Cupid’s quiver in Asia filled with cash and false hopes

Several Asian nations are implementing new rules to check the growing trend of their men marrying women from poorer neighboring countries.
The potential for exploitation of helpless girls from impoverished families has also led to some countries -- both importers and exporters of brides -- to put restrictions in place.
Gender imbalance, picky liberated women, low marketability of potential grooms and a desire to escape poverty are cited as some of the major reasons why Asian men from rich countries such as Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and South Korea are increasingly seeking brides from poorer ones like Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines.
While China is mainly an exporter of brides, import demand is expected to soar because of the one-child policy which has contributed to sex-specific abortions and a shortage of girls.
A study by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences this year concluded that more than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without women to marry by 2020.
In South Korea, more than a third of fishermen and farmers who married last year chose immigrant brides, indicating the formerly homogeneous nation is becoming increasingly multiracial, data by the Ministry of Gender Equality said.
Foreigners -- mostly from China or Southeast Asia -- were brides in 1,987 marriages to farmers and fishermen in 2009, 35 percent of the total.
The figures showed 47 percent of the foreign brides came from Vietnam, 26 percent from China and 10 percent from Cambodia.
Farmers and fishermen in recent years have increasingly looked overseas as South Korean women prefer an urban to a rural lifestyle.
In many cases matchmaking agents arrange blind dates and marriages during overseas tours for potential husbands.
Activists say some foreign brides, coaxed by false promises or deceptive advertising, end up living with spouses who have few assets or who are ill, alcoholic or just difficult.
Marriages between Japanese men and foreign women shot up 73 percent between 1995 and 2006, to 35,993, according to the latest government survey. Most of the women were Filipinas, followed by Chinese.
“Asian brides -- notably Chinese and Filipina -- remain popular in the countryside, where it’s quite hard to find young women,” said Toshio Esaka, president of dating agency Royal in Osaka, western Japan.
“But nowadays, it’s getting harder even downtown as a lot of young Japanese women are economically independent and prefer to remain single,” Esaka was quoted as saying in a AFP report.
In Singapore -- Southeast Asia’s wealthiest society -- Hong Kong and Taiwan, foreign affairs often involves marriage brokers, the report said.
Professor Ching Lung Tsay from Tamkang University in Taiwan who has been monitoring marriage migration trends for decades, said with the economic developments, people tend to delay their marriage, especially among females so the men find it more and more difficult to find a spouse.
Regina Galias, Chief Immigrant Services Officer for the Commission on Filipinos Overseas estimated that
the Philippines, which has seen over 300,000 women leave to marry foreigners since 1989.
It has had a ban on commercial international match making agencies for over a decade and all couples are interviewed to ensure the marriage is legitimate.
Despite this, Galias said in a radio interview with ABC in Australia that her department constantly deals with cases of domestic violence, there are verbal, sexual and physical abuses involving Filipino brides overseas.
“There’s actually a case in Japan where they were brought to a club, where they were forced to work as prostitutes and they never saw their husbands and then there’s also abandonment. So when they got there, they found that their husbands actually have another wife and they were just brought to the country for domestic work, said Galias.
Andrew Bruce, the International Organisation’s for Migration’s Representative for South-East Asia, says attempting to correct a gender imbalance in this way is dangerous.
“ What we’re finding is that with large flows of young women you will then cause a situation similar to what you have in China today with a shortage of marriageable women and then of course this is the possibility for trafficking,” he said.
Already, young female refugees from North Korea are increasingly becoming a commodity in China, where they are sold to farmers for up to 1,500 dollars a head, according to a Seoul campaigner.
The human trafficking is not new but has become more prevalent as prices soar amid a shortage of Chinese women in the countryside, said Reverend Chun Ki-Won, head of the Durihana Association, which offers aid to refugees.
The sense of ownership also often leads to abuse of foreign brides, rights activists say.
“Many of the cases we are dealing with involve Asian women being abused by their husbands,” says Fermi Wong, founder of Hong Kong Unison, which helps ethnic minorities in the city.
“They feel helpless because many of them do not have any relatives in Hong Kong and speak little English or Chinese.”
Mainland China, Vietnam and the Philippines provide most of the foreign brides for Hong Kong men.
The potential for exploitation of helpless girls from impoverished families has led some countries -- both importers and exporters of brides -- to put restrictions in place:
Philippines -  Mail-order brides from the Philippines were once a common phenomenon but tales of the women being abused by their foreign husbands abroad prompted the government to outlaw the practice.
Despite this, various “marriage broker” agencies get around the law by bringing in foreign men to select their prospective brides before flying off with them.
While it was once mainly Western men who sought Filipina brides, in recent years Japanese and South Korean men have also turned to the archipelago in search of partners.
Indonesia – The world’s most populous Muslim nation is considering a proposal that a US$50,000-dollar “security guarantee” should be lodged by foreign men who marry Indonesian women.
If the couple divorce, the wife will be entitled to take the money. If they stick together for at least 10 years, they can claim it as “shared property”.
But couples would be able to get around the requirement by marrying abroad.
Cambodia -  Cambodia in March suspended marriages between South Koreans and its citizens for several weeks and introduced new requirements for the process over concerns about human trafficking.
Taiwan - Taiwan also took action, banning commercial international match-making services last year after a series of high-profile criminal cases, including one in which a man was jailed for enslaving and torturing his Vietnamese wife.
More than 434,000 Taiwanese are married to foreigners, usually from China and Southeast Asia, according to the immigration bureau.
South Korea - Some 110,000 women from China, Mongolia and Southeast Asian countries live in Korea, many of them married to Koreans they barely knew before marriage and headed for an acrimonious divorce.  The country’s Justice Ministry recently announced plans requiring Korean men who want to marry a foreign woman to attend classes on “marriage ethics.” The classes will start this August at immigration offices before men head out to China or Southeast Asia in search of a foreign bride. Each class will last three to four hours and will focus on teaching men that it is wrong to think that they are buying a wife and to hide things about themselves like previous marriages or problems with alcohol. The government will not grant visas to foreign brides of men who failed to take those classes.