China’s city elites wake up to scale of trafficking after chained woman shows human side of age-old crime

Artists, poets, lawyers and netizens expressed shock about the plight of rural women sold to men and anger over authorities’ failure to protect

‘Unmarried men are seen as a source of instability … respecting women’s rights and safety are not something that concerns the Party’: human rights researcher

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Published: 11:00am, 9 Mar 2022Updated: 10:12am, 10 Mar 2022

The theme for International Women’s Day 2022 is “Break the Bias”, which asks us to imagine a world free of bias, stereotypes and discrimination. In the first in a series of stories about gender equality in China, 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.”

The Cage by The Bald Stubborn Person is one of the artworks submitted for the “Breaking Chains” online exhibition. Photo: Handout

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.

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?

SCMP Series

Gender equality in China

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