25 June 2015
China has one of the fastest rising women’s prison population in the world.
Her long grey hair hanging down her back, Ding Yuxin wept in a Chinese courtroom last December.
Following a one-day trial, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison for bribing government officials.
When the verdict was announced, Ding wobbled on her feet and was steadied by security guards. Tears rolled down her face.
With only a primary school education, Ding Yuxin built an empire hinging on lucrative government coal and railway deals. Many were secured by greasing palms, netting Ding more than $325m (£207m: €290m) in contracts.
She’s a particularly flashy example of a new kind of Chinese prisoner: a woman put behind bars for a non-violent crime. It’s an unlikely symbol of how China is changing.
Female prisoners on the rise
Overall, the number of women held in Chinese prisons is soaring, up 46% in the last decade. That is in contrast to a 10% rise in the number of male prisoners, says Dui Hua, a US-based prisoners rights organisation.
Women comprise just 6.3% of China’s prison population. If trends continue, within five years, China will imprison more women than the United States, home to the world’s largest prison population.
China’s prison statistics are slightly misleading: they don’t include the estimated hundreds of thousands of women being held in China; in juvenile detention, mandatory drug rehabilitation and forced education camps.
Even so, why is the number of women increasing so quickly?
“A major reason is that China is undergoing transition. In the past few years, we’ve seen an increase in non-violent crimes involving women such as drug trafficking and telecommunication fraud,” explains Dr Cheng Lei, deputy director of Renmin University’s Centre for Criminal Procedure and Reform.
China’s anti-corruption campaign is having an effect on prison populations too. More women are also being convicted of taking bribes, because the number of women working in the Chinese government has also gone up.
According to Dr Cheng, violent crime is not responsible for the increase in female prisoners.
“In the past, a lot of women in prison were victims of domestic violence and had committed crimes in relation to that,” Dr Cheng says. “But that figure has stabilised.”
