Minahil met her Chinese husband the day she signed the marriage certificate. It was an unceremonious affair at a house in the suburbs of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. Months earlier, a Pakistani intermediary pitched the arrangement to her parents: They could marry their daughter to a Chinese man who would give her a life abroad. In return, the groom would buy them a home in Lahore and send money for living expenses.
The father of Minahil (not her real name), a local evangelist with diabetes and an injured foot, could hardly afford the rent on their modest property. When the proposal came in, he was in debt to loan sharks and had started asking for handouts from his neighbors to get by. The family was going to be evicted, and an influx of cash would go a long way.
Minahil, 23, who is not being identified for her protection, was years behind in school when the offer appeared. She imagined marrying a Chinese man could give her more freedom than wedding a fellow Pakistani. Plus, her family needed money for medical care, and her side job packaging spices until late in the evening did not bring in nearly enough.
“At that time, I was unable to think clearly,” she told me during an interview at her family home in Lahore late last year. “My mother had to be treated, as did my father, so I did whatever I thought was best.” She got married in 2021, and it was registered in early 2022.
The decision would take Minahil to China and back, in a gamble made by many hundreds of Pakistani Christian women in recent years. Straddling a thin line between arranged marriage and human trafficking, the practice is frequently one of convenience for both brides and grooms. Pakistan’s Christian minority, most of whom are Catholic, are largely impoverished; China’s one-child policy, which ended a decade ago and pushed families to prefer male children, created a disparity in the numbers of men and women
Such marriages often follow a blueprint, with brokers from each country matchmaking for Chinese men. By China’s own admission, there is a surplus of around 35 million men who are increasingly looking abroad to find wives, frustrated by the lack of available spouses in their hometowns. High bride prices in China have only exacerbated the issue.
The so-called “leftover” men of this generation are finding mates across Asia, from Vietnam to eastern Russia. But growing demand for these brides has fueled concerns about human trafficking. In May, the Chinese Embassy in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka warned its citizens against marrying local women to avoid being scammed by criminal gangs who sell women under the pretext of marriage.
But even with governmental warnings and community pushback, demand for these marriages still exists, creating an ever-shifting network of paid and informal matchmakers who continue to find couples ready to marry across borders, despite the possible risks. Marriages between Pakistani Christians and Chinese men have taken place as recently as early this year.
Some in the Christian community argue that financial incentives offered by Chinese suitors muddy the notion of consent for women, especially those from low-income families. Traditionally, daughters in Pakistan are expected to get married, and parents have significant sway over the choice of a partner.
“A drowning man will clutch at a straw,” said Asif Aqeel, founding director of the Center for Law and Justice, a minority rights organization in Lahore. “That would be consent if she were not drowning.”
Over the past four years, in interviews with around a dozen women married through these networks, along with family members, pastors, lawyers, police, Chinese grooms and Pakistani investigators, New Lines has pieced together a picture of the changing nature of the practice, including new ploys by agents to overcome the tarnished reputation of Chinese grooms in some Christian communities.
The Pakistani government has taken action against some groups involved in arranging these marriages, most recently in March, when a Chinese national was arrested along with two Pakistani colleagues for suspected trafficking. Yet reactions from Pakistani institutions are mixed and the subject remains touchy, due to the deepening ties between the two countries.
Beijing has invested billions of dollars in infrastructure, energy and trade, keeping Pakistan’s economy afloat. The investment, which began a decade ago as part of China’s flagship Belt and Road Initiative, has seen tens of thousands of Chinese workers come and go. Islamabad has tried to accommodate Chinese interests in the face of security challenges, even creating a special police force in the capital to protect Beijing’s citizens.
Initially, Pakistani Christian communities encouraged the marriages, seeing them as opportunities for financial improvement. In Faisalabad, a city near Lahore, the Rev. Emric Joseph said that early involvement of church leaders helped regularize the practice.
“Pastors [gave] them surety that these are Christians and good people, rich people,” he told me. While there are legal ways for Christians in Pakistan to marry outside their religion, most prefer to marry within the same faith, something seen as more permissible on a spiritual level but also better for a tight-knit community that feels discriminated against by the Muslim majority.
While his methods are unconventional, Joseph manages to bring in hundreds of followers from Faisalabad and the surrounding villages to the Presbyterian church that he heads. During one visit by New Lines, he took the stage in an exercise to cast out apparent evil spirits from a member of his congregation. Joseph thought marriage proposals from Chinese men could benefit women in his congregation, many of whom were uneducated and looking for any possible way out.
But when he started seeing news stories on local Christian television channels warning their communities that Chinese marriages were risky and should be avoided, he backtracked — even taking part in a sting operation to try and catch the people involved in organizing them.
Joseph and his wife helped arrange a ceremony in a hotel banquet hall, where Pakistani investigators posed as members of a bride’s family before rushing in to arrest the groom and the pastor who had solemnized the marriage.
