During the 2022 Beijing Olympics Games, an incident beyond the Chinese government’s control aroused much ire and heated discussion on social media. Many watched a video that showed a “chained woman” held captive in a village in eastern China. By February 21, the story and its continuous development had garnered over 6 billion clicks by the Chinese on different social media platforms and that number continued increasing. {1} Many people were shocked and expressed anger not only over the existence of the massive barbaric practice of trafficking women and sex slavery in modern China but also over the authorities’ initial lackluster response, their participation in the continuous coverups, and even their complicity in the crimes.
This article delves into the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) policies, laws, enforcement policies, and practices that incubate China’s woman trafficking crimes. Under the CCP’s rule, not only are the Chinese people turned into victims, but a portion of them are also turned into criminals who prey on the victims.
I. Human Trafficking Problems and Their Scale in China
A. The “Chained Woman” Case
The “chained woman” was found in a village in Dongji Township, Feng County, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province. In December 2021, the Feng County government selected peasant Dong Zhimin’s family, with eight children, to showcase how they care about low-income people. People visiting Dong’s home saw a woman who was chained to the wall in a small room. They filmed a video and published it on the Internet.
It turned out that the woman had been kidnapped in 1997 and was sold to Dong Zhimin as his “wife” (more accurately, she became his sex slave). All men in the family including Dong Zhimin, his father, and his brother repeatedly raped her. The family kept her chained up. They cut her tongue to prevent her from screaming and pulled out almost all her teeth so that she could not bite any of the offenders while they raped her.
The whole village helped Dong’s family to monitor her so that she could not escape. After one of her failed attempts to escape, Dong offered to allow the whole village to rape her and said he would be happy to father children that anyone had with her. No one knows how many among Dong’s eight children she gave birth to and who the fathers are.
When the case was exposed, the authorities, from the township to the county, city, province, and all the way to the central government in Beijing, all tried to cover it up. They locked the woman up in a mental hospital, built walls around the village in one day to keep all outsiders from going in, and harassed volunteers who came to the small town to try to help her.
The authorities even gave her a false identity as a woman from Yunnan Province, even though the public came up with substantial evidence proving that she was Li Ying from Sichuan Province, who was kidnapped at the age of 13. There were unconfirmed Internet reports that the Feng County officials bought her as a gift for then Xuzhou Mayor Yu Guangzhou to deflower. {2}There were many criminals in this case. The first were the kidnappers and the human traffickers. Then there were Dong and his family who were both human traffickers and rapists. The whole village acted as Dong’s accomplices and many men in the village participated as rapists.
The authorities were accomplices of the human trafficking crimes. They acquiesced to or even supported the crimes by issuing government certificates, including a marriage certificate and birth certificates. When kidnapped women manage to go to the court to request their freedom, the judges demand that they go back to live with their “husbands” – the rapists. When the case gets the public’s attention, the authorities silence the Internet and arrest those who speak the loudest.
B. Human Trafficking is a Large-Scale Crime in China
The “chained woman” in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province is not the only human trafficking and sex slavery victim in China.
Shaanxi Province had a “cellar woman” whom a peasant man bought and locked in a cellar for six years as a sex slave. She had to do everything in the cellar, including discharging, pregnancy, and delivering her daughter. {3}
In the same Shaanxi Province, a man, with no shame at all, told the audience in his social media broadcast about his “caged woman.” He found a woman who had a mental problem and then lived with her. To prevent her from escaping, he built a cage and kept her locked up. {4}
In Anhui Province, a village man in his forties bought a 13-year-old girl as his “wife.” He found a way of making money. He offered his “wife” for prostitution at 20 yuan each time. Nearly all of the twenty-some single men in the village had sex with her. They even tried to drive the people who came to rescue the girl out of the village. {5}
When two police officers accompanied a Shanghai professor couple to rescue their kidnapped daughter, over 100 villagers chased and surrounded them at a train station in Xuzhou (the city of the “chained woman” case). They had to pay the village man 2,000 yuan (US $700), to compensate him for what he paid to buy his “wife,” in order to get out of the town. However, their daughter died a month later after going home, due to the abduction at the village. The mother died shortly thereafter also. Out of revenge, the father poisoned the villages well and killed the village manager and many other people. {6}
A netizen posted online that in his hometown in Jiangsu Province (the province of the “chained woman” case), every village has 10 to 20 trafficked women. The entire village guards them. Their way to keep the women there was to rape them and let them have children – then the women stayed for the sake of their children. For those who do not yield, they have “100 methods” to torture them, including gang rape, keeping them hungry, beating, pulling out their teeth, and chaining them, just to name a few. {7}
Those who still do not yield might end up disappearing. A netizen found the following death cases on the Internet, all in the county of the “chained woman.” {8}
- November 18, 2011, a naked woman’s body was found in a pond.
