The secret campaign in China to save a woman chained by the neck

Three years ago, a video blogger stumbled on a shack in a tiny village in rural China. Inside, a woman stood dazed, shivering — and chained by the neck.

The video set off an uproar. People flooded social media with calls for accountability. Some even traveled to try and find her.

Then, those voices disappeared.

The video blogger had visited Dongji village, in eastern China, to find a man known for raising eight children despite deep poverty. The man had become a favorite interview subject for influencers looking to attract donations and clicks.

But that day, one of the children led the blogger to someone not featured in many other videos: the child’s mother.

She stood in a doorless shack in the family’s courtyard, on a strip of dirt floor between a bed and a brick wall. She wore a thin sweater despite the January cold. A chain around her neck shackled her to the wall.

The video quickly spread online, and Chinese commenters wondered whether the woman had been sold to the man in Dongji and forced to have his children — a kind of trafficking that is a longstanding problem in China’s countryside. They demanded the government intervene.

Instead, local officials issued a short statement brushing off the concerns: The woman was legally married to the man and had not been trafficked. She was chained up because she was mentally ill and sometimes hit people.

Public outrage only grew. This was about more than trafficking, people said. It was another reason many young women were reluctant to get married or have children, because the government treated marriage as a license to abuse.

The outcry rippled nationwide for weeks. Many observers called it the biggest moment for women’s rights in recent Chinese history. The Chinese Communist Party sees popular discontent as a challenge to its authority, but this was so intense that it seemed even the party would struggle to quash it.

And yet, it did.

To find out how, I tried to track what happened to the chained woman and those who spoke out for her. I found an expansive web of intimidation at home and abroad. The clampdown shows how rattled authorities are by a growing movement demanding improvements to the role of women in Chinese society.

Who Is the Chained Woman?

Dongji looks like any other village in China’s vast countryside. Two hours from the nearest city, it sits among sprawling wheat and rice fields in Jiangsu province.

But when a colleague and I visited recently, one house appeared to be guarded by two men. A surveillance camera pointed directly at the entrance.

This was the street where the chained woman had lived. Officially, there was little reason that her house should still be under watch, since in the government’s telling, the case had been resolved.

After widespread outrage over the government’s initial statement, in January 2022, officials promised a new investigation. Over the next month, four government offices released statements that at points conflicted with each other. Finally, provincial officials in late February that year issued what they said was the definitive account.

According to that report, the woman was named Xiaohuamei, or “Little Flower Plum.” (The government did not specify whether that was a nickname or a legal name.) She was born in Yagu, a village in Yunnan province.

As a teenager, she at times spoke or behaved in ways that were “abnormal,” the report said, and in 1998, when she was around 20, a fellow villager promised to help her seek treatment. Instead, that villager sold her for about $700.

Xiaohuamei was sold three times, finally to a man in Dongji who wanted a wife for his son, Dong Zhimin, the government said.

Over the next 20 years, she gave birth to eight children, even as her mental health visibly deteriorated, the government said, citing interviews with Dong and villagers.

The government report did not say whether other villagers knew she had been trafficked. But self-styled charity bloggers had been visiting Dong and presenting him as a doting father since at least 2021. (The woman appeared in some videos, but unchained.)

“My biggest dream is to slowly bring the children up into healthy adults,” Dong told one blogger.

Privately, though, Dong had been chaining the children’s mother around the neck and tying her with cloth ropes since 2017, the government said.

Censors deleted the bloggers’ videos of the family and of the woman in chains. In April 2023, Dong was sentenced to prison, along with five others accused of participating in the trafficking.

The official story ended there.

Hide the Victim

As we approached the house where the men were sitting, they jumped up and asked who we were. One made a phone call, while another blocked me from taking photos.

Ten more people soon arrived, including police officers, propaganda officials and the village leader, who insisted that the scandal had been overblown. “Everything is very normal, extremely normal,” he said. When we asked where the woman was, officials said they believed that she didn’t want visitors.

The chained woman may be choosing to stay out of the public eye. But the Chinese government often silences victims of crimes or accidents that generate public anger.

Some weeks later, we tried to go back. This time, we visited a hospital where China’s state broadcaster said the woman was sent after the video went viral — her last known whereabouts.

We tracked down Dr. Teng Xiaoting, a physician who had treated her. Teng said the woman was no longer there, but said she did not know where she had gone. Other locals we asked had no information either.

Silence Discussion

After the woman’s story emerged in January 2022, the government sprang into action to suppress the conversations that followed.

Police tracked down people like He Peirong, a veteran human rights activist, who had traveled to the area around Dongji to try to look for other trafficked women.

After she returned home, police officers visited her roughly 20 times over the next month, forcing her to delete online posts about her trip and threatening to arrest her.

They also named journalists she had been in contact with, to show they were watching her communications. They even took her to nearby Anhui province on a forced “vacation” — a common tactic used to control dissidents’ movements.

Similar crackdowns were taking place farther away. A lawyer named Lu Tingge, a resident of Hebei province, said that a Jiangsu official had traveled to his city, urging him to withdraw a petition he’d submitted for more information about the case. He refused, but said he never received the information.

Detain Those Who Persist

To avoid arrest, He stopped posting about the case. Those who refused to stop, however, suffered the consequences.

Two other women also traveled to Jiangsu after the video emerged, to visit the chained woman at the hospital. Identifying themselves on social media only by nicknames, Wuyi and Quanmei, they said they were just ordinary women showing solidarity.

They were barred from entering, according to videos on Wuyi’s Weibo social media account. So they drove around with messages about the woman scrawled on their car in lipstick.

They quickly attracted enormous followings, their updates viewed hundreds of millions of times. Before long, they were detained by local police. After their release several days later, Quanmei went quiet online.

Wuyi, though, refused to be silenced. On Weibo, she said police had put a bag over her head and beat her. “Everything I always believed, everything the country had always taught me, all became lies,” she wrote.

About two weeks later, Wuyi disappeared again. This time, police detained her for eight months, according to an acquaintance. She has not spoken publicly since.

The Resistance Goes Into Hiding

After Wuyi’s disappearance, the few voices still speaking out fell silent. But the activism has not evaporated, only moved underground. It includes people like Monica, a young woman who asked to be identified only by a first name.

When the chained woman story erupted, she joined an online group of several hundred people that decided to conduct research on the trafficking of women with mental disabilities in China.

Within days, police tracked down and interrogated participants. The group disbanded, but the intimidation only made Monica angrier.

A few months later, Monica and several others quietly regrouped, using an encrypted messaging platform. Rather than campaign publicly, they tried to impose pressure on the government behind the scenes.

They studied hundreds of court cases and news stories about women who had been abused or trafficked. They wrote a 20-page report explaining the chained woman episode and laying out suggestions for reform. In July 2022, they submitted it anonymously to a UN committee reviewing China’s record on disability rights.

“Feminism in China really is the most vocal and active movement. It’s also very hard to completely scatter or kill off,” Monica said. “I think the authorities are right to be worried.”

In December, a woman whose family had reported her missing 13 years ago was found living with a man to whom she had borne two children. Authorities claimed the woman had a disability and the man had “taken her in” — the same language officials used in an early report about the chained woman.

Social media users accused the government of glossing over trafficking again. Then the censors stepped in and stifled that discussion, too.