Outrage over woman chained by neck to village hut: China's longstanding human trafficking problem suggests the CCP is complicit -- #China Boss #update 2.11.22
Update
What happened last week.
Chinese netizens were outraged by a video of a woman chained by her neck to a village hut posted on Douyin (China's TikTok) by a man who was "visibly shocked at what he [saw],” The South China Morning Post news staff reported. The Washington Post described the video and angry public response in detail:
WaPo:
The video, posted online late last month by a blogger visiting the family of eight children in Fengxian county to advertise charity efforts in rural areas, showed a woman standing in a corner of a small shed. She wore a thin sweater and was shackled with a metal brace locked around her neck and connected to a chain attached inside the hut. In the video, a young boy says he takes food to her every day.
Appalled Internet users asked whether the woman — who appeared unable to communicate with the blogger, suggesting a degree of cognitive impairment — had been forced to have so many children or had been trafficked into her circumstances. Others noticed her loss of teeth and asked whether she was a victim of abuse.
Her husband was previously celebrated online for the enormous size of his family as China moved away from its restrictive child policy. Reports, however, never mentioned his wife.
Some Internet users called for boycotting products from Fengxian, where the video was taken. On Weibo, women posted photos of signs in support on their cars. One read: “The world has not abandoned you. Your sisters are coming!”
One woman wrote in a post that she tried to visit the mother, who local officials said had been sent to a hospital, but was stopped by police. Another wrote in marker on the outside of her car, urging people to pay attention to the case. “This relates to every single woman.”
WaPo also said that online “[d]iscussion has turned into a broader debate about mistreatment of women, the ineffectiveness of local authorities in fighting trafficking, and poverty in rural areas,” and that “[b]ride trafficking — which includes Chinese women often from poor, rural areas, as well as women from Southeast Asia — is a problem in China after decades of family planning, combined with a traditional preference for boys, resulted in a shortage of women.”
Why it matters.
Chinese netizens could hardly be faulted for jumping to conclusions. China’s human trafficking problem is so endemic that the U.S. has classified it as a Tier 3 county - which is a country with a government that fails to fully meet the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 (TVPA’s) minimum standards. Worse, according to the US State Department, China knows it has a significant human trafficking problem but “is not making significant efforts” to address it.
US Department of State 2021 Trafficking in Persons Report - China:
The Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so, even considering the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on its anti-trafficking capacity; therefore the PRC remained on Tier 3.
Despite the lack of significant efforts, the government took some steps to address trafficking, including by continuing to prosecute and convict some traffickers and by maintaining consultative mechanisms with law enforcement counterparts in other countries. However, during the reporting period there was a government policy or pattern of widespread forced labor, including through the continued mass arbitrary detention of more than one million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, ethnic Kyrgyz, and other Muslims in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (Xinjiang).
Authorities continued to implement these policies in other provinces, targeted other religious minorities under their auspices, and sought the coerced repatriation and internment of religious and ethnic minorities living abroad through the use of surveillance, harassment and threats against them and their family members, and extradition requests.
The government also reportedly placed ethnic Tibetans in vocational training and manufacturing jobs as part of an ostensible “poverty alleviation” and “labor transfer program” that featured overt coercive elements.
Chinese nationals reportedly suffered forced labor in several countries in Asia, Africa, and Europe hosting Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects, within which PRC authorities exercised insufficient oversight of relevant recruitment channels, contracts, and labor conditions, and PRC diplomatic services routinely failed to identify or assist those exploited.
For the fourth consecutive year, the government did not report identifying any trafficking victims or referring them to protective services.
Although China’s human trafficking crimes are also an essential part of the government’s campaign to repress and torture ethnic minorities, the public is more concerned about the trafficking of Han men, women, and children, and, more specifically, “bride trafficking” which has become an egregious problem.
Heather Barr ,“China has a bride trafficking problem.” Human Rights Watch:
The country’s longstanding one-child policy and preference for boys created a huge gender imbalance. The difficulty many Chinese men now face finding wives, combined with a lack of protections in China, is driving a brutal business of selling women and girls from neighboring countries.
The Chinese government’s main response for many years seemed to be simply to ignore growing allegations about authorities’ complicity in these crimes. But the problem is becoming too big to ignore; the government’s stonewalling is gradually being replaced by a mixture of criminal justice and propaganda responses, neither of which get to the real issue of gender discrimination.
“Widespread dissatisfaction with the official response.”
While police in Jiangsu province, where the woman in the hut was found, were finally compelled to investigate her husband, Radio Free Asia staff saw "[o]nline comments” indicative of “widespread dissatisfaction” - some even accusing the local government of “enabling rape and illegal detention." Pardon the length of China Boss’ copy-paste, but there were SO many comments in RFA’s report:
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