- October 17, 2016, a dead woman’s body was found in a river.
- May 21, 2017, a dead woman’s body was found beneath a bridge.
- September 21, 2017, a dead woman’s body was found in a well.
- September 23, 2017, a dead woman’s body was found in a river.
- March 31, 2020, a dead woman’s body was found in a river.
- May 13, 2020, a dead woman’s body was found in a wheat field.
- January 17, 2022, a woman, holding her 2-month-old child, jumped into a lake and both died.
How severe is the Human Trafficking problem in China? Take Xuzhou (the city of the “chained woman” case) as an example. In 1982, it has 18 minority groups (ethnic groups other than the majority Han) with a population of 9,000 people. By 2000, that number jumped to over 20,000 people in 47 minority groups. The same pattern is observed on the province (Jiangsu). The minority group population jumped from 236,000 in 2010 to 621,000 in 2020. {9} However, rationally speaking, minority group people tend to stay in their own regions. It is hard to imagine these many have migrated to a place thousand miles away, of their own free will.
The book “An Old Crime – The National Women’s Trafficking Chronicle” published in 1989 quoted official numbers that from 1986 to 1989, 48,100 women were trafficked to Xuzhou. {10} In Putian City, Fujian Province between 2007 and 2012, Zhang Jing, a women’s rights activist, found 600,000 child brides (girls who a family bought to raise up as a wife for their son). {11}
The state media China Daily reported that in 2020 alone, there were one million people missing in China. This was already a “great improvement” from the 3.94 million who were missing in 2016 and 2.6 million in 2017. {12}
Human trafficking in China can also include men. In Shanxi and Henan Provinces, some coal mine owners trafficked in men as slave miners. The authorities rescued 379 people once and found many were teenagers. The youngest one was only 8 years old. Ironically, when a rescued 16-year-old boy rode a bus to return to his parents, a government official told him to get off the bus and sold him to another coal mine for 300 yuan. {13}
II. The CCP’s Anti-Humanity Nature
The “chained woman” revealed to the public how massive the human trafficking and sex slavery crimes were throughout China. The young men used in the coal mines are part of the same common pattern. The CCP is the root cause. Its anti-humanity nature leads it to disregard a person as a human being. Instead, it takes people as lifeless commodities, available for use when they have a value and to be abandoned when that value diminishes. In the CCP’s eyes, beautiful women are the sex tools for its officials. Other women are tools to serve single men’s lust and to produce a baby.
A. Officials’ Sex Tools
Peng Shuai is an example of a sex tool. Despite her celebrity status in the tennis world, Zhang Gaoli, one of the highest-ranking CCP officials (a Politburo Standing Committee member) sexually assaulted her with his wife guarding the door. When the world cried out and demanded an investigation, the CCP made her disappear for a while and then released her on staged occasions to report that she “was fine.”
These days, the CCP officials prey on beautiful women, and many have a “second wife,” a “third wife,” and so on. When an official falls during political in-fighting, one of his charges is usually “having inappropriate sexual relations with other women.”
The CCP officials’ hunting for young women dated back to when the CCP won the civil war and took over mainland China in 1949. As it entered the cities, the CCP modified the divorce policy to make it easy for its veteran revolutionists (officials and military commanders) to replace their peasant wives with younger, more beautiful city ladies: The men just needed to write a divorce letter and then the divorce went into effect.
The CCP head Mao Zedong was known for his promiscuity. A few months after he left his first wife in a city and went to the mountains to organize a military rebellion, he “married” his second wife. He later sent the second wife to the Soviet Union so that he could “marry” his third wife, the infamous Jiang Qing. In the 1950‘s, Mao created a Zhongnanhai Performance Troupe with beautiful female dancers to dance with the top CCP leaders at his weekly dance parties. Mao enjoyed dancing and after getting tired, he would pick a lady to “rest” with in a separate room for an hour. Mao continued having sex with women even after he developed sexual disease. {14}
B. Organized Women Trafficking and Sexual Crimes
The CCP also conducted organized women trafficking and sexual crimes.
