China is an Awful Place But You Can’t Say So Online or You’ll Disappear

In January of 2022 a video went viral in China on the Chinese version of TikTok. It showed a woman in a small rural town who was being held in a tiny room with a chain around her neck.

A Douyin vlogger exposed the living conditions of this mother of eight in a small village in Xuzhou. Heartbreaking and inhumane – she was literally chained up and left out in the cold. Full story here: https://t.co/AzCHwBU6mU pic.twitter.com/WLLhjpd4Zr

— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) January 29, 2022

Here’s the full clip:

To give the full story, here is the original video that caused the social media storm, which is still ongoing today (tw distressing content, not sure why the lock is blurred, as if that is the most shocking thing about this video..) pic.twitter.com/UOA5zrfeQ4

— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) January 30, 2022

People were understandably outraged and demanded to know what was happening and why. To say this was a big story is really underselling just how massive it was.

It’s one of the biggest credibility challenges Beijing has faced in recent years. The chained woman became a symbol of injustice that brought together liberals as well as nationalistic digital warriors and apolitical moderates. Many of them are worried that the chain on her neck, in a literal and figurative sense, could fall on them or their loved ones.

The video of the chained woman has led to a kind of #MeToo movement on the Chinese internet, in which many people stepped forward to share stories of mothers, daughters, sisters and classmates who were abducted or simply disappeared…

The top three hashtags about the chained woman on the Twitter-like social media platform Weibo have accumulated more than 10 billion views, rivaling those about the Beijing Winter Olympics, which were heavily promoted by Weibo and official media outlets.

First, the government tried to shrug off the issue by releasing a statement saying the woman was the man’s wife and was chained up because she had mental problems and sometimes hit people. For obvious reasons, this explanation didn’t sit well with a lot of people. If a person has mental problems they should be taken to a hospital, not chained up like a rabid dog.

And the more people looked into this story, the worse it got. it turned out the woman in question had been bought and sold a number of times before winding up with her current “husband.”

Finally, under intense public pressure, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.

According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, an impoverished village in Yunnan Province, in China’s southwest.

As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.

Buying women from rural areas is not a rare thing in China. “Little Flower Plum” became the face of a wider problem that the government doesn’t really acknowledge.

Some of the unearthed stories, based on official media reports and court documents, hit home for the Chinese middle class: A graduate student from Shanghai was abducted on a field trip and sold to a hunched man. She was rescued after 71 days. A 13-year-old girl in Beijing was kidnapped on her way to school and sold to a man who constantly beat her up. She had a son at 15 and couldn’t escape until she turned 19. A young woman from Hangzhou was abducted on a business trip and spent the next two decades in a remote village. She was rescued after her son went to college and informed her parents.

But a vast majority of human trafficking victims came from the poorest corners in China. Few were rescued. It was nearly impossible for the women to escape because whole villages kept an eye on them. They would be beaten and locked up after being caught.

Making this even worse, the husband of this trafficked woman had become a kind of local celebrity who frequently gave interviews to video bloggers. He was respected as a poor man raising his 8 children the best he could. Meanwhile, he was chaining his “wife” around the neck for at least five years before he was discovered, though it seems likely other people in town knew about this long before the public did.

For the communist government, the outrage over this became a big problem. The army of internet minders who monitor everything said online started censoring posts about the topic but the government response went way beyond that. People whose reactions to the video had gone viral got visits from the police. Those who refused to take down their posts and stop posting disappeared. In particular, two women who’d traveled to the village to meet with the woman were denied entry to the local hospital. The responded with an impromptu protest that also went viral.

…they drove around town instead, with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.

They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times.

Before long, they were detained by the local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.

Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. She shared a photo of her bruised arm, saying she was shocked that her small actions could elicit such ferocity.

“Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.

About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, the police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She was eventually released on bail and has not spoken publicly since.

So, to sum up, a woman trying to bring attention to another woman who’d been sold into sexual slavery was arrested, beaten and held in prison for 8 months.

In 2023, six people connected to the case, including the “husband” were convicted and imprisoned.

The case horrified the country and led to a crackdown on bride trafficking.

The woman’s husband was jailed for nine years for torture, abuse and keeping her captive. Five others received terms ranging from eight to 13 years.

But many reacting to the verdict on Friday said the sentences were too small and reforms were still lacking.

As for the woman at the center of the story, no one knows what happened to her. Reporters visited the village and learned she’d been dismissed from the hospital but her home now has a guard shack complete with cameras and multiple undercover police officers out front. No one is allowed in or can even take photos of the house. On a second trip to the house the female reporters were followed and then surrounded by angry villagers who threatened to beat them or sell them into slavery if they returned.

So in a way the woman at the center of this has also disappeared. She may be in the house or maybe not. We can hope she’s better off now but no one really knows.