A man walks into Wangjia village in Longxi, Gansu Province on October 28, 2015. Snagging a wife costs at least 300,000 yuan ($46,000) in this rural area, a price which can put some families in crushing debt. Photo: CFP

Jia Pingwa, writer of The Caterpillar Flower

A famous writer's claim that China's "villages will vanish without trafficked women" during an interview about his new book, has reignited the debate over how society justifies human trafficking and China's vanishing rural communities.

Jia Pingwa gained fame after writing Deserted City, a book which was banned in China for its explicit sexual content by the publishing authority in 1993 but was released in China 17 years later. The book won him the Prix Femina Etranger, a French literature prize, in 1997.

This time, he did not receive a backlash from the authorities but from readers and feminists.

The Caterpillar Flower, published in March, tells the story of a village girl named Hu Die who moves to a city and is abducted and sold to a remote village in Northwest China. Hu is raped by her "husband" and gives birth to a baby. After a year, she is rescued by police and returns to the city, but cannot stand how people judge her for her experience. The novel ends with her going back to the village to join her "husband" and their child.

The Beijing Youth Daily published an interview with Jia in April, in which he said that trafficked women, like the heroine of his novel, should share responsibility for their trafficking and take precautions.

The interviews quoted Jia as saying that the buyer in the novel would never have had a wife if he did not buy one, that poor villages will vanish if  no trafficked women are forced to live in them and that human trafficking in remote areas cannot be wiped out because of inequality between rural and urban areas.

 "What Jia implies is that it is forgivable to traffic women to remote villages, but all civilized people should make no excuses for this crime since it severely violates women's interests and rights," Gao Fuqiang, a writer and feminist, told the Global Times.

Cai Lingzi, a blogger, wrote an article online that criticized Jia for objectifying women and showing no respect to them.

"It seems Jia cares little about the suffering of trafficked women. He mourns for village bachelors while overlooks the fact that women are treated as reproduction tools and nannies there," Cai told the Global Times.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the authorities handled 92,851 cases from 2000 to 2013 in which women and children were trafficked. However, this is likely only a small part of the total number of trafficking cases that have occurred in the country.

The Supreme People's Court announced in February 2015 that the number of such cases continued to drop in China in 2014 because of harsh punishments, though the courts across the country still handled 978 cases in 2014.

"As the crisis of leftover men gets worse, especially in poverty-stricken areas, some people may choose to illegally buy a wife," He Xuefeng, a professor at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, told the Global Times

He said that prenatal gender selection has worsened the disparity in China's gender ratio and to fulfill the traditional ideal of carrying on the family line, sometimes a whole village takes part in purchasing trafficked women, preventing them from running away and blocking their rescue.

There are even reports about trafficked women who refuse to leave after being rescued by police, as they are afraid of facing the judgment of the outside world, said Cai. But that does not mean human trafficking is forgivable, Cai added.

Sad reality

Some complimented Jia, saying that the novel is realistic since it reveals the expanding gap between rural and urban areas and draws attention to the bachelor issue in remote areas.

"The Caterpillar Flower is a story about how to communicate with the land rather than just about trafficking. The great pain experienced by Hu Die stems from both society and the individual, and highlights the difficulty in finding a sense of belonging," Liang Hong, a famous writer was quoted by the People's Daily as saying.

In the postscript of The Caterpillar Flower, Jia wrote that the story was based on one of his friends' daughter's experience 10 years ago.

"This event was like a knife sticking into my heart ... I am concerned about the expansion of urban areas and the decline of rural areas. Human trafficking is vicious and should be cracked down on … but who cares about those bachelors in villages or the fact that cities have seized fortune, labor and women from rural areas," writes Jia.

Jia told the Global Times on Tuesday that some media outlets published only part of his remarks without giving their full context. But he refused to clarify his meaning.

Hou Hongbin, a columnist, said in an article released on the news site qq.com that Jia is too nostalgic and narrow-minded in blaming the bachelor issue on cities and it is understandable that rural girls want to pursue better lives in cities.

According to a survey released by China Youth Daily in February, there are at least nine single men of marriageable age in each of the 300 villages they surveyed across China, and 80 percent of them are forced to be bachelors for reasons other than physical disabilities.

Dang Guoying, a research fellow on rural development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said that the backward rural areas that Jia depicts in his novel are doomed to vanish during the process of urbanization.

"Improving economic conditions and  changing attitudes toward women in rural areas could attract some village girls to go back and ease the bachelor problem," said He.