Joseph is not the only member of the community to have resisted in this way. An activist, Saleem Iqbal, put out early warning calls about such marriages when he heard accusations that the Chinese men involved were not Christian, something he found personally offensive. “It seemed wrong. It seemed suspicious,” he told me late last year.
Iqbal shared with me the details of an organized group on WeChat (a Chinese messaging service) of approximately a dozen Christian women from around Punjab who were unhappy in China and wanted to return. On his Facebook page, which has around 40,000 followers, he warned other parents not to accept marriage proposals from China. “They can be dangerous, so don’t do this with your daughter,” he recalled saying.
Minahil and her husband spent around a year together in Pakistan after their marriage, shuffling between her family home and that of the Chinese broker arranging their visas and travel. As they waited for their paperwork, Minahil learned more about her husband, who lived and worked in Lahore. The two communicated in a mix of Mandarin and Urdu, using a phone translation app to fill the gaps until she learned enough Mandarin to hold a conversation.
The couple often got along, but Minahil’s husband was also quick to get jealous and could turn violent. Once, he hit her in front of her parents when they disagreed, which almost made her change her mind about going with him to China.
During her visa interview, Minahil said she assured the official she was going of her own free will. “I told them it’s my choice to go to China. This is my husband, and his family there is calling us to come,” she said.
Once she reached China, the dreams of an exciting life abroad evaporated. The couple moved in with his parents in a rural area of the eastern Shandong province, instead of the urban home for the two of them that she was promised. She passed the time by going to church with her husband, who was also a Christian, and he taught her how to ride a bike on the street in front of their house.
But tensions soon began brewing with her mother-in-law, who was irritated at Minahil’s lack of both pregnancy and work. Minahil, in turn, couldn’t stand the Buddhist figures her mother-in-law kept around the house. She also turned up her nose at the food she cooked, opting instead to buy burgers from the outside market. She missed the freshly baked roti bread from home.
Minahil also began chafing at her husband, who wouldn’t take her side in front of his mother and spent much of his time playing online gambling games. Their fights sometimes escalated. “I remained sincere to him,” she said. “Then he beat me up for the first time in front of his mother.” Her mother-in-law stood by her son. “It really saddened me a lot,” Minahil added.
After several months, she decided to go home to Pakistan, but she couldn’t afford the trip without asking for money from her new Chinese family. Minahil ripped up the marriage certificate to try to persuade her mother-in-law to relinquish her passport. “One of my friends had advised me to keep my passport with me. I thought that she was joking because I had full confidence in my husband that he wouldn’t do this,” she told me.
In desperation, Minahil cut her wrists. While being treated in the hospital, police urged her husband and mother-in-law to send her back to Pakistan before she committed further harm to herself. Her good-natured father-in-law, who had mostly been away during Minahil’s stay, begged her not to go. But they finally relented. After six months in China, as her visa was up for renewal, her husband agreed to bring his wife back to Lahore. After they returned, she filed for divorce in January 2024.
The cross-border marriages first came under the spotlight in early 2019, when Pakistan’s Federal Investigative Agency (FIA) said it had busted a suspected prostitution ring trafficking young women to China. Later that year, The Associated Press published findings by Pakistani investigators that identified over 600 cases of women and girls who married Chinese men through these networks, many of whom were suspected to have been deceived and forced into prostitution. In one case, a 37-year-old woman returned to Pakistan under mysterious circumstances after two months in China, appearing weak and malnourished, according to reporting from the time. She died around five weeks later.
At the time, Pakistan began to crack down on the networks arranging the marriages, arresting Chinese nationals it suspected of being involved. The Chinese government rejected allegations that women were being sold into prostitution, but started withholding visas for some Pakistani brides as it investigated.
But this scrutiny didn’t stop the marriages; instead, the matchmakers found new loopholes and opportunities. In one case, a woman who was married in 2023 told me the brokers lied by describing her suitor as Korean, not Chinese. Some Pakistani women flew to a third country to apply for visas to China, according to an official at Pakistan’s FIA, who spoke on condition of anonymity. In March 2023, three women traveling with a Chinese agent were stopped at Lahore’s airport en route to Azerbaijan on business visas after marrying Chinese nationals in Pakistan.
Some grooms and brides have married through the networks more than once. In one case earlier this year, a Chinese man married a Pakistani woman only to discover she already had a husband from China, he told me. He spotted a Chinese visa already in her passport, with the name of another Chinese husband.
The man, who declined to give his name due to privacy concerns, believes his bride, her parents and their pastor arranged her second marriage to make money: Before agreeing to the nuptials, her family requested 250,000 Pakistani rupees, or around $900. He has now sworn off future relations with Pakistani women. “Pakistani people engage in fraud,” he told me in April over WeChat.
In at least two other cases, including Minahil’s, men sought a second marriage from the Pakistani Christian community after the first failed.
Pakistani institutions have struggled to take action against cross-border marriage cases when the women and their families insist the marriages took place with their consent. This was the scenario in March, when immigration officials stopped two Chinese and Pakistani couples at Lahore airport in a suspected case of trafficking.
