Chained and neglected

A MOTHER of eight children became the centre of attention on Chinese social media amid the ongoing 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

With an iron chain around her neck, Yang was wearing thin clothes in the chilly winter weather, all alone in a dilapidated hut at a rural village of Xuzhou city in the eastern Jiangsu province as seen in a video shot by a vlogger.

In another house in the same compound, her husband and children, in other videos, posed happily and welcomed visitors who brought them gifts and monetary aid.

Her husband Dong, 55, was featured as “a happy super dad” in various videos shot by vloggers since last December.

The vloggers had made him a hero for having many kids, saying that he has greatly contributed to the country’s vision of a higher birth rate. And yet, none of the clips mentioned Yang.

As Dong’s popularity rose, more video bloggers visited the family.

One of them noticed Yang in the tiny hut with only a makeshift bed.

He asked if she was cold and tried communicating with her, but Yang had trouble understanding him.

After he shared the video online on Jan 28, people went all out calling for the authorities to investigate.

In a quick response, the local officials said Yang was a local resident but they could not tell who she is and where she lived.

They said the couple were legally married and the family, who lived below the poverty line, received a monthly government subsidy of over 3,000 yuan (RM1,975).

The netizens refused to believe their version.

In subsequence statements, the officials said Dong’s late father found the “mentally unstable” Yang begging on the streets at a town some 10km away in 1998.

He brought her home and arranged for her to tie the knot with his son two months later.

People were still dissatisfied, demanding to know how she registered her marriage without any identity document, or could a mentally unfit person get married, and why there was no action taken against the family that had exceeded the number of children a couple could have.

(China abolished the one-child policy in 2015 and opened up a third slot for children last year. Violators are subjected to a hefty fine. In Dong’s case, the figure can go up to hundreds of millions of yuan.)

The public suspected she was abducted, confined and raped, and that she was assaulted when she fought back or tried to escape. Similar cases have been reported in the media.

In previous cases, the victims were often sold to families in the rural areas where the bachelors were too poor to get a wife.

These men, according to tradition, must bear a son to carry on with the family’s name, so they sought to marry through illegal channels.

Most victims suffered mentally by the time they were rescued.

Based on true stories, The Story of an Abducted Woman and Blind Mountain are among the Chinese films produced to highlight such crimes.

In a move to help Yang, the people spent their Chinese New Year holidays on the Internet, looking up for missing women who looked like her and passed their findings to the cops.

Their hardwork was fruitful.

Last week, investigators from Xuzhou announced that the woman was a native of Yagu village where a minority tribe is residing in the southwestern Yunnan province.

Yang, whose real name is Xiao Hua Mei, first got married in 1994 but divorced two years later.

Police arrested Dong for illegal detention of “his wife”.

Also arrested were a 48-year-old woman, identified only as Sang, and her husband, 67, for human trafficking.

Sang, a villager of Yagu, told investigators that Yang’s late mother asked her to take her daughter to the city for medical treatment, but she lost her upon arriving at the train station.

Sang did not lodge a police report or inform her family that she was missing.

Yang is now undergoing treatment for schizophrenia. Apart from the eldest son, 22, who is working in the city, the rest of the children – aged between 10 and two – have been placed under the care of the Xuzhou authorities.

Several local officials are being investigated for negligence of duty.

In the midst of the shocking news about Yang, a neighbour of hers was exposed as another victim of human trafficking.

In a video, the woman – known as Zhong – is seen crawling on the floor.

She also appeared to be mentally challenged and was chained, with only a blanket covering her body.

After seeing Dong earning money, Zhong’s husband contacted the vloggers to shoot a video of his family, too.

He admitted paying more than 1,000 yuan (RM660) for his wife.

According to the vlogger who took the clip, local villagers told him Zhong arrived at the village around the same time as Yang and claimed she was abused by her bad-tempered husband.

The vlogger said Zhong has two children.

According to local media, she has also been rescued and sent to the hospital for treatment.