The Mark of Zorro.(Zhu Wenguang)

Zhu Wenguang knew he had to tread carefully. He was a controversial police guard from a far-off province, trying to persuade a roomful of country cops to support his idiosyncratic crusade. He had traveled more than 1,000 kilometers from his native Sichuan to Inner Mongolia to track down a local woman who had been shipped up north and sold to a farmer. Zhu offered the cops smokes. He invited them to a meal. He agreed to rent a minibus at his own expense. But it was nearing sundown on a wintry March day, and he knew the public-security officials he was cajoling wanted to go home rather than raid a nearby backwater called Cowskin Village.

"Well, I guess we'd better do it," their commander sighed finally. Zhu and his police escort drove to the hamlet and faced down an angry peasant mob who didn't want to give up the woman, Gu Xiuquan. They brought her back to the police station, where her "husband" and the local party secretary both tried to persuade her to stay. She refused-- and kowtowed to Zhu in gratitude for saving her. Before heading off into the night, Zhu thanked the local cops for their help. One of them half-smiled in the frigid darkness: "Come back to Inner Mongolia any time."

Zhu is not welcome everywhere he goes. The 38-year-old security guard is part cop, part zealot, and his missions to rescue women abducted and sold into marriage by traffickers run him up against the great wall of Chinese indifference, ineptitude and impotence. Wherever he goes--up the snow-covered Tibetan plateau, across the grim northern Chinese plains, to the glittering coastal metropolises--he must enlist the aid of local authorities who are too often unimpressed by his pleas or unequipped to help, when they are not actively in league with the gangsters who run the bride trade. Local officials and villagers often lie to him or actively resist: he's been beaten with sticks, tire irons, shovels and fists. And the problem he is trying in his own way to solve--the tens of thousands of peasant women tricked and sold into marriage thousands of kilometers from their homes all across China-- seems insurmountable.

But still they come: letters and photos and husbands and parents, all pleading with the man nicknamed "Zorro" by the Chinese press, to help those women return home. They cannot afford to pay much--certainly not enough to finance costly and sometimes fruitless trips to other provinces. But Zhu and his wife have started a VCD-rental store on the ground floor of their house, and have asked help from families' friends, to fund his efforts. And he has the doggedness--all street smarts and pit-bull persistence--of a classic private eye. He has rescued more than 100 women since 1992; the work has become an "addiction," he says. And especially in China's restive countryside, where three quarters of the population lives, this is increasingly the only way things get done--semiofficially, through the efforts of individuals who work both within and without a system that is too poor, overstretched and discredited to cope.

No one knows exactly how many Chinese women have been sold into unwanted marriages; U.S.-based Human Rights in China very conservatively estimates the number at 50,000. The scourge is largely fueled by the grim conditions in China's countryside. As many as 100 million Chinese--more than the populations of France and Spain combined--have left their villages for cities, where women in particular are easy prey for traffickers. Rural dowry payments have skyrocketed: it's now cheaper to buy a bride, who can cost as little as $300, than to purchase the house, jewelry, home appliances and other enticements expected by any self-respecting fiancee.

What's more, marriageable men now far outnumber women in rural areas. Decades of family-planning restrictions, which led to the selective abortion of many female fetuses and even female infanticide, have helped produce a severe gender imbalance. (In one 1995 census, never- married men between 20 and 44 outnumbered their female counterparts by 2 to 1.) Those women who are raised in the countryside often leave as soon as they're old enough. "Women move to the city where they can more easily find jobs, and then they don't want to [return and] marry farmers," says Tan Le Shan of Save the Children, which cooperates with Yunnan police to aid abductees in the southwestern province.

Sichuan, China's most populous province, suffers from all of these factors. A former People's Liberation Army soldier, Zhu learned the extent of the trade in women when he took a job as a gatekeeper at the public-security office in Zhongjiang county. Distraught families would line up to beg authorities to find their missing wives and daughters. "They came weeping and pleading, often with photographs of loved ones," says Zhu. In 1988 one of his relatives was herself abducted and sold to a peasant in Anhui province. Local authorities tried and failed to free her; eventually the desperate woman escaped on her own. "Partly because of that, I just wanted to do something for kidnap victims," he says.