The investigator who flagged them, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said he noticed how they behaved as if they didn’t know each other. But when the women were questioned, they insisted that the men were their husbands and they were going to China willingly.
In April, one of the couples, Marry Shahzad and Zuo Longxiang, filed a petition against the government in the Lahore High Court, arguing that they were unable to travel to China because their passports had been confiscated by Pakistani investigators. The petition, which was seen by New Lines, said the government failed to justify why the couple were barred from international travel despite having valid paperwork.
Such examples, along with other cultural norms of marriage, put these marriages in a unique gray area that experts argue makes them difficult to address.
“This is exactly the kind of challenge that we find ourselves in,” said Sebastian Boll, a doctoral candidate at the United Nations University’s Maastricht Economic and Social Research Institute on Innovation and Technology and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, who has studied marriage migration to China in several countries in Asia. “We have, on the one hand, what is effectively a crime and considered to be a particularly bad crime. And on the other hand, we have a fundamental right to marry based on free and full consent.”
Across South Asia, arranging marriages and paying matchmakers to facilitate the process of finding a partner for one’s child is often the norm. In the case of Chinese marriages, families say intermediaries introduce the couples and sort out financial arrangements, marriage paperwork and visas.
The trends differ across countries, but these marriages often involve low-income and minority communities, as they do in Pakistan. In countries including Vietnam and Cambodia, governments have taken additional steps to limit these transnational arrangements under the umbrella of combating trafficking. But classifying this trend as trafficking isn’t straightforward, since the marriages quickly cross into the private domain.
Marriage is not specifically mentioned in the internationally recognized definition of human trafficking, which involves the movement of people for the purpose of exploitation through ill means, including coercion, payment, deception and abuse of power. Exploitation refers to prostitution and other activities of a sexual nature, forced labor, slavery, servitude and the removal of organs. In many cultures, marriage practices often involve the transfer of money from one side to the other, either a dowry from the bride’s family or a so-called bride price from the groom’s side.
Some women who moved to China after marrying through matchmaking networks say they are happy with their decision and push back against the idea that marriages with Chinese men are dangerous and should be stopped.
Sonia Raza, a 33-year-old Pakistani Christian who married a Chinese man through a broker in 2019, said her proposal offered a rare opportunity to change her circumstances. Over a WeChat call from China two years after her move, she told me she had always wanted to marry outside her society. “I love Pakistan. But I don’t like Pakistani culture,” she said, describing her qualms about the often unequal treatment of women in her home country. “Because of that, I really wanted to get out of there.”
She now lives in Shandong province with her husband and their young son. When Pakistan and China started cracking down on these marriages, she feared it could lead to visa troubles, which could separate her from her new family. Some Chinese men who were considering finding a Pakistani wife have also now dropped their plans, fearing they could be swept up in trafficking allegations. “They are so scared. They don’t want any of this drama,” she told me.
Mumtaz Baloch, a former spokesperson for Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and now the country’s ambassador to France, told New Lines last year that she attributed the failure of these marriages to practical roadblocks, including language barriers between couples and lifestyle differences between cultures. “This was more an issue of unmet expectations,” she said.
Baloch was working at the Pakistani Embassy in Beijing in 2019 when her government repatriated a group of brides unhappy in their new lives. “At that time, we thought it was unnecessarily politicized and made it into a trafficking issue,” she said. “Most of them married of their own free will, with their pastors involved and with their families present.”
One 38-year-old Chinese man in Pakistan told me it was too expensive to find a partner in his city in Shandong province, where, on top of paying steep bride prices, men are expected to be fully settled with a house and car of their own before marriage. An engineer by training, he initially came to Pakistan in 2019, where he made money by procuring supplies for Chinese infrastructure projects.
New Lines first interviewed the man, who declined to give his name due to privacy concerns, after his divorce from a Pakistani Christian woman in 2021. At the time, he swore he was the one who’d been wronged after his wife left him to be with her boyfriend. “I spent a lot of money on getting married, and now many people laugh at me,” he said at the time, through a string of WhatsApp messages. “I will not force her, nor will I waste months of time.” In a court document from the divorce hearing, his wife testified that she had married without her consent.
In a subsequent interview in Lahore last year, New Lines met the man and his new wife, a 23-year-old Pakistani Christian student, whom he describes as a love match. They said that in order to apply for visas to travel to China, the Chinese Embassy required a document testifying that she had married of her own choice and free will. When they went to apply for her Pakistani passport, the immigration office told them they would need to see if the groom had committed any illegal acts.
Since Minahil returned to Pakistan, her ex-husband has told her he regrets how their life in China panned out. “He admitted that his mother was not fair with me,” she said. But that didn’t stop him from asking Minahil to return the bride price now that the marriage was over. Brokers have also called her up, asking her family to repay him.
Minahil is planning to marry again later this year, this time to a man from the Christian community. She had wanted to marry him before going to China. She still wants to better her family’s circumstances and hopes the couple will move abroad someday. There is one place they will not go: “Not China,” she said.
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