In our newsletter 38, we gave a detailed account of the circumstances of the woman in chain found in a village in Jiangsu Province (next to Shanghai).
A brief recap: because of persistent public outrage, the local government, Feng Xian (a county) of Xuzhou (a city and its surrounding district) issued a few announcements to clarify the situation. But each time the new annoucement negated the previous one, causing more public scrutiny.
The administration structure in China is very hiearchical. There are five layers:
Nation
Province
City /district
County/township
Village
Each layer has power over the layers lower.
The first announcement categorically denied that the woman was trafficked, the second one said that she was a begger that was taken in by the deceased father of Mr. Dong, and then a third one said that she was mysteriously coming from Yunnan, a remote mountaineous province.
Since then, Fengxian government released a fourth announcement, alleging that the woman from Yunnan was trafficked, and arrested Mr. Dong and two other involved. This is 180 degree turn from the first announcement.
Two former investigative reporters in Yunnan quietly went to the remote village in Yunnan to check. They have quit their career years ago because independent journalism has been killed by our dear supreme leader. Now they sell teas and liquers and have no journalist permits. They stopped what they were doing and did a report on the village where “Xiao Huamei” came from. What they were doing, under current laws in China, is actually illegal.
But their report gave people much awaited details to assess the credibility of the fourth announcement. In short: not credible at all.
They asked related people, and turned out that people don’t remember what “Xiao Huamei” looked like, since she went missing 24 years ago. Xiao Huamei’s half sister and uncle were not given the video of the woman in chain until very late in the night before the fourth announcement and they could not confirm that she was indeed Xiao Huamei. DNA evidence of Xiao Huamei’s deceased mother was taken from an old clothe that the half sister kept. The reporters also asked local people and language experts if the woman in chain speaks any local dialects, and no one can confirm that. So the evidences in the fourth announcement did not stand up.
The two former reporters also disclosed for the first time that Xiao Huamei was probably born in 1978. This is the first time we know the age of the woman. People noticed that the woman in chain is supposed to be 52 year old, according to the hospital record. She has been put in local mental hospital since her story blew up on social media. CCTV even broadcast footage of her in the hospital bed, many people said that in the footage they heard her saying: “Let me go!” (I saw the footage and it’s not clear to me what she was saying).
This report was viewed by millions on Wexin. Until it was deleted. Copies are of course available on this side of the wall: e.g. here.
On Tuesday Feb 15th, another former investigative reporter claimed that some netizen sent him photos of the marriage certificate that was described in the first announcement. Very quickly people started asking questions.
The woman’s name is consistent with the first announcement. Her birthday is consistent with the hospital record in CCTV footage: she was born on 6th of June, 1969.
The date of issuance of the certificate is 2nd of August 1998. Netizens pointed out that it was a Sunday, and they doubt if the government works on any Sunday.
But the two former investigative reporters found out that Xiao Huamei was born around 1978, not 1969. So, this woman on the marriage certificate is not Xiao Huamei that was named in the third and fourth announcement.
The photo in the marriage certificate:
People say she does not look like the woman in chain at all:
Who is the this woman on the marriage certificate then?
Many people commented that the official seals look too new, while this marriage certificate is supposed to be issued in 1998. Others say they lack other official seals or the ID numbers of the couple. Some speculated that the marriage certificate was made up by the local government after public outrage of the woman in chain.
Other people found the birth certificate of the oldest son and claimed that he was born one year before the marriage. And according to Xiao Humei’s half sister, she was not lost yet when the oldest son was conceived. So he can’t be the son of Xiao Huamei. Yet, in the government announcement, they claimed that Mr. Dong and the woman in chain are biological parents to all 8 children.
So, who is this woman whose name is on the marriage certificate? Is she the biological mother of the first son, while the woman in chain the mother of all the other 7, who are much younger? And where is this Xiao Huamei? What happened to her and the woman on the mariage certificate?
People graduated from top universities in China started circulating petition letters to the public/central government that call for actions, signed with hundreds of names. First, Beijing university, then Zhejiang university, People university, etc.
Eventually the links they were using to get signature got the “404” treatment from the government.
Last time universities alumni signed petition letters was for the eath of Lei Yang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Lei_Yang ). Lei Yang graduated from the People’s university and worked in Beijing. In 2016, he was mysteriously dead in police custody when he was on the way to his car to drive to the airport to pick up his parents in law. There was a cover up on what happened to him. Eventually, his surviving wife decided to take a deal the government offerred and let it quiet down.
This is another tradition that has not been seen for a while. I think the last time lots of people tried to hold up signs for something was during the occupy central movement in Hong Kong in 2014. People were swiftly arrested.
Many people predicted that this time the arrests were delayed because of the Olympic Games.
