In Newsletter 35, we told the story of a woman found chained by the neck in a village. She had given birth to 8 children while considered mentally ill and violent so that she had to be put in chain. It created a social media storm as netizens retold stories they personally know of abducted women, recalled movies made on this topic. In time of the Olympic, the government rushed to silence Weibo, trying to make it go away.
But it did not.
She was discovered when some vlogger went to the home of a Mr. Dong in Jiangsu province (it neighbours Shanghai). On Jan 27th, a Douyin (Chinese Tiktok) short video was posted. It shows some man visiting the family of Mr. Dong, which was full of children. He asked the children where their mother was, and was led to a dark shed. He found a woman in thin clothes in the cold winter, and a metal chain tied to her neck. He rushed to find some donated winter jacket for her. It seems that the vlogger was there to send donated children’s winter clothes.
DW has a report in Chinese on the family. Before the woman’s situation was exposed, the family was a darling for local governmental propaganda, as an example of a loving and hard working father taking care of his children and how government helped people like him in poverty. The family received 37,000 yuan (USD 6,000) government money to renovate the home in 2021, according to the government response to the public outrage.
In the past, many social media people came to donate money to him and posted photos on the internet. The show of charity towards poor people is one topic that easily attracts internet traffic. It was perhaps with this intention the vlogger came to visit the family. After the video went viral and public expressed outrage at the inhumane and potentially illegal treatment of the woman, the vlogger expressed displeasure. He said he only wanted to improve the living quality of the woman, not to damage the family.
Some wedding/marriage company even hired Mr. Dong for advertisement. It is not clear when these happened. People also found out that Mr. Dong had his own (now deleted) Douyin account :
His account name: Father of 8 children
Self description: “I am a father of 8 children. I have a mother who is 80 years old and a brother who is disabled and single.”
As you can see, the woman is not included in the profile. According to New York Times, she is also disappeared from all the videos that have been uploaded under his account.
So, we know that her ordeal was not a secret, but it was hidden because no one cares about her. From the social media to the government who were exploiting the number of children this poor family has for their own political/commercial gain, they never mentioned the mother.
Until the general public knew of her existence through a video.
The government issued three public announcements about her. In the first announcement, issued on Jan 28th, the government emphasized that she was not a victim of human trafficking. She was married in 1998.
With that marriage certificate, the government felt that they have explained everything.
Surprisingly, the society at large was even more angry.
People argued: how is it that being married makes this legal? Who is this woman? How did she end up in this marriage? How did she become mentally ill? And why did she have so many children while being chained? Was it against her will?
The government had to issue another announcement on Jan 30th, explaining that she was a beggar when Mr. Dong’s father (now deceased) met her and took her in. The government acknowledged that they did not check her identity when issuing the marriage certificate. The government also disclosed that in Nov 2020, the woman’s information was included in the police database for lost/trafficked children, but no relatives were found.
In the government announcements, she was given a name, “Yang Mouxia”. Since the government did not check her identity, it is very likely not her real name. People are not convinced. Human trafficking of women in the 80s and 90s was widely discussed on internet as people seek to understand what happened to her. Allegations of social media suppression from the local government sparked more anger. On the ground, more and more people showed up to see the woman and to show their support, only to meet massive police presence. Videos of police intimidation are shared on Twitter. More on this further down this newsletter.
Just today, Feb 7th, the government issued a third announcement. They claimed that she is from Yunnan (a mountainous province in south-west China), and her parents have died. Her real name is “Xiao Huamei”. She already was mentally ill after her first marriage and her mom asked a friend to take her to Jiangsu to get treatment and get married. Her friend lost her and never bothered to report to the police or her parents. The government said they will continue investigation.
They also claimed that medical exams attributed her loss of teeth to gum diseases, and DNA test showed that Mr. Dong and Yang Mouxia (Xiao Huamei) are the biological parents of all the children. They will investigate if Mr. Dong have committed crime.
Because the local government has lost all credibility on this matter, I think this announcement will not quiet things down. We will see.
Since the first video of the woman in chain surfaced, before the police showed up to seal the village so no one can see her, there have been a few videos of social media people visiting the family, trying to show their love to the family. In these videos, people have heard her saying:
“So far away. How can I escape? I can’t escape. This world does not want me any more.”
“This group people are bad. The whole family are rapists. “
People believe that she is not all lost. And they want to save her.
