Chained Woman in China Sustains Public’s Attention Despite Regime’s Focus on Olympics

Video screenshot of a mother of eight shackled in a village hut in Xuzhou city, Jiangsu, China, in January 2022. Screenshots via Douyin

The Chinese people’s focus on the condition of a chained woman in Feng county, a mother of eight children, continues, exceeding attention to the Beijing Olympics that came to a close on Feb. 20. The incident has ignited heated discussion online on bride trafficking in China.

In a post that is on Chinese social media Weibo, Maggie Ip, the granddaughter of Ye Jianying, one of the Chinese regime’s founding generals, said on Feb. 20, “The regime blocked the road to enter Feng county on Feb. 15. We want to see the solutions to solve the issue, not using pressure to maintain the peace on the surface … Feng county is only the tip of the iceberg. How about other [areas]?”

The horrendous story of the chained woman has seen Chinese netizens continuously posting updates about the case and commenting on Weibo, Weixin, and other Chinese social media. However, the regime’s online algorithms constantly censored information, preventing the topic’s going viral, instead favoring content about the Olympics and other topics labeled “positive energy.”

Knowing the regime’s censorship, Chinese netizens continued discussing the trafficking case online by avoiding the sensitive words.

“We want to know who has gold medals around their neck, but we are paying more attention to the woman locked up with a chain around her neck,” a Chinese netizen with the user name Mili’s Mom posted on Weibo on Feb. 18. “We need to reincarnate tens of thousands of times to be another Eileen Gu (Olympic gold medalist). But the distance between us and the chained woman and other woman trafficking victims is so short, which is only a hit, some drug, and a white-color van.”

The methods that human traffickers in China used to kidnap women off the streets include blows to the head or drugging them with a mouth spray so they lose consciousness and can be tied up and taken away in a van.

Human Trafficking

Beijing has attempted to tackle the issue of human trafficking by issuing laws, yet the problem persists in China today.

The latest official data was reported by the state-run Legal Daily on Feb. 16, 2015. The Daily quoted official data from the Ministry of Public Security, which reported that over 30,000 women and 13,000 children were rescued by police in 2014. The report didn’t mention when and where these women and children were kidnapped and sold.

In recent decades, Chinese state-run media have frequently reported one case after another of women being kidnapped off the streets or cheated by human traffickers offering good jobs. The women were then reportedly sold in rural areas to poor families.

Almost all of the kidnapped women try to escape. The human traffickers and poor families usually beat them, chain them, rape them, and forcibly impregnate them to deliver babies, according to Chinese media.

The chained woman in Feng county is believed to be a trafficking victim.

Chained Woman

On Jan. 28, a video of the chained woman spread quickly in China and among overseas Chinese. In the video, the dazed middle-aged woman is standing in the corner of a shed with a chain around her neck.

She had no coat or shoes amid freezing winter temperatures and had only a bowl with a little food beside her, which was supposed to be her lunch.

The person who shot the video explained that the woman has no name, and lives in Dongji village of Feng County, Xuzhou city, in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province. The person said the chained woman is the wife of a local man, Dong Zhimin, and had delivered eight children. They are seven boys and one girl, and their ages range from one and a half to 20 years old.

After the video went viral, many Chinese netizens went to the village to visit the chained woman and shared what they found online. According to them, the woman was raped by Dong, Dong’s father, and Dong’s brother over the past two decades. When she first arrived in the village, the local officials raped her “because she was beautiful.”

In the early years, the chained woman bit and shouted at the men who raped her. Dong and his family then broke her teeth, cut the tip of her tongue, and forced her to drink drugs that damaged her vocal cords.

From the video that the netizens shared, the chained woman said: “I live like a prostitute.”

Days later, the woman repeatedly told a netizen who visited her: “The world has abandoned me,” complaining that none of the netizens who visited her had attempted to rescue her.

Netizens responded that they can’t take the law into their own hands, calling on the authorities to take action.

Regime’s Action

Feng county and Xuzhou city authorities did take action after the video went viral, but this was only to publish four statements on the case, none of which calmed the public or rescued the mother of eight.

Feng county authorities announced on Jan. 28, hours after the first video was circulated online, that the chained woman married Dong of her own will in August 1998, and became mentally ill in recent years. They also claimed that a netizen chained her to shoot the video because they wanted to attract public attention.

Two days later, authorities released another statement, claiming that the chained woman was a mentally-ill beggar when Dong’s father found her in June 1998. The father then married her to Dong months later. Because the woman’s mental status worsened, the family chained her to avoid her from beating others.

On Feb. 7, Xuzhou city authorities stated that the chained woman was named Xiao Huamei from Yagu village in Fugong county in southwestern Yunnan Province, and had mental issues since 1996. Her friend brought her to Donghai county in Jiangsu where she became lost. They said that the woman’s teeth were damaged due to periodontitis.

Three days later, Xuzhou city authorities said that DNA tests verified that Dong and the chained woman are the parents of all eight children.

However, the announcements angered Chinese netizens who continued calling on authorities to take action.

On Feb. 17, Jiangsu provincial authorities announced they would investigate the case thoroughly and report it to the public.

Censorship

News of the chained woman first got attention before the Beijing Olympics and continued to be a focus throughout the Games. However, the issue hasn’t been listed as “viral” or “trending” on China’s social media platforms. User accounts that published criticisms were closed by the regime’s censorship.

Lao Dongyan, a professor of law at China’s top Tsinghua University, created an account on Weibo and posted her first post on Feb. 19, in which she said that the case would be recorded as part of China’s history and that she would keep speaking about it.

Hours later, the post was removed from Weibo and her account was banned from posting any more information because the first post “violated the related law and rules.”

Partially state-owned Phoenix TV sent a team to Dongji Village and posted a live video on its social media account on Feb. 19. The video was removed and the account was banned after just one hour online. More reporters were stopped at checkpoints before they could enter the village.

Two female volunteers who were able to visit the chained woman were detained by local police on Feb. 11 and released on Feb. 18. After their release, they posted on Weibo that they were beaten by police. Their social media accounts were quickly removed and any newly registered accounts were banned as well.