In the early 1950’s, the CCP sent nearly 200,000 soldiers to Xinjiang where they were stationed permanently. In 1953, the Xinjiang Military Command reported that the soldiers strongly requested wives to establish families. The CCP Central Military Commission mobilized several provinces to send 100,000 women to Xinjiang. Some provinces sugarcoated it as recruiting female soldiers. All of them were paired with and married to the male soldiers there. {15}
During the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976), the CCP sent tens of millions of city teenagers to rural areas. Many of the girls, unable to protect themselves, became the sexual victims of the village officials.
The CCP also conducted many sexual crimes in its persecution of political dissidents. Since 1999, It has also persecuted Falun Gong, a traditional mind-body exercise following the principles of Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance. There were reports of police raping or gang raping female Falun Gong practitioners. The United States Human Rights Council documented a case that on November 25, 2005, policeman He Xuejian in Tunzhou City, Hebei Province raped two Falun Gong practitioners, with another police officer watching but not stopping him. {16} Minghui website, which reports on persecution of Falun Gong practitioners also outlined many other cases, including two guards at the Changsha Detention Center, Hunan Province raped a 77-year-old practitioner; guards at the Masanjia Forced Labor Camp, Liaoning Province, striped 18 female practitioners naked and pushed them into male inmate cells for gang rape in October 2000; they pushed another nine female practitioners into male cells in April 2001; and a Beijing detention center did the same to female practitioners and even forced male practitioners to watch the gang rape. {17}
III. The CCP Turns Chinese People To the Dark Side
A. The CCP’s Ideology
The CCP has destroyed the traditional moral values in China. It promotes atheism and communist ideology and makes the Chinese people lose the ability to discern right from wrong. People were told to live by the “law of the jungle”: whoever is the most vicious wins and one can achieve his goal through any barbaric means, completely ignoring moral codes.
This makes people to give up moral guard when taking actions. They will consider only the interests of their own but not that of others. Damaging other people does not seem wrong if it can bring themselves benefit. For example, buying a woman to rape is justified as “carrying on the family line” and beating the “disobedient” women is legitimatized since they bought her.
B. The CCP’s Policy
Two of the CCP’s policies sowed the seed for the human trafficking crime. The first one was China’s “one-child” policy that it adopted in 1980. Many families, especially those in the villages, hold the idea of passing down the family name and thus want only a son. Many female babies were aborted during pregnancy or killed after birth. According to China’s 2020 census, Chinese male population is 34.9 million over the female population. The male to female newborn ratio in China was 1.19 to 1 in 2010 and 1.11 to 1 in 2020, {18} where the normal ratio across the world is 1.05 to 1. {19}
The second one is an unwritten policy to focus its resources on the cities than the villages. The CCP has realized that turmoil in cities, especially the big cities, can be devastating to its rule; but turmoil in rural areas won’t. So it spends much more on the city residents to pacify them. For example, China offers benefits such as medical insurance, pension, and child education only to the city dwellers. Peasants are blocked from those benefits; even if they go to cities, they are still not qualified since they don’t have the city residence status.
As a result, the city residents are getting wealthier much faster than the peasants. Premier Li Keqiang stated in 2020 that China had 600 million people whose monthly income is less than 1,000 yuan (US $160). The majority of them were peasants.
These CCP’s two policies have produced shortage of women and poverty in villages, making the male peasants the most vulnerable group in finding a wife. The authorities could not offer any solution and thus pushed a fair amount of village men to the barbaric way: buying kidnapped women.
C. The CCP’s Law
The CCP’s law and its practice of law nourish the woman trafficking crime.
China’s current criminal law on buying a “wife” is too lenient to deter the human trafficking crimes. Article 241 of China’s Criminal Law states: “Whoever buys an abducted woman or child shall be sentenced to fixed-term imprisonment of not more than three years, criminal detention or public surveillance.”
In other countries, the punishment is much more severe. For example, in the United States, a conviction for holding a person in peonage carries a maximum prison term of 20 years. Sex trafficking of children can face a potential life sentence. The ancient dynasties in China also had severe punishment: either put the criminals to death or sent them to far-away areas to perform intense labor without return.
