China: Police Arrest People for Trying to Find Woman 'Chained in Hut'

Police in eastern China’s Xuzhou city arrested two women in recent days after they documented online an attempt to visit a woman who had allegedly been “chained and locked in a hut” by her husband in Xuzhou, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported Wednesday.

“A Beijing-based lawyer, who could not speak on the record but had been informed about the case, confirmed that two women were detained at the weekend in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province,” the Hong Kong-based newspaper reported on February 16.

The SCMP said it spoke to other unnamed sources who said police detained the two women on February 13 on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” which is a catch-all charge used by China’s ruling Communist Party against dissenters.

The two women in question, who have yet to be identified, were arrested while trying to visit a separate woman in Xuzhou featured in a video that went viral among Chinese internet users in recent weeks. The video footage appeared to show “a middle-aged Chinese woman … in a doorless, shabby shack — with a metal chain tied to her neck and nailed to the wall,” the news site SupChina reported on January 31.

“It was freezing cold in the winter, but the woman was wearing no coat. Next to the shed was a warm house where her husband and eight children resided. When asked about the woman’s situation, one of her kids said with an emotionless expression on his face that food was brought to her every day,” the news site detailed after reviewing the viral footage.

The woman featured in the video “was found to be a trafficked woman who had been forced to marry and have eight children, and was said to have been sometimes locked up and chained by her husband since last June after – according to the authorities – she showed signs of mental illness,” the SCMP reported on February 16.

The incident proved extremely embarrassing for the Communist Party, which has fought growing unrest in rural areas as a result of widespread abuses of the poor and global disgust at its abhorrent treatment of women. The “chained woman” video touched a nerve after mounting reports of Chinese censors erasing feminist content from government-controlled social media sites and boasting of its forced sterilization program against Uyghur women, which international human rights experts have identified as evidence of genocide.

Local Chinese Communist Party officials in Jiangsu province, which contains Xuzhou city, “initially denied that the woman was a victim, before last week arresting her husband and two accomplices following growing calls from the public to investigate the possibility of illegal detention and human trafficking,” according to the SCMP.

In the wake of the public scandal, the two women arrested in Xuzhou on Sunday announced plans online to travel to the city and confirm the victim’s whereabouts and well-being in person. A group of 100 alumni from a top Chinese university joined in the chorus expressing public concern for the Xuzhou victim by publishing an open letter to Beijing in recent days. Their plea for a thorough investigation into the woman’s circumstances was censored by the Chinese Communist Party, according to Bloomberg.