This is the first in a series of stories about gender equality in China to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8. Here, Phoebe Zhang looks at how the case of one trafficked woman led to unprecedented public attention and calls for action in China.
“Is she China’s mother? Is she China’s reproductive organ? The bloody leash she wears around her neck is ringed with your coldness. The chains she wears are the shackles on your soul. On this mystical land, she is multitudes,” reads the poem Heavy Moments by Yang Jingrong.
A drawing called The Cage depicts three naked women bound and trapped in a bird cage with Chinese characters scrawled around them: “From the royal palaces and courtyards ... to the thatched huts and pigsties of commoners, the ones locked up are always women.”
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The bold pieces, part of an online art exhibition called “Breaking Chains”, were inspired by the recent case of a woman found chained in a dark hut that shook China and reopened old wounds from the country’s decades-old problem of bride trafficking. The scandal also inspired collective calls for action that the government’s censorship machine has been unable to silence.
A video on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, started it all.
It showed a middle-aged woman standing in the corner of a doorless shed, shackled to the wall by her neck. She had unkempt hair and a dazed expression. A man asked if she needed anything and she nodded, folding her arms to indicate that she was cold. The outside temperature was 0 degrees Celsius that day, according to the caption.
Grim video of chained mother stirs memories of China’s ‘missing girls’
The inhumane conditions the woman was kept under immediately caught the public’s attention. People demanded answers: who was she and why was she locked up? Was she trafficked and sold to this family? Did she have a mental health issue?
Details that emerged only angered people further: the woman had eight children with the man who had chained her up. They were married. Officials claimed there was no trafficking involved.
Pressured by public outrage, authorities finally launched an investigation that found the woman, who authorities said was called “Xiaohuamei”, was trafficked from the southwestern province of Yunnan to Xuzhou in China’s eastern province of Jiangsu.
The man she was married to and two others are being investigated on suspicion of human trafficking, while 17 officials have been punished in relation to the case.
Xiaohuamei is receiving medical care, according to a Jiangsu government statement released last month.
A horrible situation
It is the first time in recent memory that a case involving a trafficked woman has united so many voices calling for change.
In the weeks after the story broke, dozens of lawyers and academics poured their thoughts into online articles and live-streamed videos, while artists and writers created art such as that exhibited by “Breaking Chains”, expressing outrage or sharing personal stories of family members who had also been trafficked.
On Weibo, discussions of the story quickly generated billions of views and tens of millions of comments.
Graduates from top universities in China signed petitions urging the Communist Party and the State Council, the country’s cabinet, to look into Xiaohuamei’s situation.
Volunteers launched an online spreadsheet, collecting information on women suspected of being kidnapped from news reports, tips from friends and families and missing person reports.
“If we can’t talk on behalf of those silenced, then we face the same destructive end,” wrote one artist who took part in “Breaking Chains”.
“The artists felt the pain and misery of the chained woman,” said Wang Zheng, a professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Michigan who helped get the exhibition published on a popular feminist website.
“They empathised with her and did not want this to be silenced,” she added.
Despite all the attention Xiaohuamei’s story has gained, it is not unique. The government does not release annual case numbers involving trafficked women and children but in 2015 the Supreme People’s Court revealed that between 2010 and 2014, it dealt with 7,719 such cases. State news agency Xinhua reported in 2018 that in the three years prior Chinese courts handled 2,806 cases involving trafficked women and children.
China launches campaign to stem trafficking of women and children
Sociologist Chen Yeqiang has researched rampant human trafficking in Fugong county in southwest China’s Yunnan province since 2010.
He found that local women were often tricked into marriage by agents promising a better life in wealthy areas on the east coast. The agents, often part of large organised crime chains, were paid up to thousands of yuan in “introduction fees” for each match.
The men they were matched with, however, were often poor, had a disability or had a bad reputation, making it difficult for them to find a wife. When the women reached their new homes, they were often abused or forced into confinement.
In one example, Chen wrote that a woman was bought and sold five times, from one family to the next. Another villager said a woman was sold three times and each time she escaped home she was sold again.
“The phenomenon was rampant in the 1980s and 90s,” said a veteran feminist activist, who asked not to be names because of the sensitivity of the subject. “Many women were treated as merchandise or tools.
“The reason there’s this much attention on the case shows many people on the internet or in the cities did not realise how much women’s rights were being harmed in the rural areas,” she added.
While it has been common for women to be trafficked and sold in rural areas, Wang said the “huge divide” between rural Chinese and people of higher socio-economic status in urban areas explained why many found Xiaohuamei’s case so shocking.
“City elites could not imagine that such a horrible situation would exist in the 21st century,” she said. “[So] they have a strong desire to act, to do something to change it.”
In an apparent response to the public fury, lawmakers addressed the issue of human trafficking several times at this year’s annual legislative meeting.
China’s chief justice Zhou Qiang said on Tuesday that criminal offences involving sexual assault, trafficking and buying trafficked women and children would be “severely punished”, while the country’s top prosecutor, Zhang Jun, pledged to do more to bring human traffickers to justice.
Paying ‘lip service’
Over the years, Chinese authorities have moved to tackle human trafficking. Every year, the Ministry of Public Security launches anti-trafficking campaigns, establishing DNA databases and online platforms to collect tips.
However, many say the authorities’ actions so far have not been enough – and the way they handled Xiaohuamei’s case proved it.
From initially dismissing the possibility of trafficking to releasing vague and contradictory statements, the government’s actions have been heavily criticised.
Attempts to censor discussion of the case fuelled public anger, professor Wang said.
Although online discussion of the topic has not been banned in the way other sensitive issues are censored, several mainland journalists said they were told to stop covering it and the accounts of some prominent intellectuals who spoke out about it were suspended.
In China, buying trafficked humans gets less jail time than for illegal plants
The organiser of “Breaking Chains” declined to be interviewed because of official scrutiny and volunteers the Post spoke to did not want to be identified because of ongoing censorship.
“People originally expected the government to solve the issue, but instead [officials] acted contrary to their expectations,” Wang said, adding that the public simply asked of authorities: “Tell us the truth, punish all criminals, dig up all chains of organised crime and clean them up.”
Wang Yaqiu, a senior researcher on China at Human Rights Watch, said the persistence of human trafficking despite government measures showed a fundamental lack of will or interest in protecting women’s rights by the ruling Communist Party rather than an inability to solve the problem.
“The government pays lip service to women’s equality and has laws on paper addressing human trafficking, but in reality, its top priority has always been about staying in power and maintaining so-called social stability,” she said.
“Unmarried men are seen as a source of instability. Cracking down on trafficking and respecting women’s rights and safety are not something that concerns the party greatly.”.
The feminist activist who did not want to be named said local governments showed they could be “thorough and swift” when it came to China’s population-control policies, even forcing women to get abortions in some cases.
“But how come when it comes to trafficking women, local governments and women’s federations aren’t doing enough?” she said.
Xiaohuamei’s case showed how tolerant village heads and local governments were of men buying women if it meant raising China’s declining birth rate, Wang Yaqiu said.
“In the past couple of years, we still see officials’ awareness lagging behind,” she said. “When they talk about the gender imbalance, they still focus on men needing wives and increasing births.”
More from South China Morning Post:
- China’s chained woman scandal: public anger persists as investigations, censorship ‘raise more questions’
- Feminism in China dates to communist revolution but today activists feel squeezed by the state
- China looks to ‘update and strengthen’ women’s rights law
- China will plot its own path on human rights, Xi Jinping says, as report takes aim at US record
- Women’s rights in Asia: how far have we really come in improving gender equality?
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