44 China The Economist February 26th 2022
A horrorfromanotherage
I
f all goesto plan for Communist Party leaders, the year 2022
should show the world that China represents the future. State
television kicked off the lunar new year with greetings from the
crew of the country’s first space station, the Tiangong, beamed to
over a billion viewers. February saw the capital, Beijing, safely
host a Winter Olympicsduring a global pandemic. Athletes were
secluded in hightechnology quarantine bubbles, before compet
ing on slopes of artificial snow. In a sign of the country’s allure as a
sporting power, a freestyleski champion born and raised in
America, 18yearold Eileen Gu, chose to compete for China, her
mother’s homeland, earning two gold medals and one silver.
Yet news of confidence and modernity has had competition in
these opening weeks of the year. Since late January, millions of
Chinese have dodged online censors to follow a different story, in
volving horrors that seem transported from another age. The news
broke when a video blogger filmed a motherofeight, who
showed signs of mental illness, chained by the neck in a freezing
village outhouse in the eastern province of Jiangsu. Nationwide
public outrage reached levels not seen since the chaotic first
weeks of the covid19 pandemic in 2020. It peaked as local officials
issued a series of defensive, contradictory statements about the
woman and how she reached their rural county near the city of
Xuzhou. Eventually admitting that she had been sold into mar
riage, their openness went only so far. Guards sealed the woman’s
village against outsiders. Two concerned citizens were detained
after trying to visit the hospital where she is now confined after a
diagnosis of schizophrenia. Censors deleted many reports about
the case, taking special pains to suppress news of a collective ac
tion: a petition signed by graduates of elite Chinese universities,
demanding an investigation into human trafficking nationwide.
Under pressure, Jiangsu’s provincial leaders finally launched a
formal investigation. A report published on February 23rd de
clared that the woman, Yang Qingxia, also known as Xiao Huamei,
or “Little Plum Blossom”, was 44 years old and came from a beauti
ful but deprived area of Yunnan, a southwestern province. She
was trafficked at least twice before being sold and married to Dong
Zhimin, a farmer who had eight children with her. Mr Dong and at
least two traffickers have been arrested, and 17 officials sacked ordisciplined, almost all of them of countylevel rank or below.
Striving to end on a positive note, the report announced a cam
paign to protect the rights of women, children, the mentally ill
and disabled. Public reactions to the report are distinctly mixed,
with evidence of critical comments being heavily censored.
The widespread anger inspired by Ms Yang’s plight is revealing.
That brides and children are trafficked is sadly no surprise. An an
cient scourge, it is given new life today by wildly skewed gender
ratios, especially in rural areas where a preference for sons has
combined with decades of strict familyplanning controls and
sexselective abortions to leave tens of millions of women miss
ing from the population. Demographers estimate that around one
in five Chinese men has no chance of finding a Chinese bride. In
2015 an ethnographer from Shandong Women’s University, Chen
Yeqiang, published a study of migrant brides from Ms Yang’s home
region in Yunnan. Typicallyaged 1520, a dismaying number were
tricked or abducted before being sold. Many later fled, some leav
ing children behind so that inlaws would not pursue them.
Those with disabilities are at highrisk of being trafficked. In
2021 Xiong Wanru of Princeton University published a survey of
1,215 bridetrafficking cases that reached Chinese courts between
2010 and 2018. A third of female victims were mentally or physical
ly disabled, fetching prices 30% below the average as a result. Half
of all the women were foreign, often from Vietnam. Many buyers
were older men who lacked the education or skills to leave their
village and work in a city. Sometimes parents bought a bride for
disabled or mentally challenged sons, seeking grandsons to carry
on the family line. A dismaying number of local officials are sym
pathetic to such traditionalist arguments. In a recent report the
China Economic Weekly, a partyrun magazine, described how
judges in Feng County, Ms Yang’s place of captivity, denied divorc
es to several trafficked women, urging them to think of their chil
dren and try harder to reconcile with their husbands.For party and patriarchy
It is striking how many women have written online about seeing
images of Ms Yang and imagining themselves in her place, notes
Ma Zhiying of the University of Chicago, who has studied mental
illness and illegal marriage in China. To Ms Ma, that reflects wider
fears of young, urban women when they hear the government call
ing for them to marry and have more babies for the nation’s sake.
It should worry party leaders that, as netizens tried to compre
hend Ms Yang’s story, many shared memes from or copies of
“Blind Mountain”, a film set in 1990s China, depicting a young col
lege graduate tricked into marrying a poor villager. The bleak plot
sees the village chief and local elders colluding to thwart the wom
an’s attempts to escape. In contrast, today’s leaders claim to have
eliminated dark, hidden corners where cries for help go unheard
and corruption is unchecked. The party boasts of building good
roads to even the remotest villages and of sending upright officials
to eliminate graft. With surveillance cameras in every hamlet and
identitycard scanners at every railway station, police brag that no
criminal can hide for long.
Such boasts explain public shock over Ms Yang’s case. A sup
posedly modern, allknowing, allseeing state failed to notice her
suffering—or worse, chose to look away in the name of local social
stability. Some netizens wonder how much has changed since the
time of “Blind Mountain”, when it comes to officials’ priorities.
China’s rulers, a socially conservative bunch, talk a lot aboutthe
future. But their system protects horrors with roots in the past.nChaguan
The story of a trafficked bride has shaken China in revealing ways