On International Women’s Day, China’s Netizens Remember the ‘Chained Woman’

March 8, International Women’s Day, was met with fanfare by Chinese companies and government officials, with the usual spate of pro-women slogans posted to social media accounts. To provide a sample, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian ended his press conference that day by saying that women “fill families with warmth and add brilliant colors to life. I would like to extend my best wishes to them on this special day. May you live your dream, stay young at heart, and glow with beauty, grace and happiness.”

As in Zhao’s comments, it’s notable that much of China’s official Women’s Day messaging seems to fully embrace traditional gender roles, extolling women for their “warmth,” “beauty,” and special place in the family. State-owned China Daily, for example, celebrated Women’s Day by posting a painting of a curvaceous woman in pink with the message “May beauty and joy be with you.”

Comments praising women for their achievements outside the home were far less common.

As Dr. Leta Hong Fincher has discussed extensively in her research, the Chinese Communist Party is a deeply patriarchal institution. No woman has ever made it to the CCP’s top leadership body. China’s party and government officials pay lip service to Women’s Day, but at the same time they are deeply concerned about the grassroots feminist movement within China – and crack down on women’s rights activists as fiercely as any other social campaign seen as threatening to the CCP’s rule.

The Chinese government has both strictly censored feminist discourse online – including banning prominent feminist organizations’ social media accounts – and arrested feminist activists. Most famously, in 2015, Chinese authorities arrested five women for planning to raise awareness about sexual harrassment on public transportation. Ironically, the “Feminist Five” were detained just days before Women’s Day – the date they had chosen for their awareness campaign, which involved handing out stickers to subway passengers.

That’s why, despite the spate of comments from officials and state media, China did not see any large women’s marches on March 8, unlike other countries around the world. Instead, China’s feminists were limited to impromptu acts of advocacy, including posters put up at college campuses. In some cases, documented by SupChina, students simply hung up Mao-era posters with slogans praising gender equality, including the famous line “women hold up half the sky” – subtly drawing attention to the longstanding gap between CCP rhetoric on women and their lived reality in China.

Much of the feminist messaging this year, however, centered on one particular image: the face of the “chained woman.”

In late January, a video emerged showing a woman in a village outside of Xuzhou in Jiangsu province chained to the wall inside a dilapidated building with no door, exposing her to the bitter cold. The vlogger who posted the video on Douyin – the original version of TikTok used in China – had come to interview a man famous in the area for having eight children, including seven sons. The father, Dong Zhimin, had become something of a local celebrity for his large family, but the vlogger was shocked to discover the living conditions of the mother, who was not even wearing a jacket until the vlogger gave her one. Adding to the horror, the woman appeared to be mentally impaired, unable to communicate with or comprehend the vlogger when he approached her.

The video immediately sparked suspicions that the woman was a victim of human trafficking – someone who had been kidnapped and sold as a “bride” (or, to avoid the euphemism, a victim of repeated sexual assult) to a man in a rural village. “Bride” trafficking has become increasingly prominent thanks to the gender imbalance caused by China’s one child policy, which resulted in more and more “bare branches” – men, especially in rural areas, who are unable to find wives. That has led to horrific tales of abduction and sexual abuse, especially targeting women who are mentally ill or otherwise disabled.

The local authorities’ initial response essentially tried to sweep the story under the rug. The county government claimed that the woman was not a victim of human trafficking, and that she was kept chained up for her family’s protection as she tended to become violent during episodes of mental illness. Local officials proclaimed that the family was being offered assistance and could now enjoy “a warm Spring Festival.”

That did not come close to satisfying the Chinese public. Netizens, including former investigative journalists, dug into the case, trying to discover the woman’s identity by looking into unsolved missing persons cases. Amid the outrage, local authorities backtracked and repeatedly issued different statements and updates on the case. Each announcement contradicted previous findings; Manya Koetse of What’s on Weibo wrote a detailed overview of the “twists and turns” in the case for those who want a more thorough run-down.

The public anger resulted in the case being kicked up the bureaucratic ladder, with provincial-level officials launching their own investigation. Jiangsu’s official investigation found that the woman, originally from Yunnan, had indeed been sold to Dong, the father of the eight children. Officials announced they had arrested nine people, including Dong, for human trafficking in connection with the case, and disciplined 15 county-level officials for their handling of the incident.

That still didn’t satisfy netizens, though, who were outraged that Dong had not been charged with rape – an obvious inference from the fact that he had fathered eight children with a human trafficking victim. Meanwhile, the woman herself has essentially disappeared since state media briefly showed images of her receiving treatment in a local psychiatric hospital. Two women who tried to visit her in February to deliver flowers were detained and beaten by the police.

The story captivated China’s attention, becoming one of the most-discussed topics on Chinese social media despite widespread censorship and the distraction of the Beijing Olympics. “Even the Winter Olympics and Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine haven’t detracted from the attention of the Chinese public and the rest of the world on the case of the chained woman,” independent journalist Gao Yu told Radio Free Asia (RFA).

Since then, images of the woman – still referred to simply as the “chained woman,” because netizens are so skeptical that the government has in fact discovered her real identity – have become potent symbols for the feminist movement.

In one poignant mural that appeared in Benxi, Liaoning province in early March, the woman’s image was composed using Chinese characters meaning “freedom,” “equality,” “civility,” “harmony,” and “justice.” As scholar Chenchen Zhang pointed out on Twitter, those are all “core socialist values” officially promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. Yet that didn’t stop the mural from being painted over within hours.