Kidnapers Supply China’s Bride-for-Sale Market : Slavery: Men who can’t attract a mate can buy an abducted woman from criminal gangs, who flourish as parents fear for their daughters’ safety.

The peasant girl Fan Xianxiu began her journey into bondage a year ago as she walked the unfamiliar streets of this southwestern provincial capital in search of a job.

Two women befriended Fan. They bought her new clothes and persuaded her to join them on a trip north. When they got off the train in Inner Mongolia, two men were waiting to take them to a nearby village.

There, to Fan’s shock, a skinny and lame 24-year-old peasant paid her four companions $483, the price of a good color television, to take her for his wife.

“He said he was so ugly that none of the local women wanted to marry him,” Fan recalled. Her voice was soft and she looked every bit the 16-year-old naif with her ponytail and bangs hanging over her baby face.

Today, Fan is back in Chengdu. Police rescued her from a life of bondage that has become all too common in modern China.

Waiting at a government holding center to be reunited with relatives, she recounted her harrowing tale.

Fan told of the nights she was forced to sleep with the man who purchased her, the days she was shadowed by his relatives to prevent her from running away, the few moments by herself when all she could do was pray her ordeal would soon end. As she spoke, haltingly, in flat, short sentences, she squeezed the hand of a comforting friend.

“I was brokenhearted,” she said. “I hoped I could get back to Sichuan as fast as possible.”

In imperial China, women were commonly sold to be wives, concubines or prostitutes. The communists ended that after taking power in 1949. But the breakup of farming communes, which doubled as powerful local governments, and the partial return of a market economy has eroded Communist Party control in the countryside and led to a resurgence of human trafficking.

There are many reasons for the problem. Paying a family to wed their daughter is back in fashion, and men who cannot afford that often find it cheaper to buy a bride from kidnapers. Men from remote villages sometimes find that local women won’t have them.

Criminal gangs find easy kidnap targets among the millions of poor peasants who flood the cities in search of work.

Fan, who was sold into a relatively well-off household and was never beaten, fared far better than many other abducted women.

“The personal freedom of most kidnaped women has been restricted, most of them have been bitterly beaten, some of them have been raped and some have been resold on many occasions,” the state-run Inner Mongolia Daily reported recently.

More than 50,000 cases of abducted women and children were reported in 1991-92, the last years for which statistics are available, a spokesman for the national police said. The actual number of kidnapings is undoubtedly higher since not all are reported.

Although many of the women are abducted from Chengdu and elsewhere in the southwestern province of Sichuan, the provincial police refused to discuss the issue.

But one need only travel about an hour from Chengdu and listen to the people of Taihua village to understand just how pervasive the problem is.

Listen to Nong Ziying, who believes her 16-year-old daughter’s disappearance five years ago must have been an abduction:

“I went to Chengdu a lot of times, but I didn’t find out anything,” said Nong, 46, standing by a field of young green wheat as she clutched a tiny black-and-white photo of her daughter.

“Of course I cried . . . I think of her a lot, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Then there’s Zhen Shufang. She is so petrified that her only child, an 18-year-old daughter, will become the next victim, that she doesn’t let her leave home. Zhen spends the day doing embroidery behind barred windows.

“Girls that age are easily tricked,” the mother said. “They can be kidnaped and sold.”

One village girl was abducted and sold to a peasant in another province before being rescued and returned home. Her parents tracked her down and coaxed police with gifts of cigarettes to help bring her back.

The central government clearly wants to crack down on the kidnapings. They not only are embarrassing to a ruling Communist Party that stresses sexual equality but also provide ammunition to international critics of China’s human rights policies.

Authorities have enacted tough anti-abduction laws and executed some kidnapers. In 1991-92, police rescued about 44,000 abducted women and children and arrested about 75,000 members of kidnap gangs, the Public Security Ministry said.

Fan Xianxiu was rescued late last year when Inner Mongolia police swept through her village looking for kidnaped women as part of a provincial campaign against abductions. She was among nearly 60 kidnaped Sichuanese brought back from the north to Chengdu in mid-January.

She said the man who held her for eight months on the final day “urged me to stay. I said I wasn’t coming back. Of course he was angry.”

Several of the other women owed their return more to personal courage than police work.

One, a penniless 15-year-old surnamed Yang, traveled about 60 miles in frigid weather after escaping from the man who bought her. She reached the safety of police in Jilin, a northern provincial capital, after seven days on the road, sustained by the kindness of peasants who took her in at night.

For all the kidnaped women and children who are rescued, countless more never go home. The women who made it back to Chengdu said there were many more purchased wives still living in the villages up north.

Some victims are so fearful of being caught and beaten they never try to escape. Others choose to stay, those who have borne children or find their new surroundings more comfortable than their impoverished home villages.

Abducted women also may find themselves stigmatized if they return home. Parents often reject them, husbands divorce them.

For now, with booming urban areas continuing to lure poor peasant women, it may be difficult for authorities to snuff out the abduction epidemic.

Young country women seeking work as maids or factory workers continue to crowd an illegal job market at Chengdu’s Nine-Eyes Bridge, a favorite hunting ground for wife-traffickers.

Police efforts to close the market have failed. Posted signs and broadcasts warning of abductors on the prowl don’t seem to frighten the young women, who believe they will be able to spot trouble if it comes.

In fact, they sound a bit like Fan Xianxiu, bundled in a red sweater against the winter cold. She’ll soon be looking for work again, she said.

“Of course I won’t be fooled again,” she insisted.

But when asked how she will spot potential abductors, she groped for an answer:

“As long as I’m careful, it’ll be all right.”