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The most powerless of China's new generation of women sit huddled in a row of brothels in Xingsha, a grimy town in Hunan province where some of the kidnapped girls from Xupu county have ended up. Red and purple lights illuminate the girls' narrow frames, many barely past puberty. A few girls lounge under a giant photograph of a naked couple, while others smoke cigarettes and play cards to pass the time. One trick costs $18; a whole night is double that. No one talks about arresting the pimps who keep a watchful eye over the girls lest they try to escape. A police car is parked next to one brothel, but a passerby snickers and whispers that the officer is a regular. Cops, of course, get a discount.
During Mao's heyday, China had virtually no prostitutes, as every man, woman and child was tracked by Orwellian neighborhood-watch committees. But when Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping opened the country to economic reforms, people began to roam—and disappear from neighborhood radars. Men traveling on business could visit newly opened brothels without anyone knowing, and pimps could gather truckloads of girls from the countryside without raising suspicion. Today, prostitution is so rampant that the latest edition of the Xinhua Dictionary of New Words has a new entry: pao niu, or looking for prostitutes.
The traffickers first descended on Xupu county in 1995, and at least 600 local girls are now thought to be serving either as prostitutes or as brides illegally sold to farmers too poor to pay for a more expensive traditional marriage. Last year, some 20,000 women nationwide were rescued before being sold as wives. The All-China Women's Federation estimates that the rate of female abductions is increasing by an average of 30% a year. Residents of Xupu county have tried to combat the kidnappings any way they can. After a local middle-school principal's daughter was snatched between classes, he ordered the walls surrounding the schoolyard to be made higher. Parents in the village now keep their children at home after dusk.
Villagers say they've had little help from the police, and they suspect local officials may be complicit in the abductions. After an elderly activist named Zhang Xisheng spoke to the local media about the epidemic of missing girls, he was suddenly jailed and is now serving a seven-year sentence for subverting state security. Despite villagers drawing up a list of likely traffickers, only one suspected kidnapper has been arrested—and he was later released. In Hu Lixia's one exchange with a local police officer, she says he dismissed her entreaties for justice and then asked her to service him. When Hu's father spoke to the local press about the incident earlier this year, officials from both the provincial- and national-level security bureaus showed up at his door, promising violence if he talked again. Yet when contacted about the kidnappings, a local police spokesperson at first professed no knowledge of the case, then added that it was too sensitive to talk about. Like other locals, Zhou Ruwen, a farmer whose granddaughter was abducted, claims cops turn a blind eye because they've been paid off by traffickers: "The police don't make money if they stop the kidnappers," says Zhou. "They only make money if the kidnapping continues. We have to accept that we will keep losing girls from our homes."
But even the girls who have been able to stay at home are losing out. One of Mao's proudest accomplishments was increasing the number of girls in school. A century ago, barely 2% of women were literate. By the 1990s, village-committee leaders had seen to it that most girls had attended at least a few years of grade school. But over the past decade, China's cash-strapped Education Ministry has started allowing schools to increase their fees to make up for financial shortfalls. In some rural school districts, the fees are half a peasant's yearly income. The first ones to drop out, naturally, are girls whose families cling to the feudal notion that only boys need an education. Last year in rural areas, girls were 11 times more likely than boys to drop out of primary school. Unsurprisingly, there are also fewer women going to college: since 1995, the number of female university students has declined every year, to one-third of the student body today, according to the State Education Commission.
Yang Li was a fifth-grade bookworm who was always reading ahead of her class in the mountains of Jiangxi province. True, the kids were often forced to make fireworks during class time, but at least she was getting in a little learning. Then her brother stopped sending money from his job as a construction worker, so Yang had to drop out of school. She had been one of only two girls left in her class of 30-odd kids. Now, Yang lives in the teeming southern metropolis of Guangzhou, selling roses for a living. The 14-year-old shares a cramped eight-square-meter room with nine other girls from Yangfang village who pool their earnings for rent. As the oldest, Yang cooks turnip rice for the younger ones and dispenses hugs to the lonely new arrivals. In a way, they're lucky: a worker who helps care for Guangzhou's homeless estimates that two-thirds of the city's 10,000-plus street children are girls.
Last year, Yang's 11-year-old sister arrived to start work in the big city, but Yang wasn't around to greet her. The day before, she had been arrested for loitering and was dumped in a cell with drug dealers and other miscreants. "To make it less scary, I closed my eyes and thought of the happy endings in books I read in school," says Yang. "But I don't know if I will have a happy ending or not." For many women in China, happy endings are becoming ever harder to find.