online that she was entering her marriage only to satisfy her parents. “My parents are getting older, so am I; my relatives are pushing me; and neighbours gossip about me... I feel I don’t have a future for myself.”

Prostitution, trafficking of women, child marriage, had all but disappeared in Mao’s China. But then came Deng Xiaoping’s ‘opening up’ to the West and its ‘socialist market economy’, resulting in China becoming the world’s second-largest economy. If in the process, women have become a commodity again, well, maybe that’s all part of “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, as Xiaoping once put it.