The court rulings in China are usually in favor of the criminal man. It is rare for the trafficked women to go to court to request separation, but even if they do, the courts treat the requests as regular divorce cases and, on many occasions, reject the requests.
China Daily reported a few court rulings at the Feng County (the county of the “chained woman” case). A trafficked woman filed for divorce in 2014. Instead of punishing the criminal husband, the judge declared that “[they] have constituted a de facto marriage” and that “it is possible for the two to stay together.” He then denied the divorce request. A similar divorce case filed in 2013 was also rejected. {20}
Netizen searched the Supreme Court’s case listing website and found 245 divorce cases related to trafficked women were denied by courts. {21}
Local police also support “the family.” In the earlier mentioned “caged woman” case, a social media influencer helped the woman find her home in Qinghai Province. But police demanded her to be returned to the man who bought her and claimed that DNA test showed she was not the lost daughter from Qinghai. {22}
A trafficked woman shared her story online. She was sold to a village man and had a son with him. She tried to escape several times and once managed to go to a town and got on a long-distance bus. The man and his helpers came and stopped her. She called for police to help. After hearing that they had a son already, the police officer simply said to the man, “Take your wife home.” She was completely desperate. {23}
D. The CCP’s Stability Control Practice
The CCP’s practice of stability control makes it choose to support the criminal men instead of the victim women in trafficking cases. To the CCP, the most important thing is to keep the society under control. The large group of single males present a bigger social risk than the victim women, so the CCP innately wants to calm down the men first.
Thus, when the single men work on buying their “wives,” the CCP party branch chiefs at the villages, the frontline of CCP’s village control, normally do not dare to stop them. They acquiesce the act or might even support it.
The police and other next level (town-level) officials, rely on the village heads to manage villages. They follow the village heads to acquiesce or even support the crimes: for example, issuing marriage certificate to “legalize” the crime.
The next level officials, who rely on their subordinate-level officials to keep the society under control, follow suit to acquiesce the crimes. This support then moves up the chain from county to city, to province, and even to the central government. Authorities at these levels have more controls and more resources. When an incident is reported, they simply silence it instead of fixing it, since coverup is the low-cost option.
Zhang Jing founded China Women’s Rights, a non-government organization. Her organization surveyed for trafficked young girls in Fujian Province from 2007 to 2012 and helped some girls find their parents. However, their pursuit on the girl trafficking crimes put many people, including officials, as criminals. The authorities fixed the problem by suppressing Zhang’s organization in 2012: defining it as an “anti-China force,” shutting down its website, arresting its four leaders, and threatening its volunteers. Zhang had no choice but to stop. {24}
The Supreme Court has a website listing case information and judge decisions. When the Chinese people furiously discussed the woman trafficking cases, the CCP hurried up in removing those cases from the website to hide information. A revealed judge group discussion showed a “notice”: “Each judge team: [We] received an urgent notice from the higher court. Please check as soon as possible the published cases involving human trafficking. If there are issues [with any cases], please report them to the Trial Management Office as soon as possible, and they will report to the provincial high court, which will then request the Supreme Court’s website to remove them.” {25}
At the same time, Liaoning Provincial Cyberspace Administration Office sent 16 warnings on cases listed on the Supreme Court’s website. Normally a provincial government organ should not give order to a central government organ, but the Liaoning office did it, for they were more in-line with the CCP’s stability control principle. {26}
IV. Ending
The CCP is anti-humanity in nature. Its ideology, policies, laws, and practices have all contributed to the creation and continuance of the trafficking crimes against women and children in China and have pushed many people to the dark side to commit crimes against their innocent fellow citizens. As a result, the CCP has turned many human beings into sub-animals. They have lost their moral codes; they act like animals and in some cases are even worse than animals as they have no bottom lines in their conduct while animals still have a bottom line.
The West has already seen some of those twisted souls from China, including the wolf warriors, virus and human genome manipulators, fentanyl producers and traffickers, as well as those who come to the United States but still follow the laws of the CCP. How many more do we want to deal with before we resolve to deal with the root cause – the CCP itself?
Endnotes:
1. Epoch Times, “Former CCTV Anchor Revealed The Dark Side of Human Trafficking in Xuzhou,” February 21, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/2/21/n13594904.htm.
2. VCT News, “A High-Rank Official Was Revealed for Raping the ‘Chained Woman,’” March 2, 2022.
https://vct.news/news/af79e91b-f4cf-4a56-a719-f5e6745a6527.
