Chinese See Themselves in a Chained Woman Favorite 

The Xuzhou chained woman incident, also known as the Xuzhou eight-child mother incident, is a case of human trafficking, false imprisonment, sexual assault, severe mistreatment, and subsequent events that came to light in late January 2022 in Xuzhou's Feng County, Jiangsu, People's Republic of China. The video of a mentally disturbed and unlawfully imprisoned woman, Yang, who was chained to a wall and who gave birth to eight children went viral on China's internet and sparked a huge public outcry. (Wikipedia)

On Chinese social media, users dug up a marriage certificate with a photo of a woman who was identified by the government as the chained woman but looked different from her. They dived into court documents that showed the region where she lived has a dark history of human trafficking. Long-retired investigative journalists traveled to a village deep in the mountains, knocking on each door, to verify the government’s claim that she grew up there.
“No social events have ever had the same effect on netizens like the one of the chained woman,” a user called “Xudiqiuziyuanku” wrote on the social media platform WeChat. “It forced us to become detectives, analysts, A.I. image in-painting technicians, data mining engineers and Sherlock Holmes.”

The Chinese public staged a rare online revolt because it felt that the government had failed to prioritize the personal safety of women, despite its claims that women “hold up half of the sky.”
(NewYork Times)

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. And the topic continues to hold people’s attention online amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Hundreds of graduates from some of China’s most prominent universities signed petitions, urging the central government to investigate the case. Several bookstores set up sections for books that could help readers understand the case, including “Masculine Domination” by Pierre Bourdieu, “Men Explain Things to Me” by Rebecca Solnit and “Jane Doe January: My Twenty-Year Search for Truth and Justice” by Emily Winslow. Lawyers, academics, former journalists and many bloggers helped give the Chinese public a crash course on human trafficking, forced marriage and demographic statistics. They resurfaced books, films, documentaries and news reports about abducted women.