Lijia Zhang

Opinion | China must act to end the trafficking and sale of women – public outrage is not enough

An outcry over an abducted woman’s inhuman treatment in Xuzhou led to arrests this time, but the nightmare for thousands of women across China will continue if the authorities don’t take the problem seriously

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Farmers plough a field in Zhaojue county, in Sichuan province, on February 9. Wife abduction in China’s rural areas has been a problem for years. Photo: Xinhua

Lijia Zhang

Published: 6:45am, 24 Feb 2022

As China geared up to host the Winter Olympics, a viral video of a woman chained to a shabby hut in a village in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, shocked and enraged the nation. Local authorities initially denied any claims of abuse, but, under increasing pressure, they finally admitted the mother of eight was a victim of trafficking.

It is believed that the woman was taken from Yunnan to Xuzhou by a fellow villager surnamed Sang and her husband. Both of them, plus the woman’s “husband”, are now under arrest.

My chest tightened when I first read the story. It was a familiar tale, but still deeply shocking. Over the years, I have reported on half a dozen stories about trafficked brides and even took part in rescue missions. Each trafficked woman suffered untold misery; they were raped, beaten, humiliated and sometimes chained up.

Every year, thousands of Chinese women, usually from poor regions such as Yunnan, Sichuan and Guizhou, are kidnapped and sold to farmers in other poor regions as wives. The Chinese government has launched numerous campaigns against human trafficking and passed several laws against traffickers and buyers, but the problem still thrives in poor rural China.

According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, in 1998, the police dealt with 6,513 cases involving the trafficking of women and children; the figure leapt to 23,163 in 2000 and dropped to 20,735 in 2013. These are just the reported cases.

Why would farmers buy wives? To start with, it is a much cheaper way to obtain a wife. The betrothal gifts and cost of a wedding ceremony in the countryside usually come to between 50,000 and 100,000 yuan (US$8,000-US$16,000), while buying a bride costs about one tenth of that sum, or less.