3. NetEase, “A Shaanxi Girl Lived in a Cellar for Six Years,” January 22, 2022.
https://www.163.com/dy/article/GUBIP58M0543QW78.html.
4. Radio Free Asia, “Shaanxi Has a ‘Caged Woman,” March 2, 2022.
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/renquanfazhi/ql2-03022022065612.html.
5. Epoch Times, “Yao Cheng’s Account of His Rescuing Kidnapped Women in China,” February 3, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/2/13/n13574593.htm.
6. Banned Books, “Laofu: The Criminal,” February 14, 2022.
https://www.bannedbook.org/bnews/ssgc/20220214/1691924.html.
7. NetEase, “The Trafficked Women I Know,” February 21, 2022.
https://www.163.com/dy/article/H0NHPB6O0519BCHU.html.
8. China Digital Times, “Why There Were So Many Female Corpse in Feng County, Xuzhou City, Jiangsu Province?” February 16, 2022.
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/676997.html.
9. Epoch Times, “The ‘Chained Woman’ Showed the Chinese Society Were Corrupt,” March 8, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/3/8/n13630916.htm.
10. Epoch Times, “The Number of Women Trafficking Case Is Shockingly High,” February 6, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/2/6/n13558230.htm.
11. Epoch Times, “Expert Analyze the Root Cause of Woman Trafficking,” February 6, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/2/6/n13557973.htm.
12. China Daily, “’China’s Missing People Whitepaper (2020)’ Published, Reporting One Million Missing People in 2020,” February 26, 2021
https://tech.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202102/26/WS60386587a3101e7ce9741248.html.
13. SINA, “Shanxi and Henan Province Rescued 379 Slave Miners from Coal Mines,” June 15, 2007.
http://news.sina.com.cn/c/p/2007-06-15/040313232545.shtml.
14. Aboluo News, “Zhongnanhai Performance Troupe: Mao Had Sexes With Other Ladies Even When He Had Sexual Diseases,” September 22, 2015.
https://www.aboluowang.com/2015/0922/617428.html.
15. The CCP Party History and Document Study Institute Website, “The History of Sending Female Soldiers and Female Civilians to Xinjiang,” April 19, 2007.
https://www.dswxyjy.org.cn/n1/2017/0419/c222139-29221853.html.
16. United States Human Rights Council, “Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences,” March 19, 2007, Page 33.
https://www.icj.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/Communications-SR-Violence-against-women-2007-eng.pdf.
17. Minghui, “The “Woman in Chains” and the Party’s Crimes Against Humanity,” March 6, 2022.
https://en.minghui.org/html/articles/2022/3/6/199421.html.
18. China News Service, “Chinese Males Are 34.9 Million More Than Females,” May 12, 2021.
https://www.chinanews.com.cn/gn/2021/05-12/9475503.shtml.
19. Our World in Data, “How does the sex ratio at birth vary across the world?” August 6, 2019.
https://ourworldindata.org/sex-ratio-at-birth.
20. China Daily, “Trafficked Women Filed for Separation. Feng County Court: Denied the Request. Where Is the Bottomline of Law?” February 17, 2022.
http://ex.chinadaily.com.cn/exchange/partners/82/rss/channel/cn/columns/j3u3t6/stories/WS620deae5a3107be497a06ac6.html.
21. Radio Free Asia, “Cyberspace Administration Office Warns Supreme Court’s Case Listing Website,” February 21, 2022.
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/renquanfazhi/ql-02212022094203.html.
22. VCT News, “Shaanxi ‘Caged Woman’ Found Her Hometown But Police Blocked Her Return,” March 3, 2022.
https://vct.news/news/f1862a27-1883-42ae-ab09-6e526d9ee51f.
23. Aboluo, “Police Came: Take ‘Your Wife” Home,” February 5, 2022.
https://www.aboluowang.com/2022/0205/1705027.html.
24. Epoch Times, “Expert Analyze the Root Cause of Woman Trafficking,” February 6, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/2/6/n13557973.htm.
25. Epoch Times, “The CCP Removes Woman Trafficking Cases from Website,” February 25, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/2/25/n13605772.htm.
26. Radio Free Asia, “Cyberspace Administration Office Warns Supreme Court’s Case Listing Website,” February 21, 2022.
https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/yataibaodao/renquanfazhi/ql-02212022094203.html.