(Deutsche Welle Chinese website) Sun Meihua, a 32-year-old woman who disappeared from Beijing, appeared in a village in Cao County, Heze, Shandong 26 years later. People in the village call her "Aunt Long". Someone asked her what her name was, and she said her name was "Bitter Cauliflower". After the exposure, public opinion called her another "girl in chains" or "little flower plum".
The person who discovered her was not the police, but a Shandong blogger who made short videos. The first meeting was on the side of the road in the village. She had been hungry for a long time, so she took a bag of fried noodles and squatted down to eat it with her hands. She can name the places in Beijing and write the names of herself, her father and her brother on paper. Her ID card was in the hands of the 78-year-old man known as "Uncle Long". In May this year, the blogger asked for it in exchange for a second-hand mobile phone - the name on it is "Zhang Li", she is nearly 3 years older, and the application was issued in 2020. The blood samples are then sent to the public welfare family search studio of the local police for comparison - avoiding the local police is a common strategy for private family search. It was several months after the blood sample was sent that it was confirmed that she was from Beijing.
On August 23, another volunteer Du Xiaohua came to visit. When he arrived, the door to the back room was locked. He called 110 and posted the video that night, but was immediately pressured by the local police to delete it, but he refused. The next day, the Cao County Criminal Police Brigade explained its preliminary investigation: She came to the home of "Uncle Long" in 1997, and was "brought over from a village in Shangqiu, Henan Province" by him. She had a mental disorder at the time; after learning from the village party secretary and villagers, they believed that there was no abuse or forced prostitution. Du Xiaohua asked: Why didn't you take blood and perform facial recognition when registering for household registration in 2020? Why do people still stay in elderly homes? The reply was: "This (relocation) is not our business."
On August 31, she was placed in a nursing home. On September 8, his 70-year-old brother took his 58-year-old sister back to Beijing.
Changping Observation: Where is #铁chain女? #WhereIsTheChainedWoman?
A purely accidental discovery
Four years ago, Jiangsu's "Chain Girl" was accidentally photographed by a video blogger. The blogger originally went to photograph a man who "raised eight children in extreme poverty." It was one of the man's children who led him to the door of the shack, and he saw the child's mother with an iron chain fixed to the wall tied around her neck. Both incidents were the same: not calling the police, not conducting a census, not defending women's rights, but the victims occasionally appearing in unexpected scenes.
"Xia", a woman from the same hospital as Sun Meihua, was also abducted. In 2024, the same blogger helped her find her family in Shaanxi. Neither the trafficker nor the briber were held accountable, and she still lives there.
Scholar Cai Tianji analyzed 387 judgment documents involving the trafficking of women from 2014 to 2015 and found that there is a highly active underground buyer's market in the area bordering the three provinces of Shandong, Henan and Anhui, which concentrated more than 60% of the trafficking cases in the province.
In 1999, as a reporter for Southern Weekend, I was interviewing in the Xinyi Mountain District of Guangdong Province and found that the proportion of "wife-buying" in those remote mountain villages was as high as over 50%, and the local police announced that the number of people rescued in the past ten years was more than 7,000. Everyone knows who bought the daughter-in-law, but local officials never take the initiative to confirm that "trafficking exists." The "girl in chains" who was accidentally photographed became news precisely because she represents the countless "bitter cauliflowers" who were not photographed.
Seal is faster than investigation
In the "Women in Chains" incident, public opinion placed its greatest expectations on a high-level investigation team. People soon discovered that the primary task of the provincial investigation team was not to investigate the case, but to maintain stability: Internet users who visited were detained or interviewed, articles were deleted, accounts were blocked, and bookstores and scholars who supported the case were warned. Four years ago, I pointed out in an opinion piece: It is often not the traffickers who are punished, but those who expose human trafficking.
This time, Sun Meihua's sealing process was faster and more thorough. Although she has returned home, there has been no official notification; the relevant records on the accounts of bloggers who assisted in finding her relatives can no longer be retrieved; the originally lively discussions on the platform have quietly fallen silent. Her brother-in-law Liu Anjun said that his two communication accounts and two short video accounts are no longer available, and one of them shows that the restricted status continues until December 31. A concerned person asked him to send a recent photo of her after returning to Beijing, but he refused in his voice: "You can't send it. If it is posted, our group may disappear again."
Liu Anjun in Beijing was blocked from the security door of his brother's house, and his sister who lives in the United States was blocked from even her overseas video. On September 12, Liu Anjun went to the police station to report that her husband was suspected of abandonment and abduction. The police station refused to accept the report on the grounds that "the case is still ongoing" and "it is confidential to non-immediate relatives." According to Article 110 of the Criminal Procedure Law, any unit or individual who discovers criminal facts or criminal suspects has the right and obligation to report the crime or report.
According to independent media reports, the police handling the case proposed to coordinate a meeting with the family members, but came with three requirements: taking, recording, and recording of the meeting were strictly prohibited; the online group chat must be disbanded; and the Sun Meihua incident must not be mentioned in public again. Liu Anjun refused on the spot.
Four years ago, the topic "Investigation Team Established" on Weibo for the "Women in Chains" incident had 3.4 billion views. Four years later, a group of concerned people with only a few hundred people dared not even post a photo.
Changping Observation: What role does the Chinese government play in human trafficking?
The fate of independent reporting
The two independent media outlets that actually conducted interviews and reports on this incident were "NORA" and "Aquarius Age". Two media outlets asked the Caoxian County police why they once denied the existence of "trafficking". They interviewed the second sister who settled in the United States and her brother-in-law in Beijing, and reconstructed how a Beijing Hutong girl walked from the hotel reception desk to a village in Shandong.
The reports from these two media outlets were deleted after being published inside the wall, and then reprinted on overseas platforms. "Aquarius Era" believes that the intensity of scrutiny of this matter is far greater than that of the previous "Feng County Chained Girl" and Shanxi Women's Trafficking Cases and the "Sphincter-impaired Female Master" incident.
In addition, the blogger who first discovered Sun Meihua had taken nearly 100 videos about her, but all of them have now been taken off the shelves. The only publicly available image on the Internet is that of August 23 - she was leaning against the door frame wearing a baggy white T-shirt, and there was a thin scar left on her left face from childhood.
There are also very few foreign media reporters who can report on such events. In March last year, "New York Times" reporter Vivian Wang published a long report tracking the follow-up of the "Chain Woman": She and her colleagues went to Dongji Village for an interview. The house was guarded, and there was a surveillance camera at the entrance. Soon a dozen people came, including police, publicity officials, and the village chief. The village chief insisted that the scandal had been exaggerated and "it's all normal, very normal." Then the two were sent to the train station.
Due to reports including but not limited to such reports, in February this year, Wang Yuemei was informed at the Beijing Airport that her residence permit had been cancelled, and she was required to leave the country within a time limit.
