Jiangsu authorities vowed to “strictly crack down on crimes related to trafficking in women and children.”
China has fired, punished and probed more than a dozen local officials in eastern Jiangsu province, following an investigation aimed at quelling public anger over a mother of eight deaths. neck chain.
Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday, citing the investigation by local authorities. Officials also vowed to crack down on trafficking in women, pledging to investigate cases of violations of the rights of women, children and people with mental disabilities.
The report added that Jiangsu authorities vowed to “strictly crack down on criminals involved in the trafficking of women and children, as well as those who traffic in women and children”.
Last week, the Jiangsu government announced it would form a group to “find the truth,” after China censored a letter signed by 100 Peking University alumni calling on the central government to look into the matter. topic, a rare public challenge to President Xi Jinping. government.
Three of the 10 most trending topics on Twitter like China’s Weibo are about investigation.
The woman’s plight sparked outrage after a video showing her being held captive in a doorless hut emerged in late January. Many users of Twitter-like Weibo have posted past cases of women being trafficked in the world’s No. 2 economy, including a scene where a man locked his wife in a potato warehouse and discussed about the limited rights of rural women.
Much of the public anger has been directed at officials in Xuzhou, the third-largest city in the wealthy coastal province of Jiangsu, which borders the financial hub Shanghai. Their initial statements seem to downplay the plight of the woman who lives in the rural village of Dongji and are sometimes at odds with each other.
The woman, named Xiaohuamei, was from a remote village in Yunnan and was trafficked twice in the late 1990s, the investigation confirmed. The second sale was for the Dong family, whose son married her in 2000 and changed the woman’s last name to Yang. Xinhua reported that she gave birth to eight children between 1999 and 2020.
Local prosecutors have now arrested the woman’s husband on charges of abuse and two others on human trafficking charges, the investigation said. Six people alone have been detained by police amid ongoing criminal investigations.
“This woman’s fate is too tragic,” former investigative journalist Tiemu, who traveled to Yunnan to try to confirm Yang’s identity, told China’s Story FM podcast. “In that era, many Chinese women were in such a situation – they were reduced to tools.”
He thinks that society should have the courage to correct its mistakes. “And we should have a conscience to correct those flaws,” he added.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)
