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In January of 2022 a video went viral in China on the Chinese version of TikTok. It showed a woman in a small rural town who was being held in a tiny room with a chain around her neck.
A Douyin vlogger exposed the living conditions of this mother of eight in a small village in Xuzhou. Heartbreaking and inhumane – she was literally chained up and left out in the cold. Full story here: https://t.co/AzCHwBU6mU pic.twitter.com/WLLhjpd4Zr— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) January 29, 2022
Here’s the full clip:
To give the full story, here is the original video that caused the social media storm, which is still ongoing today (tw distressing content, not sure why the lock is blurred, as if that is the most shocking thing about this video.) pic.twitter.com/UOA5zrfeQ4— Manya Koetse (@manyapan) January 30, 2022
People were understandably outraged and demanded to know what was happening and why. To say this was a big story is really underselling just how massive it was.
It’s one of the biggest credibility challenges Beijing has faced in recent years. The chained woman became a symbol of injustice that brought together liberals as well as nationalistic digital warriors and apolitical moderates. Many of them are worried that the chain on her neck, in a literal and figurative sense, could fall on them or their loved ones.
The video of the chained woman has led to a kind of #MeToo movement on the Chinese internet, in which many people stepped forward to share stories of mothers, daughters, sisters and classmates who were abducted or simply disappeared.
The top three hashtags about the chained woman on the Twitter-like social media platform Weibo have accumulated more than 10 billion views, rivaling those about the Beijing Winter Olympics, which were heavily promoted by Weibo and official media outlets.
First, the government tried to shrug off the issue by releasing a statement saying the woman was the man’s wife and was chained up because she had mental problems and sometimes hit people. For obvious reasons, this explanation didn’t sit well with a lot of people. If a person has mental problems they should be taken to a hospital, not chained up like a rabid dog.
And the more people looked into this story, the worse it got. it turned out the woman in question had been bought and sold a number of times before winding up with her current « husband.