Some naively think that after the games, the government will come to solve the problem, others responded that the government will come to solve the protesters.
According to RFI in Chinese, a group of women (about 100 of them) drove to the village of the woman in chain, only to be intimidated by the local police, and was turned back by the local government under the name of COVID prevention. There had been some talks about it on social media, however there is no way to verify it.
This tweet got thousands of likes:
(rough translation
So and so (name of the twitter user): the newest information from my side
They could not cover up any more, so a special meeting was held.
Peng (Madam Dear Supreme Leader) is very firm on a thorough investigation. She said that whoever tried to block the investigation should be investigated. Something similar happened to her hometown also, and that made her losing face. If this is not solved, she had no face to go overseas.
The opposition is based on the image of the country. If they can supress social media and wait it out, after a while, no one will talk about it.
Xi (Dear Supreme Leader) has not said anything yet
Peng might have already made some actions
Many people mocked the attitude in posting such a blatantly ass kissing rumour. And the person who posted it is a pro-democracy guy with 75,000 Twitter followers.
But he is not the only one that becoming a laughing stock. Mr. Hu Ping, the person who wrote many books on Chinese politics and was labeled as number one theorist on Chinese democracy is selling a “one woman multiple husband” solution on Twitter. To him, China is not a patriarch society that oppresses women, but a patriarch society that failed to serve men better. And in his equation, if one man with multiple wives means oppression of women, one woman of multiple husband solves the problem.
Like the woman in chain, Eileen Gu, the American Chinese skier who decided to compete for Team China is also a hot topic. Her prestigeous background can’t be ignored and most Chinese see the huge gap between themselves and the glorious athelet/fashion model. Eileen is rewarded with ads for 30 brands and fees that add up to 200 million dolars.
Many people in China say that her face is everywhere now. One guy on Wexin group said that he felt like vomiting because he is overwhelmed by her images blasted at him.
Meanwhile, some one found a photo of Eileen Gu on her instagram from Nov 2021 and happily attributed it as her show of solidarity for the woman in chain:
But will the government respond to people’s demand and find out the truth of the woman in chain, and what is going on in China’s countryside?
My guess is: “No.”
How many women are being trafficked and sold into marriages that they can not escape? We don’t have the number since this never happened. According to Chinese media in 2021, since 2017, there are about 600 court rulings on women trafficking, involving 1200 women. That is it, out of 1.3 billion people. What a wonderful country.
Social media people have discovered many women were sold to the city/district where the woman in chain was found, Xuzhou of Jiangsu province. And as I mentioned earlier, Jiangsu is next to Shanghai, and is the third richest province in China, after Beijing and Shanghai . That is perhaps why they can afford to buy so many women. But how does it work in the system?
In our newsletter number 3, we introduced the hukou system in China: everyone born in China is registered with the government (unless you are born out of the quota, your parents might hide you). To get onto the registration of any area, you need some good reason: you have a job with a well established company or the local government, or marriage.
Migrant workers, for example, can not register in the place where they work.
Another example, lately people talked about how to get the precious Shanghai hukou if you are married to a local Shanghaiese (who has a hukou): you have to wait for 10 years. And you have to bring your original hukou, since you can’t have two hukous at the same time….. it is very airtight.
So when the woman in chain got public attention, the local government first instinct to cover up was to deny that she was trafficked. But the public demanded more: where is she from, where is her original family? The local government had to make up the story on the go. Eventually, the scandal shows the hukou system is gamed by the local authority to do whatever suits them.
Since the woman in chain is trafficked, the local government had no ID or hukou document on her. In theory, they could not issue marriage certificate. But since over the years they have been giving money and helping the family, they can’t say that they did not know that the woman was married without proper document. The identity of the woman on the marriage certificate must be in their file, that was the first cover up they can think of. Then they used “Xiao Huamei” as the second cover up. It seems they never faced the public scrutiny at this intensity (thanks to our dear supreme leader who brought peace and order), so they were a bit caught off hand.
However, the many incidents of women being trafficked and sold into marriage are proof that the hukou system, which was designed to control population movement, and should be able to catch such cases, was used to cover up crimes and normalizing human trafficking: women were simply given a new identity and got “integrated” into the system.
Some people digged up court documents in Xuzhou and showed that when trafficked women went to court to file for divorce because they wanted to leave, the judge ruled that “the marriage is a good one” and rejected the divorce. Today, this made to the Sina headline news. In fact, Xuzhou has so many good marriages that in 2021, it was named one of the happiest cities in China.
Many women watching this case found it like a nightmare: male superemacy works hand in hand with a totalitarian states swallowing up women without public realizing the scale. And it is all under the blessing of the local bureaucracy.