Myanmar officials and rights organizations are speaking out against a video by China’s state-run Xinhua news agency that they say encourages the trafficking of Myanmar women into China for marriage.

Critics say the three-minute video, which appeared on Xinhua’s Facebook page on September 21, paints a misleading picture of life in China for Myanmar brides.

The video, subtitled in Burmese, shows a Myanmar woman identified only by the Chinese name Ma Xiao Yue living comfortably with her husband in his native Shanxi province.

Speaking in fluent Chinese, the woman says she met her husband in 2007 and now receives support from the Chinese government. 

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Khine Su Lwin, the assistant director of the department of rehabilitation under the Ministry of Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, told Myanmar Now that the video gives the mistaken impression that foreign women who marry Chinese nationals are eligible for government assistance.

“It encourages human trafficking. I see it as an attempt to influence Myanmar nationals,” said Thaung Htun of the anti-trafficking Karuna Foundation.

Other officials suggested that the video could be seen as a deliberate attempt to lure women into China.  

“We need to investigate who will benefit from this video,” said Thet Naing Aung, a police chief who works with the police department’s anti-human trafficking taskforce.

He added that the video could only be accepted as genuine if the woman were permitted to return to Myanmar to confirm that she was living freely in China.   

“We can’t accept this kind of coverage because it doesn’t do our country any good,” he said.

Anti-human trafficking organizations also took issue with the video, saying that it bears no relation to the reality that many Myanmar women face in China.

“It encourages human trafficking. I see it as an attempt to influence Myanmar nationals,” said Thaung Htun, chair of the Karuna Foundation, an anti-trafficking organization based in Muse, on Myanmar’s border with China.

He added that marriage to a Chinese citizen offers no guarantee that the rights of Myanmar citizens who live in China will be protected.

“Almost all of the women who have been arrested and sent back to Myanmar were married to Chinese nationals,” he said, noting that the Chinese authorities routinely treat these women as illegal immigrants.

The Karuna Foundation has assisted thousands of women trafficked as brides to China since its founding in 2008, according to Thaung Htun.

“They are trying to hush up the fact that most trafficked women are in trouble by showing a happily married Myanmar wife,” said Nang Pu, director of the Htoi Gender and Development Foundation.

Human rights advocates say that many of the trafficked women are also victims of conflict in Myanmar.

According to a joint report released by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Kachin Women’s Association of Thailand in 2018, about 8,000 women from Kachin and Shan states were trafficked to China as brides between 2013 and 2017.

Last year, Human Rights Watch reported that brokers promising jobs in China were targeting ethnic women living in IDP camps. According to the report, some of the women were forced not only to marry against their will, but also to abandon their children in exchange for permission to return to Myanmar.

“This is a violation of human rights. Very few women are happy as trafficked wives,” she added. This year alone, she said, 119 forced brides have contacted the foundation for help. 

Despite efforts to highlight the problem, official figures show that the number of cases continues to grow. 

The Myanmar government’s department of rehabilitation, which provides support for women sold as brides in China, said that it assisted 181 trafficking victims in 2017, 242 in 2018, and 308 in 2019.

Demand for foreign brides is high in China due to a demographic imbalance attributed to Beijing’s four-decade policy of limiting couples to just one child. 

By some estimates, there are 33 million more men than women in the country as a result of a traditional bias that favors male offspring.