Among all the chaos, someone made the comparison between the woman in chain and a young girl who went missing in 1996 at the age of 12. They think the photos strongly suggest that they are the same person. The family of the missing girl is trying their best to get real DNA test to find out.
As usual, Weibo posts are getting deleted, big Vs are getting phone calls. Perhaps not surprisingly, the eldest son of the chained woman, who is now 23 year old, called people demanding them to take off their post about his mother, because his life was turned upside down.
Many people went to the village trying to see the woman. They are met with police suppression. And swiftly, they posted videos of police harassment.
In this video you can see police cars surrounding the village, demanding the visitors to show their PCR test. This is a tactic targeting the netizens.
Police also forced people clean up their car. The police in the video quoted a famous misogynist phrase: “It is not your fault that you are ugly, but it is your fault that you come out to scare people.” The woman asked back: “Why should you be scared that I am ugly?” On her car, she wrote with red ink, “Mr. Dong forced a mentally ill woman to have 8 children to get government subsidy. ” The red ink was washed away under the gaze of the police.
Police visited the hotel of the visitors and demanded them to take off their social media posts because this case is a national secret. They can only talk to the propaganda department.
And a video shot at night showed a police “educating” netizens: “Let me tell you clearly: we have hundreds of police here. You guys can not make a dimple here, you won’t be able to make any wave. Especially the leaders, we will arrest you and put you in jail.”
I think the reason that the society at large can not be pacified by the government announcements is mainly that people are all too aware of the issue of women being human trafficked into countryside and forced into marriage and giving births.
If you remember, in our newsletter 33, when we introduced the phrase “leftover woman”, we also talked about “leftover man” which is a much larger problem, thanks to the one child policy enforced since 1980s. There are more than 35 millions of single men than single women. And the gender imbalance is much worse in the country side. The Hukou registration system makes it impossible for men (and women) to leave and move to the cities. But what is more, many rural families strongly prefer boys and female infanticides were practiced in order to avoid punishments in the one child policy era, from 1980 to 2015.
But the one child policy is not the only factor to be blamed. Lack of law enforcement to stop human trafficking made things worse. That is because there is this Chinese tradition that men need to have offsprings for the family. It is so strong that even a famous Chinese writer Jia Pingwa claimed: buying and selling women for the villages to continue to exist is acceptable. For him, it was just too horrible for a village to have no women, he said. As for the women, as a writer, he had no interest to get to know them.
When the internet comments criticised Mr. Jia, and proposed that such village should just die out, Hu Ping, a well known overseas Chinese pro-democracy figure, wrote: “It is all CCP’s fault, they robbed the men at the bottom of their needs for sex, for families and offspring. How heartless the young people these days are, when they say that those people should just die out!”
Other old Chinese men on twitter are arguing that this is not a women’s right crisis but a human right crisis. It is obvious these old Chinese men have not heard that “Women’s rights are human rights.”
The truth is, the human trafficking of women started in the 80s and peaked in the 90s, before the gender imbalance due to one child policy actually affected marriage. The impact of one child policy manifested in the last ten years when women from neighbouring countries were being sold to Chinese men.
In 2008, a college students being sold to different families over 15 years in inner Mongolia became a national news. She was sold in early 1990s. She was discovered living in a dark cave for 15 years in horrible conditions. On the wall of the cave, she wrote only one character: “Run”. She was also severely mentally ill when people found her. Back then, China had relatively independent media, they informed the public and forced the inner Mongolia government to get to the bottom of it. The woman was rescued and got proper treatment. Today, some media reported that she has recovered and is leading a normal life.
In comparison, today, there is no more independent media in China, the public relies on social media to inform each other. In the last few days, they put tremendous pressure on the local government. Many netizens deeply felt helpless that they can’t save her after such intensive and prolonged social media focus.
Rumours say that our dear supreme leader is annoyed that the public cared way more about a crazy woman than about the Olympic game.
Just to add salt to the Lunar New Year injury, people want to use this for public bathroom signs:
The Chinese Woman team won the AFC Asian Cup against South Korea, 3-2.
In a normal society, you will have people/social workers who can reach out to the woman in chain to help her, you will have news media who can dig into the history and find out who she really is, you will have legal scholars and social experts advocate for change of laws and social services to help people like her, to prevent such tragedy from happening again.
But China is no longer a normal society. Many people see the woman in chain as themselves in chain. Or:
(She is a famous tennis player who won Grand Slam tournament twice. )
This is how China is now: much worse than other free and democratic countries, and worse than 2008 China.